Katie Hafner

Those curious drawings were the earliest topological maps of what we now know as the internet. The doodler, Lawrence G. Roberts, died Dec. 26 at his home in Redwood City, California. He was 81.

The cause was a heart attack, said his son Pasha.

As a manager at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, Roberts designed much of the Arpanet — the internet’s precursor — and oversaw its implementation in 1969.

Roberts called upon a circle of colleagues who shared his interest in computer networking for help in creating the technical underpinnings of the Arpanet, integrating and refining many ideas for how data should flow.

Roberts was considered the decisive force behind packet switching, the technology that breaks data into discrete bundles that are then sent along various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. He decided to use packet switching as the underlying technology of the Arpanet; it remains central to the function of the internet.

And it was Roberts’ decision to build a network that distributed control of the network across multiple computers. Distributed networking remains another foundation of today’s internet.

Roberts’ interest in computer networking began when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. He paid close attention to the work of his longtime colleague, Leonard Kleinrock, who had done research on theoretical aspects of computer networks, analyzing the problem of data flow. Roberts also followed the ideas of J.C.R. Licklider, a prominent psychologist and predecessor of Roberts’ at ARPA, who envisioned what he called an “intergalactic computer network.”

It was under Roberts’s leadership at ARPA that the possibilities of computer networking began to grow clear to a community beyond the core of scientists who built the Arpanet.

He long believed that a computer network was of little importance unless it was used in interesting ways. As early as 1968, he exhorted his colleagues to create applications for the nascent network. ARPA, for instance, was one of the largest early users of electronic mail.

“Larry led us to uncover potential that we never would have seen had he not pushed so hard for increased functionality,” said Vinton G. Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist and a graduate student in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles when Roberts was overseeing the building of the Arpanet. “He pushed all of us to find ways in which we could make good on the promise of resource sharing.”

He was also a serial entrepreneur and corporate executive. After leaving ARPA in 1973, Roberts founded or co-founded a half-dozen companies focused on computer networking.

Lawrence Gilman Roberts was born Dec. 21, 1937, in Westport, Connecticut, the youngest of three children. His parents, Elliott and Elizabeth, were both chemists who had met in the Yale University chemistry department while pursuing their doctorates.

As a young child, using his father’s chemistry books and chemicals, Roberts built a series of rockets and bombs. He recalled that one of his youthful experiments produced a chlorine gas byproduct, “which put me in the hospital under an oxygen tent because I sniffed it to see what was happening,” he said in May.

When he was in sixth grade, he built an elevator to ascend an oak tree in his yard. He was sitting in it one day when a connector broke. He fell to the ground and broke his neck. “They were quite used to me in the hospital,” he said.

But it was electronics that eventually captured his attention. “I wanted something new, not old like chemistry,” he said.

Roberts received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1959. That year he married June Stuller, a computer programmer. They divorced in 1974. Three subsequent marriages also ended in divorce.

By the time Roberts received his Ph.D. in 1963, also in electrical engineering, he was already working at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, a government research facility. He soon encountered the TX-0, an early computer, and used it to build an optical character recognition program. He also did early work in computer graphics and virtual reality. He and a colleague, Ivan Sutherland, built an ultrasonic pointing device that could manipulate objects on a screen.

Initial attempts to recruit him to ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office to oversee the technical structure of the Arpanet failed. He was reluctant to leave Lincoln Lab for a job he viewed as largely administrative. But eventually he agreed, and arrived at the Pentagon in December 1966.

Stephen Crocker, a computer scientist who worked for Roberts at ARPA, said his boss’s dislike of wasted time was legendary. “Within a few weeks, he had the place memorized,” recalled Crocker, referring to the labyrinthine Pentagon building. “As I’ve heard the story, Roberts obtained a stopwatch and began timing various routes to his frequent destinations.”

“'Larry’s Route’ soon became commonly known as the fastest distance between any two Pentagon points,” Crocker said.

Kleinrock, who had shared an office with Roberts at Lincoln Lab, said that after Roberts arrived at ARPA, he showed Kleinrock and other colleagues his sketches of the network’s topology and logic. Hundreds of drawings later, he chose a distributed network, rather than a centralized or star configuration, to serve as the backbone of the Arpanet.

