Harvard University

"Under these circumstances, my parents decided to send me overseas. My third uncle, Mr. Zhang Sihou, was then a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and he chose for me to apply to Harvard University. Why choose Harvard? First, Harvard is a world-famous institution; second, Harvard is in Boston, and my third uncle could look after me nearby. But Boston also had another world-famous school, one that specialized in science and engineering: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why, after my father had clearly told my third uncle that I was going to study science and engineering, did my third uncle still not choose MIT for me? About this, I later asked my third uncle. He smiled and said, “The you I knew was the you at Nankai in Chongqing, when you loved the humanities. Later I heard you wanted to study business. It wasn’t until you got to Hong Kong that I heard you wanted to study science and engineering. I thought you should have time to gradually establish your own interests. Rather than rush you into the very specialized MIT, it would be better to let you have a buffer period at Harvard. Besides, Harvard’s science and engineering are also top-notch—it’s just not as specialized as MIT.”"

"At eighteen I entered Harvard University in the United States. Among more than a thousand classmates with blue eyes, I was the only Chinese. For a whole year I had only American friends, used only English, and absorbed Western culture like a sponge. Even now, several decades later, that year at Harvard remains the most unforgettable and most exciting year of my life."

"Norman Abramson left his job teaching engineering and physics at Harvard University in the late 1960s to accept a job at the University of Hawaii that put him within walking distance of the ocean. Abramson loved surfing, but he made his reputation riding airwaves. As head of a campus research project, Abramson created a wireless network based on radio signals that solved a local communications problem with University of Hawaii computers scattered among its campuses on four islands. Underwater telephone cables connecting the islands were expensive and not always reliable. Abramson’s solution was ALOHAnet, a network of software and equipment that radiated coded messages over radio signals. The advent of computers and digital communications made it possible to modulate radio waves, once shaped to convey the dashes and dots of Morse code, to relay digital bits known as 1s and 0s. This binary code was so efficiently processed that it was possible to relay data at faster speeds. Ham radio enthusiasts had tinkered with radio-based digital data transmissions for years, but radio channels were scarce and the capacity for conveying large blocks of data over long distances was limited. The biggest problem with traditional analog radio channels was that they were so busy and noisy that data messages were at risk of being lost or so corrupted they were unreadable. ALOHAnet solved these problems by dividing data into coded packets. Each packet held a portion of the user’s message and instructions about the destination and sequence in which the packet was to be arranged with other parts of the message when they arrived. If a channel was busy, packets were programmed to wait, like cars obeying a red light. As soon as a channel opened—green light—some packets continued their journey, a process that was repeated until all packets arrived. In the early 1970s, long before most people had heard of the Internet, Abramson and his colleagues were sending and receiving e-mails from various university campuses on their wireless network.4 It would be years before the concept was commercialized."