"Bill knew."
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and Jonathan Hare of much of the BSD Unix work at Berkeley that produced the first widely used TCP/IP implementation. Later at Kleiner Perkins as a partner, where his cleantech work overlapped with John Doerr's.
At the time of the first call with Hare he was working on JXTA, Sun's peer-to-peer protocol project.
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They talked about Hare's grandfather. Bill Whitson was Deputy Chief Scientist at the Pentagon and, by family account, oversaw the Titan II program — the survivable-communications problem that produced ARPANET, the network Joy later wrote the implementation for. Hare's line about it is the one worth keeping: most people do not recognize where the internet protocols came from or why. Bill knew.
Hare was walking with Joy on the path between the two ends of Aspen Meadows when they met E. O. Wilson by chance — resuming a conversation that had lapsed for five years, and setting off everything in the record from 2006 onward.
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Gave Hare Bill Joy's personal email address
Open →co-foundedThe network is the computer
Open →wrote the implementation of what it producedWhy the internet protocols were invented
Open →the path at Aspen, 2006Wilson's magazine of choice for his excerpts; sponsor of his 2006 Aspen Ideas keynote — the path where Hare met him with Bill Joy; owned since 2017 by Emerson Collective
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-156The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-162The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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