title: Red Army Faction

text: The government hastily approved several special laws for use during the Stammheim trial. Lawyers were excluded from trial for the first time since 1945, after being accused of various inappropriate actions, such as helping to form criminal organizations (Section 129, Criminal Law). The authorities invaded and checked the lawyers' offices for possible incriminating material. Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel boasted that no other Western state had such extensive regulation to exclude defense attorneys from a trial. Klaus Croissant, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Kurt Groenewold, who had been working preparing for the trial for three years, were expelled the second day of the trial. On 23 June 1975, Croissant, Ströbele (who had already been expelled), and Mary Becker were arrested, and in the meantime police invaded several defense attorneys' offices and homes, seizing documents and files. Ströbele and Croissant were remanded and held for four and eight weeks respectively. Croissant had to pay 80,000 Deutschmarks and report weekly to a police station, and his transport and identity papers were seized.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The defense lawyers and prisoners were not the only ones affected by measures adopted for the RAF trial. On 26 November 1974 an unprecedented mobilization by police and GSG-9 units arrested 23 suspected RAF members, invaded of dozens of homes, left-wing bookstores, and meeting places, and made arrests. No guerrillas were found. BKA's chief, Horst Herold stated that despite the fact that "large-scale operations usually don't bring practical results, the impression of the crowd is always a considerable advantage".


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 16 February 1979 Croissant was arrested (on the accusation of supporting a criminal organization – section 129) after France denied his request for political asylum, and was sentenced to a prison term of two and half years to be served in Stammheim prison.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The general approach by defendants and their attorneys was to highlight the political purpose and characteristics of the RAF.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 13 and 14 January 1976 the defendants readied their testimony (about 200 pages), in which they analyzed the role of imperialism and its fight against the revolutionary movements in the countries of the "third world". They also expounded the fascistization of West Germany and its role as an imperialistic state (in alliance with the U.S. over Vietnam). Finally they talked about the task of urban guerrillas and undertook the political responsibility for the bombing attacks. Finally their lawyers (following Ulrike Meinhof's proposal) requested that the accused be officially regarded as prisoners of war.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 4 May (five days before Meinhof's death) the four defendants demanded to be allowed to provide data about the Vietnam War. They claimed that because the military intervention in Vietnam by the U.S. (and, indirectly, the FRG) had violated international law, the U.S. military bases in West Germany were justifiable targets of international retaliation. They requested several politicians (like Richard Nixon and Helmut Schmidt) as well as some former U.S. agents (who were willing to testify) to be called as witnesses.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Later when their requests were rejected, U.S. agents Barton Osbourne (ex-CIA, ex-member of the Phoenix Program), G. Peck (NSA), and Gary Thomas gave extensive interviews (organized by defense lawyers) on 23 June 1976 where they explained how FRG support was crucial for U.S. operations in Vietnam. Peck concluded that the RAF "was the response to criminal aggression of the U.S. government in Indochina and the assistance of the German government. The real terrorist was my government." Thomas presented data about the joint operations of FRG and U.S. secret services in Eastern Europe. He had also observed the Stammheim trial and referred to a CIA instructor teaching them how to make a murder look like a suicide. These statements were confirmed by the CIA case officer Philip Agee.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The RAF has been associated with various serious criminal acts (including bombings, kidnappings and murder) since their founding. The first criminal act attributed to the group after the student Benno Ohnesorg had been killed by a policeman in 1967 was the bombing of the Kaufhaus Schneider department store. On 2 April 1968, affiliates of the group firebombed the store and caused an estimated US$200,000 in property damage. Prominent members of the bombing included Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, two of the founders of the RAF. The bombs detonated at midnight when no one was in the store and no one was injured. As the bombs ignited, Gudrun Ensslin was at a nearby payphone, yelling to the German Press Agency, "This is a political act of revenge."


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 11 May 1972, the RAF placed three pipe bombs at a United States headquarters in Frankfurt. The bombing resulted in the death of a US officer and the injury of 13 other people. The stated reason for the bombing was a political statement in protest of US imperialism, specifically, a protest of US mining of North Vietnam harbours.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 19 May 1972, members of the RAF armed six bombs in the Springer publishing house in Hamburg. Only three of the five bombs exploded, but 36 people were injured.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 24 May 1972, two weeks after the bombing of the United States headquarters in Frankfurt, the group set off a car bomb at the IDHS (Intelligence Data Handling Service) Building at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg. The bombing resulted in the deaths of three soldiers and the injury of five others.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 10 November 1974, the group killed Günter von Drenkmann, the president of Germany's superior court of justice. The killing occurred after a string of events that led to a failed kidnapping by the 2 June Movement, a group that splintered off the RAF after the death of Holger Meins by hunger strike in prison.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Starting in February 1975 and continuing through March 1975, the 2 June Movement kidnapped Peter Lorenz, who at the time was the Christian Democratic candidate in the race for the mayor of West Berlin. In exchange for the release of Lorenz, the group demanded that several RAF and 2 June Movement members that were imprisoned for reasons other than violence be released from jail. The government obliged and released several of these members for the safe release of Lorenz.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 24 April 1975, six members affiliated with the RAF seized the West German Embassy in Stockholm. The group took hostages and set the building to explode. They demanded the release of several imprisoned members of the RAF. The government refused the request, which led to the murder of two of the hostages. A few of the bombs that were intended to blow up the embassy prematurely detonated, which resulted in the death of two of the six RAF affiliates. The other four members eventually surrendered to the authorities.


title: Red Army Faction

text: In May 1975, several British intelligence reports circulated that stated that the RAF had stolen mustard gas from a joint U.S. and British storage facility. The reports also indicated that the RAF had intended to use the stolen gas in German cities. It eventually turned out that the mustard gas canisters were merely misplaced; however, the RAF still successfully capitalized on the news by frightening several different agencies.


title: Red Army Faction

text: In the 1970's, the RAF was involved in several raids, taking advantage of Switzerland’s loosely guarded military armories. According to the source, the group was involved in the theft of 200 Swiss rifles, 500 revolvers, and 400 large grenades.


title: Red Army Faction

text: During the early 1980s, German and French newspapers reported that the police had raided an RAF safe house in Paris and had found a makeshift laboratory that contained flasks full of "Clostridium botulinum", which makes botulinum toxin. These reports were later found to be incorrect; no such lab was ever found.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 30 July 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel in a botched kidnapping. Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht, the sister of Ponto's goddaughter.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Following the convictions, Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS who was then President of the German Employers' Association (and thus one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany), was abducted in a violent kidnapping. On 5 September 1977, Schleyer's convoy was stopped by the kidnappers reversing a car into the path of Schleyer's vehicle, causing the Mercedes in which he was being driven to crash. Once the convoy was stopped, five masked assailants immediately shot and killed three policemen and the driver and took Schleyer hostage. One of the group (Sieglinde Hofmann) produced her weapon from a pram she was pushing down the road.


title: Red Army Faction

text: A letter was then received by the federal government, demanding the release of eleven detainees, including those in Stammheim. A crisis committee was formed in Bonn, headed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, which, instead of acceding, resolved to employ delaying tactics to give the police time to discover Schleyer's location. At the same time, a total communication ban was imposed on the prison inmates, who were now allowed visits only from government officials and the prison chaplain.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The crisis dragged on for more than a month, while the Federal Criminal Police Office carried out its biggest investigation to date. Matters escalated when, on 13 October 1977, Lufthansa Flight 181 from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked. A group of four PFLP members took control of the plane (which was named "Landshut"). The leader introduced himself to the passengers as "Captain Mahmud", who was later identified as . When the plane landed in Rome for refueling, he issued the same demands as the Schleyer kidnappers, plus the release of two Palestinians held in Turkey and payment of US$15 million.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The Bonn crisis team again decided not to give in. The plane flew on via Larnaca, then Dubai, and then to Aden, where flight captain Jürgen Schumann, whom the hijackers deemed not cooperative enough, was brought before an improvised "revolutionary tribunal" and murdered on 16 October. His body was dumped on the runway. The aircraft again took off, flown by the co-pilot Jürgen Vietor, this time headed for Mogadishu, Somalia.


title: Red Army Faction

text: A high-risk rescue operation was led by Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, then undersecretary in the chancellor's office, who had been secretly flown in from Bonn. At five past midnight CET on 18 October, the plane was stormed in a seven-minute assault by GSG 9, an elite unit of the German federal police. All four hijackers were shot; three of them died on the spot. None of the passengers were seriously hurt and Wischnewski was able to phone Schmidt and tell the Bonn crisis team that the operation had been a success.