But even as he focused on the overall architecture, he remained committed to finding practical uses for the nascent network.

Email, an application that ARPA-sponsored researchers had spent a great deal of time developing, quickly became one of the most popular applications on the Arpanet. When asked about that at a technical conference in 1986, Roberts said he was not surprised.

The ARPA director “decided it was a great thing, and he made everybody in ARPA use it,” Roberts said. “So all these managers of ballistic missile technology, who didn’t know what a computer was, had to start using electronic mail.”

Roberts added that he had received a note years earlier from Paul Baran, another networking pioneer, warning against personal use of email.

“It said, ‘One thing you ought to watch out for is you can’t send out personal message stuff, that’s illegal. That’s against the postal laws and you’ll be in jail in no time.'” Baran’s warning notwithstanding, there was no stopping the personal messages. “But we didn’t happen to go to jail,” Roberts told the audience.

Roberts left ARPA in 1973 to become the founding chief executive of Telenet, a networking company that used packet switching. Seven years later, Roberts and his co-founders sold Telenet to GTE for $60 million.

The startups that followed focused on flow control algorithms for internet traffic and did not achieve the same level of success. He ultimately failed to amass significant wealth from the internet.

“It’s like you created the Spider-Man character and it turned into a giant franchise, but you only got paid by the hour for drawing it,” said Pasha Roberts.

Yet Roberts remained philosophical about this aspect of his life. “It’s sad that it didn’t benefit me,” he said in 2018 interview. “But it’s interesting, and I love the knowledge I gained from building it and using it and understanding it from the beginning.”

The interview took place in Roberts’s modest house in Redwood City, a town in Silicon Valley, which he shared with his longtime partner, Dr. Tedde Rinker, a physician.

Roberts is survived by Rinker and his son Pasha, as well as two sisters, Mary Annis Arris and Ruth Esther Bennett. A second son, Kenny, died in 2013.

In 2018, the biggest problem he saw with the internet was network security.

“I envision someday getting software into the network that helps curb attacks, but that’s going to take a lot of work,” he said. “It’s got to be distributed around the network in order to solve the problem. So that’s the project I keep thinking about, but I don’t have a solution.”

He was quick to dismiss detractors who said the internet had sparked the demise of brick-and-mortar retail stores.

“I think it’s wonderful, and I think they should go out of business, because going to the store is ridiculous,” he said. The doorbell rang, and Roberts excused himself to take delivery of groceries he had ordered online.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/obituaries/lawrence-g-roberts-dies-at-81.html" id="bcfcd842-8abf-3ebe-aedb-2545037be2b5">The New York Times</a>.

In late 1966, a 29-year-old computer scientist drew a series of abstract figures on tracing paper and a quadrille pad. Some resembled a game of cat’s cradle; others looked like heavenly constellations; still others like dress patterns.

Lawrence Roberts, Who Helped Design Internet's Precursor, Dies at 81

The cause was respiratory failure, his wife, Virginia, said.

Lukasik (pronounced loo-KAY-sik) spent eight years at the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA, a period when great strides were made in detecting and controlling weapons of mass destruction — particularly nuclear devices — as well as in computer networking and artificial intelligence.

Lukasik’s work at ARPA helped spur the growth of a worldwide network of seismographs to detect nuclear explosions, helping to plant the seeds for what became the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

He was an ardent champion of using advanced technology to promote national defense, including the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, which was built during his tenure as ARPA director.

In a 1991 interview with the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute, Lukasik said that one of his major goals was to transfer ARPA’s work to the military services. “Whatever it is you’re trying to do, it’s got to get out of the research labs,” he said.

He required ARPA researchers to develop technology with applications to military command and control systems. “It wasn’t just, ‘Gee whiz,’ and patting them on the back,” he said. “It was understanding what they’re doing, grasping its implications and relating that to the world of problems that the Defense Department either had or would be facing.”

