Correcting Internet History

[Thomas A. Fine]

I'm writing this because of the video that just came out on Mac Address about the Apple Airport.

 

I was there when WiFi was invented, I know the guy that did it, and it was not Vic Hayes.  It's someone that basically nobody has ever heard of, Doug Karl.  And he also happens to be one of the first (arguably the first) to have ever created a firewall too.

 

I'm familiar with a lot of history, and it's usually an exaggeration to make such claims.  Things are rarely "invented".  They gradually develop over time, and many people play a role.  But in the case of WiFi, Doug Karl personally implemented so many critical steps in both hardware and software that there is no doubt.

 

He did the first practical production implementation of a hardware and software solution for transmitting ethernet (AlohaNet notwithstanding, as this was a completely alternate path to wireless networking).  They were used in that case for long-haul networking to connect remote buildings at Ohio State (where I worked at the time).  He had working implementations at least by 1994.

 

He was able to do this pretty trivially because of the work he did creating KarlBridge software, which was PC-based bridges (and later routers).  His claim as the first create of firewalls is harder to parse out.  His KarlBridge software was available before some of the bigger commercial firewall companies, but a lot happened all at once, many people were working on it, and some competing commercial products (which were more successful) came on too quickly to have been based on his work.  But because he had a working solution for implementing a bridge on PCs (probably at the absolute earliest point at which PCs were fast enough to do this in software), as well as a solid knowledge of wireless technologies that existed at that time, he was able to cobble together something that worked as a wireless bridge between buildings.  (Every time I see an LMG video where they're doing medium or long haul wireless connections I chuckle inside, knowing that they're just reproducing work that existed before WiFi even existed.)  These were used for several years as the sole or primary Internet connection for some sites.

 

If that was it, that'd be weak sauce for such a claim.  But he became well known within the community for his work, so when Lucent was approached by Apple to develop what would become the Airport, and WiFi, Lucent asked Doug Karl to, well basically do all of it.  They needed hardware.  Doug didn't do the transmitter/receiver (based on existing Lucent technology), but he designed the rest of the circuitry in early Airport prototypes.  But more importantly he developed the operating system for the Airport, almost entirely based on the KarlBridge software that he modified for the wireless bridges, and features he'd added over the years.  He developed the first WEP security (and I had an opportunity to help with that but was too busy with other work).

 

When the Airport came out, nobody else even came close to approaching the work that Doug Karl did to make this thing happen.  Lucent was practically just a middleman.

 

To be fair to Vic Hayes, his role was on guiding the production if IEEE 802.11 standards.  These happened in parallel with the work that Doug Karl was doing.  The exact interplay here has been lost (or at least, I haven't been able to dig it up).  I don't know if Doug was implementing early IEEE committee suggestions, or if IEEE was turning Doug's implementations into standards, or a little of both.  What I don't see is any evidence of any early interactions between Doug Karl and Vic Hayes at that time, though both frequently appeared in USENET discussions about wireless networking.  But in my experience, standards spring from implementations, not the other way around, and there is absolutely no doubt that Doug Karl played THE critical role in nearly every aspect of early WiFi implementations.

 

So how does history like this get lost?  I haven't spoken to Doug in years, and we were never particularly close, but he always struck me as someone who just wanted to get on with things and didn't care about whether or not this made him famous.  I think he's largely been written out of history because he was just never a cheerleader for himself.  As with most things, the people who get the credit are the tireless self-promoters, rather than the people that rolled up their sleeves and got it done.

 

Here's a video of an interview about his work that's been so successfully scrubbed from the Internet that it seems to only exist at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/g4tv.com-video22693

[TetraSky]

Unfortunately, it's something a lot of people worked on and Vic Hayes just happened to be the chairman of IEEE 802.11 Standards Working Group for Wireless Local Area Networks at the time, which is why he got the credit for the standard and not the other guy who worked on an Apple product before. Sure it may have helped overall, but it wasn't "the standard" as we know it.

It's the same reason why many developers and engineers are living in the dark abyss of history while their bosses got the glory associated with their work. There's just too many to name.

[dilpickle]

On 11/25/2023 at 6:56 PM, TetraSky said:

Unfortunately, it's something a lot of people worked on and Vic Hayes just happened to be the chairman of IEEE 802.11 Standards Working Group for Wireless Local Area Networks at the time, which is why he got the credit for the standard and not the other guy who worked on an Apple product before. Sure it may have helped overall, but it wasn't "the standard" as we know it.

It's the same reason why many developers and engineers are living in the dark abyss of history while their bosses got the glory associated with their work. There's just too many to name.

Exactly. The days of a single person creating a new technology are long over. There are dozens if not hundreds of engineers that work on these things. And everything is built on what came before.

 

All Doug Karl did was adapt an existing technology. The same can be said of Berners-Lee and the web.

 

We have a human tendency to divide everything into neat categories and make heroes out of individuals but the world is never that simple.

[Thomas A. Fine]

On 11/28/2023 at 11:26 AM, dilpickle said:

Exactly. The days of a single person creating a new technology are long over. There are dozens if not hundreds of engineers that work on these things. And everything is built on what came before.

 

All Doug Karl did was adapt an existing technology. The same can be said of Berners-Lee and the web.

 

We have a human tendency to divide everything into neat categories and make heroes out of individuals but the world is never that simple.

I disagree (to some degree) on both counts.  Absolutely all inventions stand on other work.  Berners-Lee didn't invent the idea of a hypertext document system, certainly.  But his software project was a whole and distinct new thing.  It wasn't built based on ftp or gopher or any other system.  He didn't grab some other software project and adapt it.  He built a working system from scratch.  And it was not an obvious thing.  If it was, the people that developed gopher would have made a hypertext system instead of a menu system.  Most people working on hypertext systems were building local ones, not networked ones.  And were obsessed with academic problems like how to handle dead links (WWW answer: just ignore the problem :-)  Sure, once he'd done that, a lot of people contributed to add features and create standards.  But the community that showed up to contribute to that effort were all there because of his work, and we all knew it. Few things are as truly invented by one person as the web.

 

Doug Karl was somewhat less of an inventor and more of a participant in a chain than Berners-Lee was.  He couldn't have done what he did without the commercial radios that were coming out.  But Mr. Karl did more critical steps by far than anyone else involved in WiFi's development.  Both hardware and software pieces that no one else had done, creating a working practical wireless bridge, and then writing the software for Apple's Airport.