title: Red Army Faction

text: After the conclusion of the Landshut hostage crisis was announced in the late evening of 17 October, all the RAF members incarcerated in Stammheim committed suicide during the following night. Their lawyer, Arndt Müller, had smuggled pistols into the prison. Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe shot themselves with these weapons while Gudrun Ensslin hanged herself. Irmgard Möller tried to kill herself with a knife, but survived severely injured. The suicides went unnoticed until early next morning. Doctors were rushed in. Baader and Ensslin were already dead when found. Raspe was still alive and moved to the hospital where he died soon after. Möller recovered after being brought to a hospital.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The suicide of the imprisoned RAF leadership led to a significant media echo. The coordinated attempt sparked numerous conspiracy theories. It was alleged that the RAF members did not kill themselves, but instead were killed by the German authorities, the BND, CIA, the United States and NATO. These theories were spread by RAF supporters and sympathizers, and some were taken up by the mainstream press. Available evidence shows that these suicides were planned and prepared for a long time by the RAF members.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On the very same day, Hanns-Martin Schleyer was shot to death by his captors en route to Mulhouse, France. On 19 October, Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he had been "executed" and pinpointed his location. His body was recovered later that day in the trunk of a green Audi 100 on Rue Charles Péguy. The French newspaper received a letter declaring:


title: Red Army Faction

text: The dissolution of the Soviet Union in late December 1991 was a serious blow to Leninist groups, but well into the 1990s attacks were still being committed under the name RAF. Among these were the killing of Ernst Zimmermann, CEO of MTU Aero Engines, a German engineering company; another bombing at the US Air Force's Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt), which targeted the base commander and killed two bystanders; a car bomb attack that killed Siemens executive Karl-Heinz Beckurts and his driver; and the shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl, a leading official at Germany's foreign ministry.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 30 November 1989, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor in Bad Homburg. On 1 April 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, leader of the government organization responsible for the privatization of the East German state economy, was shot and killed. The assassins of Zimmermann, von Braunmühl, Herrhausen, and Rohwedder were never reliably identified.


title: Red Army Faction

text: After German reunification in 1990, it was confirmed that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of East Germany, which had given several members (who had chosen to leave the group) shelter and new identities. This was already generally suspected at the time. In 1978 part of the group was exfiltrated through Yugoslavia to communist Poland to avoid a manhunt in Germany. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Peter Boock, Rolf Wagner, and Sieglinde Hoffmann spent most of the year in facilities of the Polish Ministry of Public Security in Masuria, northeastern Poland, where they were also going through series of training programs along with others from Arab countries.


title: Red Army Faction

text: In 1992, the German government assessed that the RAF's main field of engagement now was missions to release imprisoned RAF members. To weaken the organization further the government declared that some RAF inmates would be released if the RAF refrained from violent attacks in the future. Subsequently, the RAF announced their intention to "de-escalate" and refrain from significant activity.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The last action taken by the RAF took place in 1993 with a bombing of a newly built prison in Weiterstadt by overcoming the officers on duty and planting explosives. Although no one was seriously injured, this operation caused property damage amounting to 123 million Deutschmarks (over 50 million euros).


title: Red Army Faction

text: The last big action against the RAF took place on 27 June 1993. An agent of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the West German domestic intelligence agency) named Klaus Steinmetz had infiltrated the RAF. As a result, Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams were arrested in Bad Kleinen. Grams and GSG 9 officer Michael Newrzella died during the mission. Due to a number of operational mistakes involving the various police services, German Minister of the Interior Rudolf Seiters took responsibility and resigned from his post.


title: Red Army Faction

text: On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the machine-gun red star, declaring the group dissolved:


title: Red Army Faction

text: In response to this statement, former BKA President Horst Herold said, "With this statement the Red Army Faction has erected its own tombstone."


title: Red Army Faction

text: Horst Mahler, a founding RAF member, is now a vocal Neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier. In 2005, he was sentenced to six years in prison for incitement to racial hatred against Jews. He is on record as saying that his beliefs have not changed: ("The enemy is the same").


title: Red Army Faction

text: In 2007, amidst widespread media controversy, German president Horst Köhler considered pardoning RAF member Christian Klar, who had filed a pardon application several years before. On 7 May 2007, pardon was denied; regular parole was later granted on 24 November 2008. RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt was granted release on five-year parole by a German court on 12 February 2007 and Eva Haule was released 17 August 2007.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Police in Europe investigating the whereabouts of Ernst-Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg and Daniela Klette stated that a search had been made in Spain, France and Italy. This followed reports that they could be hiding in the Netherlands in 2017 after being suspected of masterminding robberies in supermarkets and cash transit vehicles in Wolfsburg, Bremen and Cremlingen between 2011 and 2016.


title: Red Army Faction

text: According to scholarly research into Stasi documents, RAF members in East Germany were trained and assisted by personnel from the Stasi Arbeitsgruppe des Ministers S.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The following is a list of all known RAF Commando Units. Most RAF units were named after deceased RAF members, while others were named after deceased members of international militant left-wing groups such as the Black Panthers, Irish National Liberation Army, and the Red Brigades.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Numerous West German film and TV productions have been made about the RAF. These include Klaus Lemke's telefeature "Brandstifter" ("Arsonists") (1969); Volker Schloendorff and Margarethe von Trotta's co-directed "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" (a 1978 adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum"); "Germany in Autumn" (1978), co-directed by 11 directors, including Alexander Kluge, Volker Schloendorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder , and Edgar Reitz; Fassbinder's "Die dritte Generation" ("The Third Generation") (1979); Margarethe von Trotta's "Die bleierne Zeit" ("The German Sisters"/"Marianne and Juliane") (1981); and Reinhard Hauff's "Stammheim" (1986). Post-reunification German films include Christian Petzold's "Die innere Sicherheit" ("The State I Am In") (2000); Kristina Konrad's "Grosse Freiheit, Kleine Freiheit" ("Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom" (2000); and Christopher Roth's "Baader" (2002).


title: Red Army Faction

text: Uli Edel's 2008 "The Baader Meinhof Complex" (German: "Der Baader Meinhof Komplex"), based on the bestselling book by Stefan Aust, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in both the 81st Academy Awards and 66th Golden Globe Awards.


title: Red Army Faction

text: Outside Germany, films include Swiss director Markus Imhoof's "Die Reise" ("The Journey") (1986). On TV, there was Heinrich Breloer's "" ("Death Game") (1997), a two-part docu-drama, and Volker Schloendorff's "Die Stille nach dem Schuss" ("The Legend of Rita") (2000).


title: Red Army Faction

text: There have been several documentaries: "Im Fadenkreuz – Deutschland & die RAF" (1997, several directors); Gerd Conradt's "Starbuck Holger Meins" (2001); Andres Veiel's "Black Box BRD" (2001); Klaus Stern's "Andreas Baader – Der Staatsfeind" ("Enemy of the State") (2003); Ben Lewis's "In Love With Terror", for BBC Four (2003); and "Ulrike Meinhof – Wege in den Terror" ("Ways into Terror") (2006).


title: Red Army Faction

text: The 2010 feature documentary "Children of the Revolution" tells Ulrike Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl, while Andres Veiel's 2011 feature film "If Not Us, Who?" provides a context for the RAF's origins through the perspective of Gudrun Ensslin's partner Bernward Vesper. In 2015, Jean-Gabriel Périot released his feature-length, found-footage documentary "A German Youth" on the Red Army Faction.


title: Red Army Faction

text: The 2018 remake of "Suspiria" features a secondary character attempting to run away to join the Red Army Faction, serving as a catalyst for the later events of the film.


title: Backslash

text: The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s.


title: Backslash

text: , efforts to identify either the origin of this character or its purpose before the 1960s have not been successful. The earliest known reference found to date is a 1937 maintenance manual from the Teletype Corporation with a photograph showing the keyboard of its Kleinschmidt keyboard perforator WPE-3 using the Wheatstone system. The symbol was called the "diagonal key", and given a (non-standard) Morse code of . (This is the code for the slash symbol, entered backwards.)


title: Backslash

text: In June 1960, IBM published an "Extended character set standard" that includes the symbol at 0x19. In September 1961, Bob Bemer (IBM) proposed to the X3.2 standards committee that , and be made part of the proposed standard, describing the backslash as a "reverse division operator" and cited its prior use by Teletype in telecommunications. In particular, he said, the was needed so that the ALGOL boolean operators (logical conjunction) and (logical disjunction) could be composed using and respectively. The Committee adopted these changes into the draft American Standard (subsequently called ASCII) at its November 1961 meeting.


title: Backslash

text: These operators were used for min and max in early versions of the C programming language supplied with Unix V6 and V7.


title: Backslash

text: The Teletype Model 33 (1963) appears to be the first commercially available unit that has the character as a standard keytop for sale in some markets; this model has a full ASCII character set.


title: Backslash

text: In many programming languages such as C, Perl, PHP, Python, Unix scripting languages, and many file formats such as JSON, the backslash is used as an escape character, to indicate that the character following it should be treated specially (if it would otherwise be treated literally), or literally (if it would otherwise be treated specially). For instance, inside a C string literal the sequence produces a newline byte instead of an 'n', and the sequence produces an actual double quote rather than the special meaning of the double quote ending the string. An actual backslash is produced by a double backslash .


title: Backslash

text: Regular expression languages used it the same way, changing subsequent literal characters into metacharacters and vice versa. For instance searches for either '|' or 'b', the first bar is escaped and searched for, the second is not escaped and acts as an "or".


title: Backslash

text: Outside quoted strings, the only common use of backslash is to ignore ("escape") a newline immediately after it. In this context it may be called a "continued line" as the current line continues into the next one. Some software replaces the backslash+newline with a space.


