I'll show you the Berners-Lee footage,
it's I have to tell you that I'm a giant
fan of yours. ≫> Oh really? ≫>
Yes I am. I mean I don't know and I've
never met you but I, it seems to me as
though maybe, maybe I'm just, it's just
the Larry Smarr image rather than the
real, Larry Smarr. ≫> You'll have to
tell me what that is. [laugh] >>
>> I'm the one person that never
gets to see that. ≫> The Larry Smarr
image? ≫> Yeah, right. ≫> When
you're inside it. ≫> Yeah. I didn't
know you were an astronomer. You know Bob
Stein by any chance? ≫> Sure.
≫> Bob Stein is my mentor. ≫>
Really? Oh yeah, we gave Bob lots of time.
≫> Yeah, I heard he's like in top
five here, ob is, Bob is the guy that
taught me high-performance computing.
≫> I go way back with him. ≫>
And >> Tom Wolf used to be a good
friend of ours, before he had his stroke
or. ≫> Yeah. ≫> Heart attack,
or whatever it was. ≫> And but I
mean to me it, after. ≫> So we don't
get disrupted. Why don't you take this and
put it over there? Tell Tira to hold my
calls and it's, it's the why an astronomer
got into this. ≫> Yeah, go ahead.
Right. ≫> Okay. ≫> I mean tell
me, tell me how this NCSA started? I mean,
the, the whole purpose of this. ≫>
Mm-hm. ≫> Is, is, it's sort of about
NCSA. It's not as much about Netscape and
Mosaic. I mean it, to me I'm curious,
[inaudible] on how, why it happened here?
≫> Right. ≫> Which is, I think
>> Yeah. I can tell you about that.
≫>. Okay. So go ahead. Tell me about
NCSA. ≫> Okay. Does the little red
light go on when you're? ≫> Yep. I'm
recording. ≫> Okay good. Well, I am
a trained relavistic astrophysicist. And I
got my P.h.D. Always in physics
departments, working on astrophysics
problems involving generalitivity, gas
dynamics, and so forth. So in the 70s,
when I was developing what is now called
numerical gen eralitivity, which is the
way to solve Einstein's equations for
dynamics of black holes, colliding black
holes, or an astrophysics that require
generativity like supernova events and so
on. I had to go and get a top-secret
nuclear weapons clearance to get access to
super computers, because in the mid 70s
the only place to get a supercomputer was
either at Livermore, Los Alamos, or in one
area which was weather. Now astronomy is
always been a driver or the super
computing and in fact on Johnny von Neumann's
computer that was built by the institute
half of that went to army to Aberdeen.
Half of that was used for the army for
trajectory calculations but the other half
was used for stellar revolution. So
astronomy and von Neumann's interest in
weather meant that astronomy and weather
for 50 years basically have been dominant
drivers of supercomputing usage. And yet
to do pure astrophysics. You're having to
get a top secret nuclear weapons
clearance. Now, nobody seemed to think
there was anything unusual about this. And
so I just went ahead as a post doc and I
would get a few months in the summer, work
100 hours a week. And then, the rest of
the year I'd had to live off of that. Go
back to Harvard where I was a junior
fellow. Try to explain to them about, you
know one could solve the laws of physics
that we had been laying down for 300 years
in incredible detail. For engineering
devices like nuclear weapons. That put on
Earth temperatures of the center of the
sun stresses beyond anything that we could
imagine in academic problems that we were
trying to solve and lots of disciplines.
So, this thing could revolutionize
academic research. Well, nobody got it. I
mean it was like, I really felt like I was
transitioning in a flying saucer between
this advanced civilization at Livermore,
and the stone age culture at Harvard, and
Harvard was as advanced as any place in
thinking about this, so it was a, what, I
didn't figure this out until I was in the
early 80s and by then the fir st cray had
gone into the continent of Europe at an
open scientific institute, the Max Planck Institute
 of Physics and Astrophysics. So
I'm over there in the summer along with
people like Dave Arnet, who was one of the
great supernova supercomputer guys in our
country and, people in chemistry and it
was like Paris in the 20s with all these
expatriates sitting over there. And we're
like trying to figure this out, like this
is an American built supercomputer, right.
Why are we in Munich, right? I mean this
is very strange so but, you know in
America we don't question the
infrastructure somehow. I mean it's just
like its either there or it isn't there. That's
just the way it is but I was having a mas [German word for mug?]
of beer like one night. Actually I think
it was the second mas of beer with my
German host who had also been born like I
was, postwar and he finally turns to me
and he says, aren't you ashamed of
yourself? You big, rich occupying country.
You come over here in our little country
and, and we finally get enough money
scraped together after World War II to
buy one of these supercomputers, and you
Americans come over here and use up our
time. He says, how did you guys ever win
the war? You know? What is going on here?
And this finally just sort of stimulated
me into saying, what <i>is</i> going on here?
