Collins Legacy Association releases feature film revealing Cedar Rapids role in creating the internet

CEDAR RAPIDS — A Cedar Rapids company is finally getting credit for its role in something that has revolutionized the world.

Today, the internet is at the foundation of our ability to do life’s most basic tasks.

From paying bills and shopping to keeping up with the news, chatting with friends or attending meetings, things that were once done offline have been changed by the internet. With five billion daily users spending an average daily time of seven hours online each day, it’s infrastructure the world depends on.

The foundation that gave the world the ability to connect to virtually limitless information wasn’t born in the 1990s or even the 1980s. With a bread truck, some engineers and radio technology from Rockwell Collins, one of Cedar Rapids’ most influential companies played a crucial role in bringing the connection we would later call “the internet” to life in November 1977.

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But it wouldn’t be until the internet was a teenager that most of the world realized what it was capable of. And now, as the internet turns 48, Cedar Rapids will learn the role it played in raising it.

“In those days, we did not call it internet,” said Anant Jain, project engineer for Collins’ packet radio program. “That’s the interesting part of it. We, nobody, had the vision of what became of it later on.”

How it started

The first feature-length film presented by the Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association is the culmination of three years of interviews produced by Busbee Creative Media and Wired Production Group in Cedar Rapids.

Don Beall, a former CEO of Rockwell International, knew the crucial role that Collins played in birthing the internet — and he had the connections who could tell the story.

“My goal was to try to get the engineers to take us back to that time and place,” said Annette Busbee, producer and director of the film. “Microprocessors were brand-new. Computer chips were brand-new, expensive and didn’t hold much memory.”

Through interviews of key players at Collins, the film takes viewers on a journey, starting with the government-funded research program Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that became central to the discoveries of the internet.

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“The interesting thing to me is, at the time, it was a research project,” said Rod Blocksome, founding member of the Collins Legacy Association and Rockwell Collins electrical engineer for 37 years.

With a few different types of networks running direct connections between specific computers, the desire for the military to communicate higher volumes of data from battlefields fueled the impetus for more mobile solutions.

“DARPA never started out to make an internet or anything like that happen,” said Bob Kahn, chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. “There was no enthusiasm anywhere that I could detect, other than for me, and a few of my colleagues, to make anything like that happen.”

In the 1960s and ‘70s, a few different types of network connections had been developed using phone lines or satellite connections to transmit data over growing geographic distances for limited corporate and governmental applications. The “C-System” developed by Collins made a data center in Cedar Rapids the world’s largest electronic message switching facility in the United States — handling more traffic in a day for flight and train systems than the entire Western Union telegraph network.

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“The C-System was a very forward looking system. Mr. (Arthur) Collins’ vision was to integrate computers and communications,” said the late Bob Cattoi, former senior vice president of engineering for the company. “They should come together, (Collins) said. They are not separate, they are one system.”

But packet radio technology, with patents and research Rockwell Collins had been developing since the 1950s, played a key role in making the internet airborne by breaking transmission of data into smaller “packets” that are reassembled at their final destination. By the 1970s, the company was known as the “gold standard” for what was then new digital radio technology.

With a nondescript “bread” box truck, Rockwell Collins equipment inside, and a little luck, the key players finally got three different types of networks to communicate for the first time on Nov. 22, 1977 — the first digital connection between radios and computers.

In the Bay Area of California with mountainous terrain, multiple airports and high traffic volume, that was no easy task.

“It was an extremely difficult environment to go drive around, and then you’re going to send a message to Norway while you’re driving around,” Blocksome said.

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Why it matters

When the project was underway, many computers were the size of vending machines, music was enjoyed on vinyl records and movies were recorded on actual film.

Today, the phones in our pockets hold more computing power than the systems that took man to the moon. High definition movies can be downloaded in under a minute. Vinyl records remain a trend mostly for nostalgia and aesthetics.

“Way back then, nobody ever thought you could transmit a movie over the internet. That was unheard of,” Blocksome said. “I think the fact that it was so versatile and the computer technology advanced so fast ... is what helped fuel this rapid expansion.”

The internet as we know it would not start to blossom until 1991, when the government lifted restrictions to allow for commercial applications of the technology. Mosaic, one of the first major web browsers, helped make it useful to the public with home computers in 1993.

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Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) became fundamental communication tools at the heart of the internet, which enjoined separate networks.

“It really laid the foundation for the internet working,” said Don Nielson, vice president of computer and information sciences for Stanford Research Institute. “It captured the world.”

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, DARPA leaders who helped develop TCP/IP, contributed insights central to the film’s explanation over a three-hour interview.

The Collins Legacy Association and those involved in making the film hope audiences have a few takeaways as the film circulates theaters and film festivals.

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For current Collins employees, they hope to imbue a sense of pride with a story they may not know about their company — the kind of passion that can sustain lifelong careers.

For students, they hope to instill the role technology will play in their future — something that complements the association’s mission to promote science, technology, mathematics and engineering (STEM) for the next generation.

“When you merge all these and add the internet to this STEM message ... it’s a powerful message about how you operate your life in terms of education and where some diligence and discipline, whether in the business world or technical world, can take you,” said Mike Dupree, president of the Collins Legacy Association and former Collins finance manager.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.