title: Backslash

text: To support computers that lacked the backslash character, the C trigraph was added, which is equivalent to a backslash. Since this can escape the next character, which may itself be a , the primary modern use may be for code obfuscation. Support for trigraphs in C++ was removed in C++17, though it remains in C.


title: Backslash

text: In Visual Basic (and some other BASIC dialects) the backslash is used as an operator symbol to indicate integer division. This rounds toward zero.


title: Backslash

text: The ALGOL 68 programming language uses the "\" as its Decimal Exponent Symbol. ALGOL 68 has the choice of 4 Decimal Exponent Symbols: e, E, \, or . Examples: , , or .


title: Backslash

text: In APL is called "Expand" when used to insert fill elements into arrays, and "Scan" when used to produce prefix reduction (cumulative fold).


title: Backslash

text: In Haskell, the backslash is used both to introduce special characters and to introduce lambda functions (since it is a reasonable approximation in ASCII of the Greek letter .


title: Backslash

text: MS-DOS 2.0, released 1983, copied the hierarchical file system from Unix and thus used the (forward) slash as the directory separator. Possibly on the insistence of IBM, Microsoft added the backslash to allow paths to be typed at the command line interpreter prompt, while retaining compatibility with MS-DOS 1.0 (in which was the command-line option indicator. Typing "" gave the "wide" option to the "" command, so some other method was needed if one actually wanted to run a program called inside a directory called ). Except for COMMAND.COM, all other parts of the operating system accept both characters in a path, but the Microsoft convention remains to use a backslash, and APIs that "return" paths use backslashes. In some versions, the option character can be changed from to via SWITCHAR, which allows COMMAND.COM to preserve in the command name.


title: Backslash

text: The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems inherited the MS-DOS behavior and so still support either character – but individual Windows programs and sub-systems may, wrongly, only accept the backslash as a path delimiter, or may misinterpret a forward slash if it is used as such. Some programs will only accept forward slashes if the path is placed in double-quotes. The failure of Microsoft's security features to recognize unexpected-direction slashes in local and Internet paths, while other parts of the operating system still act upon them, has led to some serious lapses in security. Resources that should not be available have been accessed with paths using particular mixes, such as .


title: Backslash

text: In caret notation, represents the control character 0x1C, file separator. This is entirely a coincidence and has nothing to do with its use in file paths.


title: Backslash

text: Especially when describing computer algorithms, it is common to define backslash so that is equivalent to . This is integer division that rounds down, not towards zero. In Wolfram Mathematica the backslash is used this way for integer divide.


title: Backslash

text: In MATLAB and GNU Octave the backslash is used for left matrix divide, while the (forward) slash is for right matrix divide.


title: Backslash

text: In the Japanese encodings ISO 646-JP (a 7-bit code based on ASCII), JIS X 0201 (an 8-bit code), and Shift JIS (a multi-byte encoding which is 8-bit for ASCII), the code point 0x5C that would be used for backslash in ASCII is instead rendered as a yen sign . Due to extensive use of the 005C code point to represent the yen sign, even today some fonts such as MS Mincho render the backslash character as a ¥, so the characters at Unicode code points 00A5 (¥) and 005C (\) both render as when these fonts are selected. Computer programs still treat 005C as a backslash in these environments but display it as a yen sign, causing confusion, especially in MS-DOS filenames.


title: Backslash

text: Several other ISO 646 versions also replace backslash with other characters, including ₩ (Korean), Ö (German, Swedish), Ø (Danish, Norwegian), ç (French) and Ñ (Spanish), leading to similar problems, though with less lasting impact compared to the yen sign.


title: Backslash

text: In 1991, RFC 1345 suggested as a unique two-character mnemonic that might be used in internet standards as "a practical way of identifying [this] character, without reference to a coded character set and its code in [that] coded character set". Consequently, this style may be seen in early Internet Engineering Task Force documents.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The Station nightclub fire occurred on the evening of February 20, 2003, in West Warwick, Rhode Island, United States, killing 100 people and injuring 230. The fire was caused by pyrotechnics set off by the tour manager of the evening's headlining band, Great White, which ignited flammable acoustic foam in the walls and ceilings surrounding the stage. It reached flashover within one minute, causing all combustible materials to burn. Intense black smoke engulfed the club within two minutes. Video footage of the fire shows its ignition, rapid growth, the billowing smoke that quickly made escape impossible, and blocked egress that further hindered evacuation.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The toxic smoke, heat, and the resulting human rush toward the main exit killed 100; 230 were injured and another 132 escaped uninjured. Many of the survivors developed post-traumatic stress disorder after the event. This fire was the fourth-deadliest at a nightclub in U.S. history, and the second-deadliest in New England, behind the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, which resulted in 492 deaths.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The Station was a nightclub that was located on the corner of Cowesett Avenue and Kulas Road in West Warwick, Rhode Island. The building that would become The Station was built in 1946 and was originally used as a gin mill before being converted into a nightclub. The nightclub was purchased by brothers Michael and Jeffrey Derderian in March 2000. In the months prior to the fire, the building had been inspected twice by the West Warwick fire marshal - The club was cited for nine minor code violations during the first inspection in November 2002, but was not cited for the flammable polyurethane foam the venue used for soundproofing, which was against code. The follow-up inspection in December 2002 also did not cite the foam, and the inspector gave the building an "All OK" rating on his inspection form.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Prior to the fire, the Station often hosted concerts by heavy metal bands. The concert headlined by Great White on February 20, 2003 was emceed by Michael Gonsalves, a disk jockey for Providence rock radio station WHJY who was also known as "Doctor Metal". Gonsalves was the host of the WHJY program "The Metal Zone", at the time the longest-running heavy metal radio program in the United States.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The fire started shortly after Great White began performing their opening number, their 1991 "Billboard" Mainstream Rock hit "Desert Moon". During the performance, pyrotechnics set off by tour manager Daniel Biechele ignited the flammable acoustic foam on both sides and the top center of the drummer's alcove at the back of the stage. The pyrotechnics were gerbs, cylindrical devices that produce a controlled spray of sparks. Biechele used four gerbs that were set to spray sparks for fifteen seconds. Two gerbs were at 45-degree angles, with the middle two pointing straight up. The flanking gerbs became the principal cause of the fire.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The acoustic foam was installed in two layers, with highly flammable urethane foam on top of polyethylene foam, the latter being difficult to ignite but releasing much more heat once ignited by the less dense urethane. Burning polyurethane foam instantly develops opaque, dark smoke along with deadly carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide gas. Inhaling this smoke only 2–3 times would cause rapid loss of consciousness and, eventually, death by internal suffocation.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The flames were initially thought to be part of the act (the song's music video clearly shows flames blazing around the musicians); only as the fire reached the ceiling and smoke began to bank down did people realize it was uncontrolled. Twenty seconds after the pyrotechnics ended, the band stopped playing and lead vocalist Jack Russell calmly remarked into the microphone, "Wow... that's not good." In less than a minute, the entire stage was engulfed in flames, with most of the band members and entourage fleeing for the west exit by the stage.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: By this time, the nightclub's fire alarm had activated, and although there were four possible exits, most people headed for the front door through which they had entered. The ensuing crowd crush in the narrow hallway led to that exit being blocked completely and resulted in numerous deaths and injuries among the patrons and staff. A total of 462 people were in attendance, even though the club's official licensed capacity was 404. One hundred died, and about half of the survivors were injured, either from burns, smoke inhalation, thermal trauma, or crushing.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Among those who died in the fire were Great White's lead guitarist, Ty Longley, and the show's emcee, WHJY DJ Mike "The Doctor" Gonsalves. There is reason to believe that Longley and Gonsalves tried to salvage equipment during the early stage of the fire and lost valuable time to escape before dense, toxic smoke made breathing near impossible at zero visibility. Longley is believed to have initially made it out of the building but then re-entered in an attempt to rescue his guitar. Furthermore, a number of survivors later stated that a bouncer, Scott Vieira, stopped people trying to escape via the stage exit, stating that the door was "for the band only."


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The fire, from its inception, was caught on videotape by cameraman Brian Butler for WPRI-TV of Providence, and the beginning of that tape was released to national news stations. Butler was there for a planned piece on nightclub safety being reported by Jeffrey A. Derderian, a WPRI news reporter who was also a part-owner of The Station. WPRI-TV would later be cited for conflict of interest in having a reporter do a report concerning his own property. The report had been inspired by the E2 nightclub stampede in Chicago that killed 21 people three days earlier. At the scene of the fire, Butler gave this account of the tragedy:


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Through attorneys, club owners said they did not give permission to the band to use pyrotechnics, though band members claimed they had permission.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigation of the fire under the authority of the National Construction Safety Team Act, using computer simulations with FDS and a mockup of the stage area and dance floor, concluded that a fire sprinkler system would have contained the fire long enough to give everyone time to exit safely. However, because of the building's age (built in 1946) and size (), many believed The Station to be exempt from sprinkler system requirements. In fact, the building had undergone an occupancy change when it was converted from a restaurant to a nightclub. This change dissolved its exemption from the law, a fact that West Warwick fire inspectors never noticed. On the night in question, The Station was legally required to have a sprinkler system but did not; outcry over the event has sparked calls for a national Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act, but those efforts have so far stalled .


