Globally, Hawai’i is best known for its surf culture and the Aloha spirit--rightfully so, as both originated in the remote archipelago. However, the islands also created another, more obscure form of ALOHA to the world, without which the internet as we know it today might not exist.



The date is June 1971. Disney World’s grand opening is still months away, the US completed its third manned moon mission a few months ago, while public opinion turns against the Vietnam War. The Nasdaq, FedEx, and NPR just made their debuts. Mainframes still rule the computing world, Intel just released the first microprocessor, the internet consists of 4-15 computers wired together, and the very first public demonstration of a wireless packet data network just happened...in Hawai’i.





Image Courtesy of Norm Abrahamson to the Computer History Museum



The person running the demo, Norm Abramson, was a surf freak (long before surfing the internet was an option), which led him to take a position at the University of Hawai’i as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer science after being faculty at Stanford and a visiting professor at Berkeley. Once on the islands, he was faced with a unique problem: While mainland universities could cheaply and easily run wires to time-share on a mainframe, Norm’s new university and its computer users were spread across the islands--a radius of 300km from the Manoa mainframe, most of it ocean. As a solution, Norm and his team started exploring the possibility of transmitting data over radio. This would eventually become the ALOHA protocol, and the AlohaNet.



The ALOHA protocol is simple, it’s just like talking: Broadcast what you have to say. If there is a collision--someone is talking over you--wait a moment and try again. This enabled a large number of users to efficiently share a single radio frequency band, saving vast resources over a circuit-switched or time-division model, which required either more spectrum or slower speeds on sparsely populated channels, which was often the case on bursty packet-oriented networks.



As research and implementation continued, three things became clear: The architecture of ALOHA-based data sharing was far more important than the medium, this technology could be used for the imminent US domestic satellite network (which would launch in 1974), and that they wanted to connect the AlohaNet to the fast-growing ARPAnet. As a result, the ALOHA project switched to ARPA funding and drove the creation of the first 56 kbit/s satellite data link, connecting the AlohaNet to the ARPAnet node at the NASA Ames Research Center.



The ARPAnet connection seemingly put ALOHAnet on Bob Metcalfe’s radar, who was such a fan of computer networking that he quit Harvard after they refused to let him connect the school to ARPAnet and would later earn his PhD by refining the AlohaNet model. Bob was one of the first to recognize ALOHA’s medium-agnostic properties, and used it to figure out a solution to an emerging problem with the ARPAnet.



The early ARPAnet was packet-switched, but connection-oriented in a very literal way: the computers were connected to each other via a wire. In the days of mainframes this wasn’t a problem, but as microprocessors were gaining popularity and computers were rapidly being added to the network, it was clear ARPAnet would become too slow and too expensive. Once again ALOHA saved the day: Bob Metcalfe figured out that sharing a radio channel was abstractly akin to sharing a wire, so an arbitrary number of computers running the refined ALOHA protocol could be added to a single wire, which could then connect to a network node intermediating the local network’s connection to the wider ARPAnet. This is how Ethernet was born, how the internet was able to solve its early scale problems, and how Bob would go on to start 3Com.



The fundamental and theoretical concepts of the ALOHA protocol would go on to be used basically anywhere data is being transmitted via crowded channels or on radio, such as satellites, WiFi, and cellular networks.



Today, Hawai’i’s deep and enduring contribution to the internet and modern communications is largely forgotten, even in Hawai’i. However, it’s worth remembering if only for one reason: ALOHA was a direct result of engineers creating solutions for the unique problems of their community--problems that others did not see--which in turn changed the world. That spirit of ALOHA remains alive in Hawai’i, at places like the University of Hawai’i LAVA Lab which is pioneering remote collaboration tools and spinning out startups like RendezView.



When JSConf Hawai’i talks about the importance of diversity and inclusion and not wanting to miss out on new perspectives, this is one of the stories we’re thinking about...and hopefully someday 30-40 years from now someone will be writing a newsletter about how a world-changing idea started at a new tech conference series in Hawai’i.



Come share the ALOHA with us! Get your tickets before they run out!





Mahalo,

The JSConfHI Team

https://www.jsconfhi.com/



P.S. The story of ALOHA in Norm Abramson’s own words, and here’s a great story on the birth of Ethernet. The ALOHAnet wiki talks about where the protocol has been used.