Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Bernie Cosell

In 1969 when the first two nodes of the ARPANET—the network that would become the core of the Internet—came on line, every packet that flowed over 50 kilobit/second leased lines was routed through two specialized computers called Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPs were designed and built by Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and the software that ran the IMPs had been written by a team of three programmers, one of whom was Bernie Cosell, who had left MIT three years before, at the beginning of his junior year, to join BBN.

Originally hired as an application programmer on a project building one of the earliest timesharing ...