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: On December 9, 2003, brothers Jeffrey A. and Michael A. Derderian, the two owners of The Station nightclub, and Daniel M. Biechele, Great White's road manager at the time of the fire, were each charged with 200 counts of involuntary manslaughter—two per death, because they were indicted under two separate theories of the crime: criminal-negligence manslaughter (resulting from a legal act in which the accused ignores the risks to others and someone is killed) and misdemeanor manslaughter (resulting from a petty crime that causes a death). The brothers pleaded not guilty to the charges, while Biechele pleaded guilty. The Derderians also were fined $1.07 million for failing to carry workers' compensation insurance for their employees, four of whom died in the blaze.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The first criminal trial was against Great White's tour manager, Daniel Michael Biechele, 26, from Orlando, Florida. This trial was scheduled to start May 1, 2006, but Biechele, against his lawyers' advice, pleaded guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter on February 7, 2006, in what he said was an effort to "bring peace, I want this to be over with."


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: On May 10, 2006, State Prosecutor Randall White asked that Biechele be sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum allowed under the plea bargain, citing the massive loss of life in the fire and the need to send a message. Speaking to the public for the first time since the fire, Biechele appeared remorseful during his sentencing. In his statement, he said:


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr. sentenced Biechele to fifteen years in prison, with four to serve and eleven years suspended, plus three years' probation, for his role in the fire. Darigan remarked, "The greatest sentence that can be imposed on you has been imposed on you by yourself." Under this sentence, with good behavior, Biechele would be eligible for parole in September 2007. Judge Darigan deemed Biechele highly unlikely to re-offend, which was among the mitigating factors that led to his decision to impose this sentence. Biechele was released in March 2008.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The sentence drew mixed reactions in the courtroom. Many of the families believed that the punishment was just; others had hoped for a more severe sentence.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: On September 4, 2007, some families of the fire's victims expressed their support for Biechele's parole. Leland Hoisington, whose 28-year-old daughter, Abbie, was killed in the fire, told reporters, "I think they should not even bother with a hearing—just let Biechele out... I just don't find him as guilty of anything." The state parole board received approximately twenty letters, the majority of which expressed their sympathy and support for Biechele, some going as far as to describe him as a "scapegoat" with limited responsibility. Parole board chairwoman Lisa Holley told journalists of her surprise at the forgiving attitude of the families, saying, "I think the most overwhelming part of it for me was the depth of forgiveness of many of these families that have sustained such a loss."


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Dave Kane and Joanne O'Neill, parents of youngest victim Nicholas O'Neill, released their letter to the board to reporters. "In the period following this tragedy, it was Mr. Biechele, alone, who stood up and admitted responsibility for his part in this horrible event... He apologized to the families of the victims and made no attempt to mitigate his guilt," the letter said. Others pointed out that Biechele had sent handwritten letters to the families of each of the 100 victims and that he had a work release position in a local charity.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: On September 19, 2007, the Rhode Island Parole Board announced that Biechele would be released in March 2008. Biechele was released from prison on March 19, 2008. As reported by the Associated Press, he did not answer any questions and was quickly whisked away in a waiting car. Biechele's parole and probation expired in March 2011.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Following Biechele's trial, The Station's owners, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, were scheduled to receive separate trials. However, on September 21, 2006, Judge Darigan announced that the brothers had changed their pleas from "not guilty" to "no contest," thereby avoiding a trial. Michael Derderian received fifteen years in prison, with four to serve and eleven years suspended, plus three years' probation—the same sentence as Biechele. Jeffrey Derderian received 500 hours of community service.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: In a letter to the victims' families, Judge Darigan said that a trial "would only serve to further traumatize and victimize not only the loved ones of the deceased and the survivors of this fire, but the general public as well." He added that the difference in the brothers' sentences reflected their respective involvement with the purchase and installation of the flammable foam. Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch objected strenuously to the plea bargain, saying that both brothers should have received jail time and that Michael Derderian should have received more time than Biechele.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: In January 2008, the Parole Board decided to grant Michael Derderian an early release; he was scheduled to be released from prison in September 2009, but was granted his release in June 2009 for good behavior.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: As of September 2008, at least $115 million in settlement agreements had been paid, or offered, to the victims or their families by various defendants:


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Thousands of mourners attended a memorial service at St. Gregory the Great Church in Warwick on February 24, 2003, to remember those lost in the fire.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Five months after the fire, Great White started a benefit tour, saying a prayer at the beginning of each concert for the friends and families affected by the incident and giving a portion of the proceeds to the Station Family Fund. In 2003, and again in 2005, the band stated they had not performed the song "Desert Moon" since the tragedy. "I don't think I could ever sing that song again," said Russell, while guitarist Mark Kendall stated, "We haven't played that song. Things that bring back memories of that night we try to stay away from. And that song reminds us of that night. We haven't played it since then and probably never will." By August 18, 2007, however, the band had resumed performing the song.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Two years to the day after the fire, band members Russell and Kendall, along with Great White's attorney, Ed McPherson, appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" with three survivors of the fire and the father of Longley, to discuss how their lives had changed since the incident.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: On January 16, 2013, Jack Russell scheduled a benefit show in February 2013, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the fire, and announced that all proceeds would go towards the Station Fire Memorial Foundation. Upon hearing of the event, the Foundation asked that its name be removed, citing the animosity still felt by many of the survivors and surviving families. Jack Russell's management has stated that the show would be renamed and that the proceeds would go to another charity.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: The site of the fire was cleared, and a multitude of crosses were placed as memorials, left by loved ones of the deceased. On May 20, 2003, nondenominational services began to be held at the site of the fire for a number of months. Access remains open to the public, and memorial services are held each February 20.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: A permanent memorial at the site of the fire has been erected and named the Station Fire Memorial Park. In August 2016, the site was reported to have been being used as a PokeStop in Pokémon Go, to uproar from victims' families.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: In June 2003, the Station Fire Memorial Foundation (SFMF) was formed with the purpose of purchasing the property, to build and maintain a memorial. In September 2012, the owner of the land, Ray Villanova, donated the site to the SFMF. By April 2016, $1.65 million of the $2 million fundraising goal had been achieved and construction of the Station Fire Memorial Park had commenced. The memorial dedication ceremony took place on May 21, 2017.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Following the fire, Great White split into two separate groups, one led by Russell and the other by Kendall. Neither version of the band performed in any of the six New England states for over a decade. Russell's group made its first New England appearance in twelve years at a harvest festival in Mechanic Falls, Maine, in August 2015.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Following the tragedy, Governor Donald Carcieri declared a moratorium on pyrotechnic displays at venues that hold fewer than 300 people.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: Numerous violations of existing codes contributed to the calamity, triggering an immediate effort to strengthen fire code protections. Within weeks of the disaster, an emergency meeting was called for the National Fire Protection Association committee handling code for "assembly occupancies." Based upon its work, Tentative Interim Amendments (TIAs) were issued for the national standard "Life Safety Code" (NFPA 101), in July 2003. The TIAs required automatic fire sprinklers in all existing nightclubs and similar locations that accommodate more than 100 occupants, and all new locations in the same categories. The TIAs also required additional crowd manager personnel, among other things. These TIAs were subsequently incorporated into the 2006 edition of NFPA 101, along with additional exit requirements for new nightclub occupancies. It is left for each state or local jurisdiction to legally enact and enforce the current code changes.


title: The Station nightclub fire

text: As a result of this and other similar incidents, fire chiefs, fire marshals and inspectors require trained crowd managers to comply with the International Fire Code, NFPA-101 Life Safety Code, NFPA-1 Fire Code and many local ordinances that address safety in public-assembly occupancies. However, fire professionals have few choices about what training should be provided and training programs are continually updated to incorporate new technologies as well as lessons learned from actual fire experiences.


title: ARPANET

text: The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.


title: ARPANET

text: Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the network design. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.


title: ARPANET

text: The first computers were connected in 1969 and the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970. The network was declared operational in 1971. Further software development enabled remote login, file transfer and email. The network expanded rapidly and operational control passed to the Defense Communications Agency in 1975.


title: ARPANET

text: Internetworking research in the early 1970s led by Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford University and later DARPA formulated the Transmission Control Program, which incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project. As this work progressed, a protocol was developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983 after the Department of Defense made it standard for all military computer networking.


title: ARPANET

text: Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In the early 1980s, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986. The ARPANET was formally decommissioned in 1990, after partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry had assured private sector expansion and future commercialization of an expanded world-wide network, known as the Internet.


title: ARPANET

text: Historically, voice and data communications were based on methods of circuit switching, as exemplified in the traditional telephone network, wherein each telephone call is allocated a dedicated, end to end, electronic connection between the two communicating stations. The connection is established by switching systems that connected multiple intermediate call legs between these systems for the duration of the call.


title: ARPANET

text: The traditional model of the circuit-switched telecommunication network was challenged in the early 1960s by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation, who had been researching systems that could sustain operation during partial destruction, such as by nuclear war. He developed the theoretical model of "distributed adaptive message block switching". However, the telecommunication establishment rejected the development in favor of existing models. Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) independently arrived at a similar concept in 1965.


