Title
Abramson, Norm (Norman) oral historyCatalog Number
102746750Type
DocumentDescription
Started in the late 1960s, ALOHAnet pioneered the basis for all later wireless computer networks – from phones to WiFi to RFID tagging to satellite neworks to Bluetooth – and also spawned Ethernet. It wouldn't have happened had not Norm Abramson moved to the University of Hawaii for the surfing, where he met co-creator Frank Kuo and took their grad students to Waikiki for regular sessions on the waves.ALOHAnet was initially funded by THEMIS and then DARPA, both under the U.S. Department of defense. The practical goal was to connect campuses on different islands in Hawaii’s higher education system to the IBM mainframe at the university. But the group's fundamental research was a kind of Big Bang for wireless networking in general. Wired computer networks were being pioneered by several groups in the same period; the ARPAnet is by far the best known. But ALOHAnet was the only group to take on the challenge of adapting packet switched computer networks to the finicky and error-prone medium of radio. As such, they solved some of the medium's most daunting problems, and paved the way for their many successors.
The network's random-access ALOHA protocol made it practical for multiple digital devices to share a radio channel. Various offshoots remain widely used today across different wireless domains. Those protocols also inspired the design of early wired Ethernet for local area networking. ALOHAnet was connected to the ARPAnet by 1972, via a pioneering satellite link.
ALOHAnet paved the way for DARPA's two other wireless networks of the early 1970s, the Packet Radio Network and the Satellite Network. Alongside the ARPAnet, these formed the basis of TCP and the Internet, first fully tested in 1977.
In this oral history, Norm tells how he moved from Harvard to Oahu, with stops at Hughes Aircraft and Stanford along the way. He talks of his trepidation at leaving the professional safety of top mainland universities for what felt like a wild unknown, driven by his obsession with the ocean and surfing. He describes his 1970s ideas for something like a smartphone, in concert with the ARPAnet's chief technical architect Larry Roberts. Norm describes the problems he, Frank Kuo, and their many brilliant graduate students solved for the first time, paving the way for our invisibly connected world.
Date
2013-02-25Contributor
| Abramson, Norm, Interviewee |
| Dennis, Eric, Media Producer |
| Weber, Marc, Interviewer |