Lukasik’s interest in artificial intelligence, for example, was driven by his national security concerns. In the early 1970s, while attending a meeting of ARPA-funded AI researchers, he grew impatient.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you guys do something interesting? Like, fixing it so computers can understand speech?’ ” he said in the Babbage interview.

His incentive at the time, he wrote in a reminiscence, was to assist the National Security Agency, which employed “vast numbers of transcribers and translators to make sense of a multitude of communication channels they monitored.” In one instance he had ARPA researchers work on using artificial intelligence to transcribe manual Morse code.

“In my view, he was one of the few people who really thought about how science and technology serve national security,” said Sharon Weinberger, author of “The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World” (2017). “He saw the role of strategy, not just widgets or weapons to serve the Pentagon, but the bigger picture around it.”

Lukasik was an early champion of the Arpanet, which began as an experiment in computer networking. His contribution to the Arpanet, he wrote in 2014, “was helping to wrench this R&amp;D; project away from its creators, who would have liked to research it forever,” in part to promote military innovation.

Lukasik began using electronic mail in its earliest versions in 1973; indeed, he became known for running ARPA largely by email. Yet email also vexed him. Not one to throw anything away, he grew frustrated by the email piling up in his inbox.

He complained to Lawrence Roberts, who ran ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. “I said, ‘Larry, this email is great, but it’s a mess!’” he recalled in an interview for “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet” (1996). “In typical Larry fashion he came in the next day, and said, ‘Steve, I wrote some code for you.’” It was the first email management program.

Stephen Joseph Lukasik was born March 19, 1931, in Staten Island to Stephen and Mildred (Tynan) Lukasik. His father was an accountant, his mother a bank employee.

Stephen began reading scientific literature at age 10 and at 14 knew what direction his career would take after reading newspaper accounts of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan.

“I was really horrified by the human losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Lukasik said in an interview for this obituary in March. “So I read everything that I could and decided that, of all the sciences, physics was the one that answered the questions I wanted to know about.”

At 16 he entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1951. He received his Ph.D., also in physics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.

While at Rensselaer, he met Marilyn Trappiel, a chemistry student at nearby Russell Sage College. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1982.

In 1955, while a doctoral student, Lukasik joined the Westinghouse Electric Corporation as a scientist at the company’s Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, outside Pittsburgh.

His work attracted the attention of the Defense Department, and he joined ARPA in 1966 as director for nuclear test detection. He became the agency’s overall director in 1971.

After leaving ARPA, he worked in security-related positions at the RAND Corp., Northrop, TRW and elsewhere. He became chief scientist at the Federal Communications Commission in 1979.

While at the FCC, he met Virginia Dogan Armstrong, a policy analyst. They married in 1983. In addition to her, his survivors include four children from his first marriage, Carol Ward, Elizabeth O’Masta and Gregory and Jeffrey Lukasik; two stepchildren, Elizabeth Armstrong Parker and Alan Armstrong; 11 grandchildren; and 3 great-grandchildren.

So abiding was Lukasik’s interest in national security and technology that he amassed a personal library of about 10,000 books relating to every dimension of those subjects.

Internet security breaches remained a worry. “Even if by some miracle governments and industry worldwide were to agree on a course of action to remove threats to the net,” he wrote in 2011, “groups such as criminals benefiting from the current state of insecurity are unlikely to cooperate.”

Anthony Rutkowski, a longtime colleague, recounted that while on a flight home from a meeting in Europe 18 years ago, he read a draft of a paper that Lukasik had given him. In it, Lukasik outlined ways that the internet could be used to coordinate a major infrastructure attack on the United States.

“The detail was stunning,” Rutkowski recalled. The date was Sept. 11, 2001. His plane turned around, mid-Atlantic, and returned to Europe.

This article originally appeared in

Stephen Lukasik, Who Pushed Tech in National Defense, Dies at 88

Stephen Lukasik, a physicist who oversaw crucial work on national security and computer networking as director of the Defense Department’s research division in the late 1960s and early ’70s, died Thursday at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 88.

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Katie Hafner

Articles written by the author

Lawrence Roberts, Who Helped Design Internet's Precursor, Dies at 81

Stephen Lukasik, Who Pushed Tech in National Defense, Dies at 88