title: ARPANET

text: The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), in April 1963, in memoranda discussing the concept of the "Intergalactic Computer Network". Those ideas encompassed many of the features of the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this network concept was very important and merited development, although Licklider left ARPA before any contracts were assigned for development.


title: ARPANET

text: Sutherland and Taylor continued their interest in creating the network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to utilize computers provided by ARPA, and, in part, to quickly distribute new software and other computer science results. Taylor had three computer terminals in his office, each connected to separate computers, which ARPA was funding: one for the System Development Corporation (SDC) Q-32 in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley, and another for Multics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor recalls the circumstance: "For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So, if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C., and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley, or M.I.T., about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, 'Oh Man!', it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go. That idea is the ARPANET".


title: ARPANET

text: Donald Davies' work caught the attention of ARPANET developers at Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. He gave the first public presentation, having coined the term "packet switching", in August 1968 and incorporated it into the NPL network in England. The NPL network and ARPANET were the first two networks in the world to use packet switching. Roberts said the ARPANET and other packet switching networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design.


title: ARPANET

text: In February 1966, Bob Taylor successfully lobbied ARPA's Director Charles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project. Herzfeld redirected funds in the amount of one million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget. Taylor hired Larry Roberts as a program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office in January 1967 to work on the ARPANET.


title: ARPANET

text: Roberts asked Frank Westervelt to explore the initial design questions for a network. In April 1967, ARPA held a design session on technical standards. The initial standards for identification and authentication of users, transmission of characters, and error checking and retransmission procedures were discussed. Roberts' proposal was that all mainframe computers would connect to one another directly. The other investigators were reluctant to dedicate these computing resources to network administration. Wesley Clark proposed minicomputers should be used as an interface to create a message switching network. Roberts modified the ARPANET plan to incorporate Clark's suggestion and named the minicomputers Interface Message Processors (IMPs).


title: ARPANET

text: The plan was presented at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. Donald Davies' work on packet switching and the NPL network, presented by a colleague (Roger Scantlebury), came to the attention of the ARPA investigators at this conference. Roberts applied Davies' concept of packet switching for the ARPANET, and sought input from Paul Baran. The NPL network was using line speeds of 768 kbit/s, and the proposed line speed for the ARPANET was upgraded from 2.4 kbit/s to 50 kbit/s.


title: ARPANET

text: By mid-1968, Roberts and Barry Wessler wrote a final version of the IMP specification based on a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) report that ARPA commissioned to write detailed specifications describing the ARPANET communications network. Roberts gave a report to Taylor on 3 June, who approved it on 21 June. After approval by ARPA, a Request for Quotation (RFQ) was issued for 140 potential bidders. Most computer science companies regarded the ARPA proposal as outlandish, and only twelve submitted bids to build a network; of the twelve, ARPA regarded only four as top-rank contractors. At year's end, ARPA considered only two contractors, and awarded the contract to build the network to BBN in January 1969.


title: ARPANET

text: The initial, seven-person BBN team were much aided by the technical specificity of their response to the ARPA RFQ, and thus quickly produced the first working system. This team was led by Frank Heart and included Robert Kahn and Dave Walden. The BBN-proposed network closely followed Roberts' ARPA plan: a network composed of small computers called Interface Message Processors (or IMPs), similar to the later concept of routers, that functioned as gateways interconnecting local resources. At each site, the IMPs performed store-and-forward packet switching functions, and were interconnected with leased lines via telecommunication data sets (modems), with initial data rates of . The host computers were connected to the IMPs via custom serial communication interfaces. The system, including the hardware and the packet switching software, was designed and installed in nine months. The BBN team continued to interact with the NPL team with meetings between them taking place in the U.S. and the U.K.


title: ARPANET

text: The first-generation IMPs were built by BBN Technologies using a rugged computer version of the Honeywell DDP-516 computer, configured with of expandable magnetic-core memory, and a 16-channel Direct Multiplex Control (DMC) direct memory access unit. The DMC established custom interfaces with each of the host computers and modems. In addition to the front-panel lamps, the DDP-516 computer also features a special set of 24 indicator lamps showing the status of the IMP communication channels. Each IMP could support up to four local hosts, and could communicate with up to six remote IMPs via early Digital Signal 0 leased telephone lines. The network connected one computer in Utah with three in California. Later, the Department of Defense allowed the universities to join the network for sharing hardware and software resources.


title: ARPANET

text: Nonetheless, according to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development":


title: ARPANET

text: The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation, and frequent re-computation, of routing tables. This increased the survivability of the network in the face of significant interruption. Automatic routing was technically challenging at the time. The ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network losses, since the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks.


title: ARPANET

text: The Internet Society agrees with Herzfeld in a footnote in their online article, "A Brief History of the Internet":


title: ARPANET

text: Paul Baran, the first to put forward a theoretical model for communication using packet switching, conducted the RAND study referenced above. Though the ARPANET did not exactly share Baran's project's goal, he said his work did contribute to the development of the ARPANET. Minutes taken by Elmer Shapiro of Stanford Research Institute at the ARPANET design meeting of 9–10 October 1967 indicate that a version of Baran's routing method ("hot potato") may be used, consistent with the NPL team's proposal at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in Gatlinburg.


title: ARPANET

text: The first four nodes were designated as a testbed for developing and debugging the 1822 protocol, which was a major undertaking. While they were connected electronically in 1969, network applications were not possible until the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970 enabling the first two host-host protocols, remote login (Telnet) and file transfer (FTP) which were specified and implemented between 1969 and 1973. The network was declared operational in 1971. Network traffic began to grow once email was established at the majority of sites by around 1973.


title: ARPANET

text: The first successful host-to-host connection on the ARPANET was made between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and UCLA, by SRI programmer Bill Duvall and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969). Kline connected from UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. Kline typed the command "login," but initially the SDS 940 crashed after he typed two characters. About an hour later, after Duvall adjusted parameters on the machine, Kline tried again and successfully logged in. Hence, the first two characters successfully transmitted over the ARPANET were "lo". The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the initial four-node network was established.


title: ARPANET

text: Elizabeth Feinler created the first Resource Handbook for ARPANET in 1969 which led to the development of the ARPANET directory. The directory, built by Feinler and a team made it possible to navigate the ARPANET.


title: ARPANET

text: Roberts engaged Howard Frank to consult on the topological design of the network. Frank made recommendations to increase throughput and reduce costs in a scaled-up network. By March 1970, the ARPANET reached the East Coast of the United States, when an IMP at BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts was connected to the network. Thereafter, the ARPANET grew: 9 IMPs by June 1970 and 13 IMPs by December 1970, then 18 by September 1971 (when the network included 23 university and government hosts); 29 IMPs by August 1972, and 40 by September 1973. By June 1974, there were 46 IMPs, and in July 1975, the network numbered 57 IMPs. By 1981, the number was 213 host computers, with another host connecting approximately every twenty days.


title: ARPANET

text: Support for inter-IMP circuits of up to 230.4 kbit/s was added in 1970, although considerations of cost and IMP processing power meant this capability was not actively used.


title: ARPANET

text: Larry Roberts saw the ARPANET and NPL projects as complementary and sought in 1970 to connect them via a satellite link. Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London (UCL) was subsequently chosen in 1971 in place of NPL for the UK connection. In June 1973, a transatlantic satellite link connected ARPANET to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), via the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden, and onward via a terrestrial circuit to a TIP at UCL. UCL provided a gateway for interconnection of the ARPANET with British academic networks, the first international resource sharing network, and carried out experimental research work on international internetworking.


title: ARPANET

text: 1971 saw the start of the use of the non-ruggedized (and therefore significantly lighter) Honeywell 316 as an IMP.


title: ARPANET

text: It could also be configured as a Terminal Interface Processor (TIP), which provided terminal server support for up to 63 ASCII serial terminals through a multi-line controller in place of one of the hosts. The 316 featured a greater degree of integration than the 516, which made it less expensive and easier to maintain. The 316 was configured with 40 kB of core memory for a TIP. The size of core memory was later increased, to 32 kB for the IMPs, and 56 kB for TIPs, in 1973.


title: ARPANET

text: In 1975, BBN introduced IMP software running on the Pluribus multi-processor. These appeared in a few sites. In 1981, BBN introduced IMP software running on its own C/30 processor product.


title: ARPANET

text: In 1968, Roberts contracted with Kleinrock to measure the performance of the network and find areas for improvement. Building on his earlier work on queueing theory, Kleinrock specified mathematical models of the performance of packet-switched networks, which underpinned the development of the ARPANET as it expanded rapidly in the early 1970s.


title: ARPANET

text: ARPA was intended to fund advanced research. The ARPANET was a research project that was communications-oriented, rather than user-oriented in design. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1975, operational control of the ARPANET passed to the Defense Communications Agency. At about this time, the first ARPANET encryption devices were deployed to support classified traffic.


title: ARPANET

text: The transatlantic connectivity with NORSAR and UCL later evolved into the SATNET. The ARPANET, SATNET and PRNET were interconnected in 1977.


title: ARPANET

text: Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET).


