Missing Link: On the weaknesses and strengths of the human-made Internet
Randy Bush's story spans the life of the Internet. The Internet Pioneer is a routing expert, networker and geek – he never graduated.
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Wired named him an "unrepentant hippie and world networker". The Internet Society introduced him into their Internet Hall of Fame the year it was opened. South Africa’s Rhodes University conferred an honorary doctorate to Randy Bush for the contributions he made to connecting countries in Africa. Which he accepted together with South African legendary leader Nelson Mandela.
Bush’s story goes back far beyond the beginning of the Internet to the days of punch cards and main frame computers. Coming with a background in computing the "Hippie" contributed to shaping the start of networking in the Pacific Northwest, the US and globally, sometimes from the periphery, as he notes. Bush is weary of organizations and governments, perhaps a legacy of his political activism in the 1960s in the US peace movement. Bringing people to the Internet was done by the people, not so much by organizations, he said in a talk on connecting the developing world last year.
In our interview Bush is not shy to point to what he considers wrongs and weaknesses in the afterwards development of the net, old and new. Only to add in an email afterwards that his life, and especially his career, was “really the story of the work and help of others.
heise online: You’re not only an Internet pioneer. We have to start earlier. You built a computer in the seventies already with NorthWest Microcomputer Systems, and when you did that you already had 12 years of experience in the industry. Tell us about building computers in the sixties...
Randy Bush: I wasn’t building them. Let’s see. It has to be 1965. I'm working my way lackadaisically through university by working at a clinical chemistry lab of the hospital in the University of Chicago. The chemistry lab was in the basement and one day somebody said, Randy, on the way to lunch, would you take this deck of cards up to room 534. I said, sure, and I did and when I got there I asked, what is that machine? They said, it's a computer. And I said, how does it work? And they just handed me the manual which I took home that evening. The next day I went back there and said, I have this little program I want to try. And that’s how I fell down the rabbit hole. That was an IBM 1401.
Self-made programmer and network engineer
But you were an engineer by training.
No, I wasn't trained. I'm just a geek. And I never finished.
No university degree….
Well, I have some honorary ones, but they don't count. So that computer was in the hospital in the biomathematics department and there was a senior medical computing scientist, Carol Newton, who took me under her wing and forced me to take classes in numerical methods and stuff like that. Soon I got involved working with a doctor in obstetrics who wanted to watch the heartbeat of the fetus while watching contractions. We used a PDP-8 LINC minicomputer (produced by Digital Equipment) for this. When we were finished, the doctor gave it to Hewlett Packard and Beckman. But the fun part of the story was, when my daughter was giving birth to my granddaughter in 2009, the alarms of such a device went off, and they performed a cesarean section and it saved her life. I like the circle that came around.
How long did you stay with the University of Chicago?
I worked for some time at the Chicago computation center that was then behind the University of Chicago nuclear reactor. We had to run a line from the hospital over to that center that was operated by the High Energy Physics department. In those years, computer science came of either high energy physics, mathematics, or business. For some reason I got dragged into floating point arithmetic. I was making $0.87 an hour and my wife, who was in the admissions department, was making $0.92 an hour. Not a lot, but we were happy and enjoying our life. Then came an offer from Kaiser Oakland California. Do you know Kaiser Industries in the US?
Built the Hoover Dam, warships for WWII, …
During World War II, Kaiser Steel and Shipbuilding Company wanted health care at scale for their workers. So they formed a hospital division called Kaiser Permanente, and it's what we call group medical practice. They essentially insured their employees, and after the war opened this to the public providing integrated total lifetime health care. It's almost first world medical care. Kaiser Oakland offered me a job for $11,000 a year. We had been coming to the West Coast for the summer for some years. We would camp out in the Olympic Mountains and then go down the coast and party in San Francisco. This is in the mid-sixties. We saw Jimi Hendrix live and Janis Joplin and all that stuff. Then we spent a month in Southern California. Carol Newton, the professor that had taken me under her wings in Chicago, had gone to UCLA and they gave her one of the few monster machines IBM made, an IBM 360/91. So I went down to the City of Hope Hospital, west of LA. It treats people with tuberculosis and children with cancer, and I helped them connect to Carol’s facility at UCLA to do remote jobs. So I was familiar with the West Coast. I had been raised in Seattle as a child, my father taught at the University of Washington. So when they offered me a job, we said, great, and moved to California and I worked at Kaiser Permanente, and did all the systems stuff administering two IBM mainframes.
That was in the sixties…
It was in 1968. We left Chicago right after the convention, we won’t go into it. (Democratic Convention 1968 to elect a democratic presidential candidate which resulted in violent clashes between opponents of the Vietnam War and the notorious Chicago Police, ed) I worked for Kaiser Permanente with large-scale IBM machines and started participating in users‘ and standards groups. That was in Oakland. My wife worked in the metallurgy department at Berkeley. In 1972, we had our first child and decided, we did not want to raise kids there. So we moved to the middle of nowhere in South Western Oregon. We had a farm on Cherry Creek, about 25 miles east of Coos Bay. We stayed there for many years and I worked remotely all sorts of places.
Wood outside, Pascal inside: Northwest Microcomputer Systems
You already worked remotely then?
My first telecommuting was 1972. During that time everything was party line. Three or four or five houses were on the same pair of copper. But the telco ran a private line from Myrtle Point. That was 25 miles south from us, so I could use a modem. That was really nice of them and I was impressed. Using the network, I did all sorts of strange contract work from the farm before we moved to Portland in 1986.
You were building microcomputers for Northwest Microcomputer Systems while working from Cherry Creek farm?
Yes. The funding folk were in Coos County. The microprocessors first came in then. The Intel 8080 and so on. (The 8080 was a second 8-bit microprocessor that extended the earlier 8008). I was playing with them on breadboard and a group of people from town, two doctors and the young owner of a giant old style hardware store, Farr True Value Hardware, approached me if I could program a point-of-sale and bookkeeping app for them. And I stayed on the farm and wrote 20,000 lines in assembly language in a year. The group wanted to have it packaged up with hardware and software, so we did that.
I read it was made from wood. Really?
Yes. The case of the machine was made back in Coos County by Alan Peters, a neighboring woodworker. A plastic injection mold would have been over $50k.
Your co-founders were John Burles, Michael McKeown, Jim Long, and Jay Farr, right?
Farr was the heir of True Value Hardware. John Burles was an accountant. Mike McKeown was the doctor I worked with at the University of Chicago. Jim Long in fact came to me at the age of 15 and said, I want to be a computer programmer. He later became one of the first hundred employees of Cisco. I found a hardware crew in Eugene and all together became Northwest Micro. We probably built over 20 of these machines.
Only 20?
Yes. But what happened was that after I had written the monster code, I found out that UCSD had that cool thing, Pascal. At that point, it only ran on a DIGITAL PDP-11. But I said I would take anything to get me away from this assembly language and so http://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Pascal_News/12_Pascal_News_Jun78.pdfconnected with them and helped. I didn't do the work, but I helped them get it to the 8080 processor and we put it on the board in Eugene. I'd commute up to Eugene, which was a two plus hour ride from the farm. So, we had a Pascal machine. The machines were bought by Hewlett Packard, General Electric and so on.
Why did you only make so few?
It’s because the big companies always loved the machine. The hardware guys wanted to make a run for it. Then there was Apple starting and both Northwest Microsystem and Apple went to the West Coast Computer Fair in San Jose in 1979. While the hardware guys wanted to go for it, the doctors who were big funders said no. It turned out the purpose of their funding was to have a tax loss. That's why when the company failed, I got a T-Shirt from some friends that said, "God helps those who own a majority share".