This is nuts. And I went back and I found
out, for instance, that after the Sputnik
Program, the Federal Government had funded
the universities, built the science
buildings, started the supercomputer
centers. IBM would go around and give away
almost the mainframes and, and so the
scientists in the 60s took it for granted
that they had the fastest computers in
the world in academia.  But about 1970, with
the starting of the Vietnam War, and with
all kinds of guns and butters issues and
everything else, that stopped. And in
fact, to give an example, by 78, half the
number of PhDs and engineers in
engineering was being generated in our
country as there were in 1970. So, there
was this complete severing of the Sputnik
era partnership with the federal
government and it was particularly bad in
computing. To give you an example, when I
was at Livermore in the 70s, there
were four CDC 7600s, which were just one of
the finest supercomputers ever built. No
American university ever took delivery of
a single CDC 7600. In fact, the University
of Illinois, when I first got here, had a
Cyber 175 which was a retread, a second
design manufacturing of, of this thing.
And we were one of the first universities
that had it, and people all thought that,
you know, Illinois naturally was way ahead
of everybody else. So it's like, we were
just completely divorced from the private
sector that was generating these wonderful
machines, because of federal policy, which
was to say, these things are only, are so
valuable that we can only afford to put
them into war environments. So, after this
German encounter I came back and I said, I
wonder how many other scientists like me
are there? So, at the University of
Illinois, I started calling, cold calling
my colleagues, and saying hi, you don't
know me. I'm a little assistant professor
but I bet you that your research is
blocked by lack of access to
supercomputers, and they'd sort of say
like, who? Crack, crack. Who is this? You
know, [laugh] crank call and but we'd
start talking in chemistry and biology and
agriculture and so on and, and sure
enough, it turns out that, that, that was
true. They knew how to do the science,
they just didn't have access. So I said
well, send me a little prospectus of what
science you could do if you had a
supercomputer. Well, I ended up with 65
faculty and fifteen departments on one
campus and I thought, this is going to be
all this way all over the country so it
was, I really said well jeez somebody has
got to raise this issue, And about that
time there had been a Lax Report, that had
the federal government had done that began
to undercover of the stuff and they still
weren't, I mean Peter Lax. He was one of
the greatest mathematicians, head of, one
of the top people in the [inaudible] Institute, a long time
advocate of things computational, and I had
this long, long battle with Peter, because
in the draft report of the Lax report, it
was not, it was going to say, well yeah,
we oughta get one of these supercomputers
and make it available to the universities
but you know, let's put it in Livermore or
put it somewhere that people know how to
do this stuff. And a university was not
on the list of what the Lax report
considered to be appropriate sites for a
supercomputer. So I had this long battle
over the telephone, I remember, with Peter
Lax. It was sort of David and Goliath cuz
I mean he was this giant of the field, I'm
nobody. And I, I finally convinced him not
to exclude universities as a possibility.
Even though he felt that it was fairly
unlikely that any of them would be able to
play with sharp instruments and not hurt
themselves. So, I mean, you got to
understand the world was totally different
when the supercomputer center's program
was coming into being. And people, it's so
hard for people now on the web and
everything to go back to that time. There
was no Internet, you know? There was,
there was these wonderful people Vince
Cerf and Bob [inaudible] and all
these people. Bill Joy, who had developed
TCP/IP, and, and, and embodied it in the
ARPANET. This was a few computer science
departments and military, okay? Nobody in
the physics department or chemistry
department ever heard of the ARPANET, much
less had any access to it. But it was
obviously the right idea.  And so once we
got the Congress to put through money for
a national supercomputer program, then
there was a national competition, and
so on, and the five centers were selected.
The first thing then that NSF realized.
Well okay, now we put these in place to be
providing access to academic scientists,
and yet, like, they have to fly to
Champaign-Urbana like I had to fly to
Livermore, okay? This isn't right so there
were a lot of discussions then but the
trouble was that the telecom lobbyists in
Washington would block any discussion of
the Federal Government putting in the kind
of network we have today, which is what
people wanted. I mean everybody knew that
they wanted to have a ubiquitous email
person to person network. But as soon as
they'd start talking about that the
telecom lobbyists would come up and say,
no way guys. That's private sector. Don't
get the Federal Government involved in
that. Stay out of it. So what we learned
early on was real interesting. It's like
if we had argued instead of the
supercomputer program, let's get the
Federal Government to buy everybody a
personal computer which was IBM personal
computer was two years old in 1985 and put
on people's desk, okay? Again, this would
be an interference with the private
sector. So but we said oh, we'll just take
a few of these esoteric supercomputers.
And, is that okay? That's right, there's
no market there, that's okay, the Federal
Government has a role. Well, it was the
same thing with networking. What we said
is, we just want to put a high speed
backbone across the country to connect the
five centers and, and the telecom people
said, okay, that's cool, you know 56
kilobits was the national high speed
backbone. Less than ISDN today yeah.
That's not a market, okay? And, and, and
so we got a few of these weird
supercomputer types who are out in the
universities who want to hook into
that. They say, yeah that's okay. That's
not a market. You can do that. Well, that
was the NSF Net backbone. Then the
regionals got funded. And then the
campuses were afraid if they didn't dig up
their quad and put in some fiber then the
professors who want to get access to
supercomputers would go to a university
that <i>would</i> do that, so gradually the whole
Internet emerged out of the, the sort of
policy vice you get into Washington
where you can't do the right thing. You
have to do something that seems
irrelevant, but has a logic to it that will
gradually bring the market forces into
play. That will spin out, ultimately a
whole industry.