title: ARPANET

text: The DoD made TCP/IP the standard communication protocol for all military computer networking in 1980. NORSAR and University College London left the ARPANET and began using TCP/IP over SATNET in early 1982.


title: ARPANET

text: On January 1, 1983, known as flag day, TCP/IP protocols became the standard for the ARPANET, replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol.


title: ARPANET

text: In September 1984 work was completed on restructuring the ARPANET giving U.S. military sites their own Military Network (MILNET) for unclassified defense department communications. Both networks carried unclassified information, and were connected at a small number of controlled gateways which would allow total separation in the event of an emergency. MILNET was part of the Defense Data Network (DDN).


title: ARPANET

text: Separating the civil and military networks reduced the 113-node ARPANET by 68 nodes. After MILNET was split away, the ARPANET would continue be used as an Internet backbone for researchers, but be slowly phased out.


title: ARPANET

text: In 1985, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986. NSFNET became the Internet backbone for government agencies and universities.


title: ARPANET

text: The ARPANET project was formally decommissioned in 1990. The original IMPs and TIPs were phased out as the ARPANET was shut down after the introduction of the NSFNet, but some IMPs remained in service as late as July 1990.


title: ARPANET

text: In the wake of the decommissioning of the ARPANET on 28 February 1990, Vinton Cerf wrote the following lamentation, entitled "Requiem of the ARPANET":


title: ARPANET

text: The ARPANET was related to many other research projects, which either influenced the ARPANET design, or which were ancillary projects or spun out of the ARPANET.


title: ARPANET

text: Senator Al Gore authored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill", after hearing the 1988 concept for a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock. The bill was passed on 9 December 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore called the "information superhighway".


title: ARPANET

text: Inter-networking protocols developed by ARPA and implemented on the ARPANET paved the way for future commercialization of a new world-wide network, known as the Internet.


title: ARPANET

text: Because it was never a goal for the ARPANET to support IMPs from vendors other than BBN, the IMP-to-IMP protocol and message format were not standardized. However, the IMPs did nonetheless communicate amongst themselves to perform link-state routing, to do reliable forwarding of messages, and to provide remote monitoring and management functions to ARPANET's Network Control Center. Initially, each IMP had a 6-bit identifier, and supported up to 4 hosts, which were identified with a 2-bit index. An ARPANET host address, therefore, consisted of both the port index on its IMP and the identifier of the IMP, which was written with either codice_1 notation or as a single byte; for example, the address of MIT-DMG (notable for hosting development of Zork) could be written as either codice_2 or codice_3. An upgrade in early 1976 extended the host and IMP numbering to 8-bit and 16-bit, respectively.


title: ARPANET

text: In addition to primary routing and forwarding responsibilities, the IMP ran several background programs, titled TTY, DEBUG, PARAMETER-CHANGE, DISCARD, TRACE, and STATISTICS. These were given host numbers in order to be addressed directly and provided functions independently of any connected host. For example, "TTY" allowed an on-site operator to send ARPANET packets manually via the teletype connected directly to the IMP.


title: ARPANET

text: The starting point for host-to-host communication on the ARPANET in 1969 was the 1822 protocol, which defined the transmission of messages to an IMP. The message format was designed to work unambiguously with a broad range of computer architectures. An 1822 message essentially consisted of a message type, a numeric host address, and a data field. To send a data message to another host, the transmitting host formatted a data message containing the destination host's address and the data message being sent, and then transmitted the message through the 1822 hardware interface. The IMP then delivered the message to its destination address, either by delivering it to a locally connected host, or by delivering it to another IMP. When the message was ultimately delivered to the destination host, the receiving IMP would transmit a "Ready for Next Message" (RFNM) acknowledgement to the sending, host IMP.


title: ARPANET

text: Unlike modern Internet datagrams, the ARPANET was designed to reliably transmit 1822 messages, and to inform the host computer when it loses a message; the contemporary IP is unreliable, whereas the TCP is reliable. Nonetheless, the 1822 protocol proved inadequate for handling multiple connections among different applications residing in a host computer. This problem was addressed with the Network Control Protocol (NCP), which provided a standard method to establish reliable, flow-controlled, bidirectional communications links among different processes in different host computers. The NCP interface allowed application software to connect across the ARPANET by implementing higher-level communication protocols, an early example of the "protocol layering" concept later incorporated in the OSI model.


title: ARPANET

text: NCP was developed under the leadership of Stephen D. Crocker, then a graduate student at UCLA. Crocker created and led the Network Working Group (NWG) which was made up of a collection of graduate students at universities and research laboratories sponsored by ARPA to carry out the development of the ARPANET and the software for the host computers that supported applications. The various application protocols such as TELNET for remote time-sharing access, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and rudimentary electronic mail protocols were developed and eventually ported to run over the TCP/IP protocol suite or replaced in the case of email by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.


title: ARPANET

text: Steve Crocker formed a "Networking Working Group" in 1969 with Vint Cerf, who also joined an International Networking Working Group in 1972. These groups considered how to interconnect packet switching networks with different specifications, that is, internetworking. Stephen J. Lukasik directed DARPA to focus on internetworking research in the early 1970s. Research led by Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford University and later DARPA resulted in the formulation of the Transmission Control Program, which incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. Its specification was written by Cerf with Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December 1974 (). The following year, testing began through concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN and University College London. At first a monolithic design, the software was redesigned as a modular protocol stack in version 3 in 1978. Version 4 was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983, replacing NCP. The development of the complete Internet protocol suite by 1989, as outlined in and , and partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry laid the foundation for the adoption of TCP/IP as a comprehensive protocol suite as the core component of the emerging Internet.


title: ARPANET

text: NCP provided a standard set of network services that could be shared by several applications running on a single host computer. This led to the evolution of "application protocols" that operated, more or less, independently of the underlying network service, and permitted independent advances in the underlying protocols.


title: ARPANET

text: The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan and published as on 16 April 1971. By 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification had been defined () and implemented, enabling file transfers over the ARPANET.


title: ARPANET

text: In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, of BBN sent the first network e-mail (, ). Within a few years, e-mail came to represent a very large part of the overall ARPANET traffic.


title: ARPANET

text: The Network Voice Protocol (NVP) specifications were defined in 1977 (), and implemented. But, because of technical shortcomings, conference calls over the ARPANET never worked well; the contemporary Voice over Internet Protocol (packet voice) was decades away.


title: ARPANET

text: The Purdy Polynomial hash algorithm was developed for the ARPANET to protect passwords in 1971 at the request of Larry Roberts, head of ARPA at that time. It computed a polynomial of degree 2 + 17 modulo the 64-bit prime "p" = 2 − 59. The algorithm was later used by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to hash passwords in the VMS operating system and is still being used for this purpose.


title: ARPANET

text: Leonard Kleinrock claims to have committed the first illegal act on the Internet, having sent a request for return of his electric razor after a meeting in England in 1973. At the time, use of the ARPANET for personal reasons was unlawful.


title: ARPANET

text: In 1978, against the rules of the network, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent out the first mass email to approximately 400 potential clients via the ARPANET. He claims that this resulted in $13 million worth of sales in DEC products, and highlighted the potential of email marketing.


title: Swan

text: Swans are birds of the family Anatidae within the genus Cygnus. The swans' closest relatives include the geese and ducks. Swans are grouped with the closely related geese in the subfamily Anserinae where they form the tribe Cygnini. Sometimes, they are considered a distinct subfamily, Cygninae. There are six living and many extinct species of swan; in addition, there is a species known as the coscoroba swan which is no longer considered one of the true swans. Swans usually mate for life, although "divorce" sometimes occurs, particularly following nesting failure, and if a mate dies, the remaining swan will take up with another. The number of eggs in each clutch ranges from three to eight.


title: Swan

text: The English word "swan", akin to the German , Dutch and Swedish , is derived from Indo-European root "" ('to sound, to sing'). Young swans are known as "cygnets" or as "swanlings"; the former derives via Old French or (diminutive suffix et 'little') from the Latin word , a variant form of 'swan', itself from the Greek , a word of the same meaning. An adult male is a "cob", from Middle English (leader of a group); an adult female is a "pen".


title: Swan

text: Swans are the largest extant members of the waterfowl family Anatidae, and are among the largest flying birds. The largest living species, including the mute swan, trumpeter swan, and whooper swan, can reach a length of over and weigh over . Their wingspans can be over . Compared to the closely related geese, they are much larger and have proportionally larger feet and necks. Adults also have a patch of unfeathered skin between the eyes and bill. The sexes are alike in plumage, but males are generally bigger and heavier than females. The biggest species of swan ever was the extinct "Cygnus falconeri", a flightless giant swan known from fossils found on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Sicily. Its disappearance is thought to have resulted from extreme climate fluctuations or the arrival of superior predators and competitors.


title: Swan

text: The Northern Hemisphere species of swan have pure white plumage, but the Southern Hemisphere species are mixed black and white. The Australian black swan ("Cygnus atratus") is completely black except for the white flight feathers on its wings; the chicks of black swans are light grey. The South American black-necked swan has a white body with a black neck.


title: Swan

text: Swans' legs are normally a dark blackish grey colour, except for the South American black-necked swan, which has pink legs. Bill colour varies: the four subarctic species have black bills with varying amounts of yellow, and all the others are patterned red and black. Although birds do not have teeth, swans, like other Anatidae, have beaks with serrated edges that look like small jagged 'teeth' as part of their beaks used for catching and eating aquatic plants and algae, but also molluscs, small fish, frogs, and worms. In the mute swan and black-necked swan, both sexes have a fleshy lump at the base of their bills on the upper mandible, known as knob, which is larger in males, and is condition dependent, changing seasonally.


title: Swan

text: Swans are generally found in temperate environments, rarely occurring in the tropics. A group of swans is called a bevy or a wedge in flight. Four (or five) species occur in the Northern Hemisphere, one species is found in Australia, one extinct species was found in New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, and one species is distributed in southern South America. They are absent from tropical Asia, Central America, northern South America and the entirety of Africa. One species, the mute swan, has been introduced to North America, Australia and New Zealand.


title: Swan

text: Several species are migratory, either wholly or partly so. The mute swan is a partial migrant, being resident over areas of Western Europe but wholly migratory in Eastern Europe and Asia. The whooper swan and tundra swan are wholly migratory, and the trumpeter swans are almost entirely migratory. There is some evidence that the black-necked swan is migratory over part of its range, but detailed studies have not established whether these movements are long or short range migration.


title: Swan

text: Swans feed in water and on land. They are almost entirely herbivorous, although they may eat small amounts of aquatic animals. In the water, food is obtained by up-ending or dabbling, and their diet is composed of the roots, tubers, stems and leaves of aquatic and submerged plants.


title: Swan

text: Swans famously mate for life, and typically bond even before they reach sexual maturity. Trumpeter swans, for example, who can live as long as 24 years and only start breeding at the age of 4–7, form monogamous pair bonds as early as 20 months. "Divorce", though rare, does occur; one study of mute swans showing a 3% rate for pairs that breed successfully and 9% for pairs that do not. The pair bonds are maintained year-round, even in gregarious and migratory species like the tundra swan, which congregate in large flocks in the wintering grounds. Swans' nests are on the ground near water and about a metre across. Unlike many other ducks and geese, the male helps with the nest construction, and will also take turns incubating the eggs. Alongside the whistling ducks, swans are the only anatids that will do this. Average egg size (for the mute swan) is 113×74 mm, weighing 340 g, in a clutch size of 4 to 7, and an incubation period of 34–45 days.


title: Swan

text: Swans are highly protective of their nests. They will viciously attack anything that they perceive as a threat to their chicks, including humans. One man was suspected to have drowned in such an attack. Swans' intraspecific aggressive behaviour is shown more frequent than interspecific behaviour for food and shelter. The aggression with other species is shown more in Bewick's swans.


title: Swan

text: Evidence suggests that the genus "Cygnus" evolved in Europe or western Eurasia during the Miocene, spreading all over the Northern Hemisphere until the Pliocene. When the southern species branched off is not known. The mute swan apparently is closest to the Southern Hemisphere "Cygnus"; its habits of carrying the neck curved (not straight) and the wings fluffed (not flush) as well as its bill color and knob indicate that its closest living relative is the black swan. Given the biogeography and appearance of the subgenus "Olor" it seems likely that these are of a more recent origin, as evidence shows by their modern ranges (which were mostly uninhabitable during the last ice age) and great similarity between the taxa.


title: Swan

text: The coscoroba swan ("Coscoroba coscoroba") from South America, the only species in its genus, is apparently not a true swan. Its phylogenetic position is not fully resolved; it is in some aspects more similar to geese and shelducks.


title: Swan

text: The fossil record of the genus "Cygnus" is quite impressive, although allocation to the subgenera is often tentative; as indicated above, at least the early forms probably belong to the "C. olor" – Southern Hemisphere lineage, whereas the Pleistocene taxa from North America would be placed in "Olor". A number of prehistoric species have been described, mostly from the Northern Hemisphere. In the Mediterranean, the leg bones of the giant swan ("C. falconeri") were found on the islands of Malta and Sicily; it may have been over 2 meters from tail to bill, which was taller (though not heavier) than the contemporary local dwarf elephants ("Palaeoloxodon falconeri").


title: Swan

text: The supposed fossil swans ""Cygnus" bilinicus" and ""Cygnus" herrenthalsi" were, respectively, a stork and some large bird of unknown affinity (due to the bad state of preservation of the referred material).


title: Swan

text: Many of the cultural aspects refer to the mute swan of Europe. Perhaps the best known story about a swan is the fable "The Ugly Duckling". Swans are often a symbol of love or fidelity because of their long-lasting, apparently monogamous relationships. See Wagner's famous swan-related operas "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal".


title: Swan

text: Swan meat was regarded as a luxury food in England in the reign of Elizabeth I. A recipe for baked swan survives from that time: "To bake a Swan Scald it and take out the bones, and parboil it, then season it very well with Pepper, Salt and Ginger, then lard it, and put it in a deep Coffin of Rye Paste with store of Butter, close it and bake it very well, and when it is baked, fill up the Vent-hole with melted Butter, and so keep it; serve it in as you do the Beef-Pie."


title: Swan

text: The "Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady", a religious confraternity which existed in 's-Hertogenbosch in the late Middle Ages, had 'sworn members', also called 'swan-brethren' because they used to donate a swan for the yearly banquet.


title: Swan

text: Swans feature strongly in mythology. In Greek mythology, the story of Leda and the Swan recounts that Helen of Troy was conceived in a union of Zeus disguised as a swan and Leda, Queen of Sparta.


title: Swan

text: Other references in classical literature include the belief that, upon death, the mute swan would sing beautifully—hence the phrase swan song.


title: Swan

text: The mute swan is also one of the sacred birds of Apollo, whose associations stem both from the nature of the bird as a symbol of light, as well as the notion of a "swan song". The god is often depicted riding a chariot pulled by or composed of swans in his ascension from Delos.


title: Swan

text: In the second century, the Roman poet Juvenal made a sarcastic reference to a good woman being a "rare bird, as rare on earth as a black swan" (black swans being completely unknown in the Northern Hemisphere until Dutch explorers reached Australia in the 1600s), from which comes the Latin phrase "" (rare bird).


title: Swan

text: The Black Swan theory originates from Juvenal’s reference, leading to the black swan as a metaphor for something that could, in theory, exist, but does not. After the "discovery" of actual black swans, this became a metaphor or analogy for something, typically an unexpected event or outlier, that has an unforeseen significance.


title: Swan

text: The Irish legend of the Children of Lir is about a stepmother transforming her children into swans for 900 years.


title: Swan

text: In the legend "The Wooing of Etain", the king of the Sidhe (subterranean-dwelling, supernatural beings) transforms himself and the most beautiful woman in Ireland, Etain, into swans to escape from the king of Ireland and Ireland's armies. The swan has recently been depicted on an Irish commemorative coin.


title: Swan

text: Swans are also present in Irish literature in the poetry of W.B. Yeats. "The Wild Swans at Coole" has a heavy focus on the mesmerising characteristics of the swan. Yeats also recounts the myth of Leda and the Swan in the poem of the same name.


title: Swan

text: In Norse mythology, there are two swans that drink from the sacred Well of Urd in the realm of Asgard, home of the gods. According to the Prose Edda, the water of this well is so pure and holy that all things that touch it turn white, including this original pair of swans and all others descended from them. The poem "Volundarkvida", or the "Lay of Volund", part of the Poetic Edda, also features swan maidens.


title: Swan

text: In the Finnish epic "Kalevala", a swan lives in the Tuoni river located in Tuonela, the underworld realm of the dead. According to the story, whoever killed a swan would perish as well. Jean Sibelius composed the "Lemminkäinen Suite" based on the "Kalevala", with the second piece entitled "Swan of Tuonela" "(Tuonelan joutsen)". Today, five flying swans are the symbol of the Nordic countries; the whooper swan ("Cygnus cygnus") is the national bird of Finland; and the mute swan is the national bird of Denmark.


title: Swan

text: The ballet "Swan Lake" is among the most canonic of classical ballets. Based on the 1875–76 score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the most promulgated choreographic version was created by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (1895), the premiere of which was danced by the Imperial Ballet at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The ballet's lead dual roles of Odette (white swan) / Odile (black swan) represent good and evil, and are among the most challenging roles created in Romantic classical ballet. The ballet is in the repertories of ballet companies around the world.


title: Swan

text: A swan is one of the attributes of St. Hugh of Lincoln, based on the story of a swan who was devoted to him.


title: Swan

text: In Latin American literature, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) consecrated the swan as a symbol of artistic inspiration by drawing attention to the constancy of swan imagery in Western culture, beginning with the rape of Leda and ending with Wagner's "Lohengrin". Darío's most famous poem in this regard is "Blasón – "Coat of Arms"" (1896), and his use of the swan made it a symbol for the Modernismo poetic movement that dominated Spanish language poetry from the 1880s until the First World War. Such was the dominance of Modernismo in Spanish language poetry that the Mexican poet Enrique González Martínez attempted to announce the end of Modernismo with a sonnet provocatively entitled, "Tuércele el cuello al cisne – "Wring the Swan's Neck"" (1910).


title: Swan

text: Swans are revered in Hinduism, and are compared to saintly persons whose chief characteristic is to be in the world without getting attached to it, just as a swan's feather does not get wet although it is in water. The Sanskrit word for swan is "hamsa" and the "Raja Hamsam" or the Royal Swan is the vehicle of Devi Saraswati, which symbolises the "Sattva Guna" or purity par excellence. The swan, if offered a mixture of milk and water, is said to be able to drink the milk alone. Therefore, Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, is seen riding the swan because the swan thus symbolizes "Viveka", i.e. prudence and discrimination between the good and the bad or between the eternal and the transient. This is seen as a great quality, as shown by this Sanskrit verse:


title: Swan

text: It is mentioned several times in the Vedic literature, and persons who have attained great spiritual capabilities are sometimes called Paramahamsa ("Supreme Swan") on account of their spiritual grace and ability to travel between various spiritual worlds. In the Vedas, swans are said to reside in the summer on Lake Manasarovar and migrate to Indian lakes for the winter. They are believed to possess some powers, such as the ability to eat pearls.


title: Swan

text: Swans are intimately associated with the divine twins in Indo-European religions, and it is thought that in Proto-Indo-European times, swans were a solar symbol associated with the divine twins and the original Indo-European sun goddess.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot, and businessman. In 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space and, in 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon at age 47.


title: Alan Shepard

text: A graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Shepard saw action with the surface navy during World War II. He became a naval aviator in 1946, and a test pilot in 1950. He was selected as one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959, and in May 1961 he made the first crewed Project Mercury flight, Mercury-Redstone 3, in a spacecraft he named "Freedom 7". His craft entered space, but was not capable of achieving orbit. He became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space, and the first space traveler to manually control the orientation of his craft. In the final stages of Project Mercury, Shepard was scheduled to pilot the Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10), which was planned as a three-day mission. He named Mercury Spacecraft 15B "Freedom 7 II" in honor of his first spacecraft, but the mission was canceled.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Shepard was designated as the commander of the first crewed Project Gemini mission, but was grounded in October 1963 due to Ménière's disease, an inner-ear ailment that caused episodes of extreme dizziness and nausea. This was surgically corrected in 1968, and in 1971, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, piloting the Apollo Lunar Module "Antares". At age 47, he became the fifth, the oldest, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to walk on the Moon. During the mission, he hit two golf balls on the lunar surface.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Shepard was Chief of the Astronaut Office from November 1963 to August 1969 (the approximate period of his grounding), and from June 1971 until his retirement from the United States Navy and NASA on August 1, 1974. He was promoted to rear admiral on August 25, 1971, the first astronaut to reach that rank.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was born on November 18, 1923, in Derry, New Hampshire, to Alan Bartlett Shepard Sr. and Pauline Renza Shepard (). He had a younger sister, Pauline, who was known as Polly. He was one of many famous descendants of "Mayflower" passenger Richard Warren. He was related to Scottish emigrants from Berneray in the Outer Hebrides, through the Shepard line. Alan Bartlett Shepard Sr., known as Bart, worked in the Derry National Bank, owned by Shepard's grandfather. Bart joined the National Guard in 1915 and served in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. He remained in the National Guard between the wars, and was recalled to active duty during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Shepard attended Adams School in Derry, where his academic performance impressed his teachers; he skipped the sixth grade, and proceeded to middle school at Oak Street School in Derry, where he skipped the eighth grade. He achieved the Boy Scouts of America rank of First Class Scout. In 1936, he went to the Pinkerton Academy, a private school in Derry that his father had attended and where his grandfather had been a trustee. He completed grades 9 to 12 there. Fascinated by flight, he created a model airplane club at the academy, and his Christmas present in 1938 was a flight in a Douglas DC-3. The following year he began cycling to Manchester Airfield, where he would do odd jobs in exchange for the occasional ride in an airplane or informal flying lesson.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Shepard graduated from Pinkerton Academy in 1940. Because World War II was already raging in Europe, his father wanted him to join the Army. Shepard chose the Navy instead. He easily passed the entrance exam to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1940, but at sixteen was too young to enter that year. The Navy sent him to the Admiral Farragut Academy, a prep school for the Naval Academy, from which he graduated with the Class of 1941. Tests administered at Farragut indicated an IQ of 145, but his grades were mediocre.


title: Alan Shepard

text: At Annapolis, Shepard enjoyed aquatic sports. He was a keen and competitive sailor, winning several races, including a regatta held by the Annapolis Yacht Club. He learned to sail all the types of boats the academy owned, up to and including , a schooner. He also participated in swimming, and rowed with the eight. During his Christmas break in 1942, he went to Principia College to be with his sister, who was unable to go home owing to wartime travel restrictions. There he met Louise Brewer, whose parents were pensioners on the du Pont family estate, and, like Renza Shepard, were devout Christian Scientists. Owing to the war, the usual four-year course at Annapolis was cut short by a year. He graduated with the Class of 1945 on June 6, 1944, ranked 463rd out of 915, and was commissioned as an ensign and awarded a Bachelor of Science degree. The following month he became secretly engaged to Louise.


title: Alan Shepard

text: After a month of classroom instruction in aviation, Shepard was posted to a destroyer, , in August 1944; it was US Navy policy that aviation candidates should first have some service at sea. At the time the destroyer was deployed on active service in the Pacific Ocean. Shepard joined it when it returned to the naval base at Ulithi on October 30. After just two days at sea "Cogswell" helped rescue 172 sailors from the cruiser , which had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, then escorted the crippled ship back to Ulithi. The ship was buffeted by Typhoon Cobra in December 1944, a storm in which three other destroyers went down, and battled kamikazes in the invasion of Lingayen Gulf in January 1945.


title: Alan Shepard

text: "Cogswell" returned to the United States for an overhaul in February 1945. Shepard was given three weeks' leave, in which time he and Louise decided to marry. The ceremony took place on March 3, 1945, in St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in Wilmington, Delaware. His father, Bart, served as his best man. The newlyweds had only a brief time together before Shepard rejoined "Cogswell" at the Long Beach Navy Yard on April 5, 1945. After the war, they had two children, both daughters: Laura, born in 1947, and Julie, born in 1951. Following the death of Louise's sister in 1956, they raised her five-year-old niece, Judith Williams—whom they renamed Alice to avoid confusion with Julie—as their own, although they never adopted her. They eventually had six grandchildren.


title: Alan Shepard

text: On Shepard's second cruise with "Cogswell", he was appointed a gunnery officer, responsible for the 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns on the ship's bow. They engaged kamikazes in the Battle of Okinawa, where the ship served in the dangerous role of a radar picket. The job of the radar pickets was to warn the fleet of incoming kamikazes, but because they were often the first ships sighted by incoming Japanese aircraft, they were also the most likely ships to be attacked. "Cogswell" performed this duty from May 27, 1945, until June 26, when it rejoined Task Force 38. The ship also participated in the Allied naval bombardments of Japan, and was present in Tokyo Bay for the Surrender of Japan in September 1945. Shepard returned to the United States later that month.


title: Alan Shepard

text: In November 1945, Shepard arrived at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, where he commenced basic flight training on January 7, 1946. He was an average student, and for a time faced being "bilged" (dropped) from flight training and reassigned to the surface navy. To make up for this, he took private lessons at a local civilian flying school—something the Navy frowned on—earning a civil pilot's license. His flying skills gradually improved, and by early 1947 his instructors rated him above average. He was sent to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for advanced training. His final test was six perfect landings on the carrier . The following day, he received his naval aviator wings, which his father pinned on his chest.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Shepard was assigned to Fighter Squadron 42 (VF-42), flying the Vought F4U Corsair. The squadron was nominally based on the aircraft carrier , but the ship was being overhauled at the time Shepard arrived, and in the meantime the squadron was based at Naval Air Station Norfolk in Virginia. He departed on his first cruise, of the Caribbean, on "Franklin D. Roosevelt" with VF-42 in 1948. Most of the aviators were, like Shepard, on their first assignment. Those who were not were given the opportunity to qualify for night landings on a carrier, a dangerous maneuver, especially in a Corsair, which had to bank sharply on approach. Shepard managed to persuade his squadron commander to allow him to qualify as well. After briefly returning to Norfolk, the carrier set out on a nine-month tour of the Mediterranean Sea. He earned a reputation for carousing and chasing women. He also instituted a ritual of, whenever he could, calling Louise at 17:00 (her time) each day.


title: Alan Shepard

text: Normally sea duty alternated with periods of duty ashore. In 1950, Shepard was selected to attend the United States Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. As a test pilot he conducted high-altitude tests to obtain information about the light and air masses at different altitudes over North America; carrier suitability certification of the McDonnell F2H Banshee; experiments with the Navy's new in-flight refueling system; and tests of the angled flight deck. He narrowly avoided being court-martialed by the station commander, Rear Admiral Alfred M. Pride, after looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and making low passes over the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, and the base; but Shepard's superiors, John Hyland and Robert M. Elder, interceded on his behalf.