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[Music]
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All right, welcome back to Waveform. We got another special long form episode for you today. And this one is a long
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time coming. Um, we actually did that I can and the seven keys of the internet episode way back in November. We
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published it in December. Turns out we did so much research for that episode, we ended up with two stories. Um, we
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tried to slam both of those stories into one story and it just became too tail
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endy, tangental, so we just decided we were going to cut it up into two. And um, now almost 6 months later, we have
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the second part. Welcome to part two. Welcome to part two. If you haven't seen Ian and the seven keys of the internet, I do recommend going to watch that. Um,
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there's a lot of relevant stuff. They're not directly related, but they are tangentially related. So, you should go watch that either before or after this
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episode. Uh but yeah, you guys ready to get started? I am ready. I'm trying to recall as much from that as possible
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just so I have that context. But yes, fully I almost forgot about this to be honest. The most context you need is
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David never ordered that pizza at the end of Yeah, that was a cliffhanger. Spoiler for those of you who didn't yet
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see that episode. The pizza was never ordered. Yeah, this is But we do own that pizza now. This is a lot more like
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a prequel rather than a prequel. It's the lore. Star Wars, you know, like
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backwards. We're about We're This is about to be like the Phantom Menace of Waveform podcast. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. It's about to be
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the Attack of the Clones of Waveform Podcast. I like that. I like that. All
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right. So, if you guys could take a guess, uh, where do you think that our story begins today?
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David brainstorming something and four hours later
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making up a different story. I should say, when do you think our story begins? Oh, the second you ordered that pizza.
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As has been the case for the at least two other long form podcast that we've done so far. Our story begins on October
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4th, 1957. CBS television presents a special report
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on Sputnik 1, the Soviet space satellite. Now, on October 4th, 1957, Russia launched the Sputnik satellite
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into orbit, right? And I think we were both surprised and also completely unsurprised that this is where the story
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begins. Uh because as it turns out, an insane amount of the technology that we use today comes from the United States
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reaction to that one day. So when the United States realized that Russia had put that satellite into space, it like
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went on full-on panic mode, right? Because it meant that there was another world superpower that was ahead of the
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United States technologically. And uh if you know the United States, you know that that's not going to fly. Can't just
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sit around. No, no, they don't they don't like that. I mean, the US was already freaking out about needing to
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have the strongest military around. And this was also 10 years into the cold war which lasted 45 years. So when they
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threw that satellite into space they were like oh god oh god we are very behind here. Um so if you remember from
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any of the other space episodes that we did like the James web space telescope episode or the new space race episode.
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What did the US do immediately after Sputnik got launched into orbit? I think we started working on our own launches.
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Uh didn't we put man on the moon like 15 years later? Yeah. Like the 60s. Yeah. So, what organization did they launch to
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do that? Oh, NASA. Well, that's where you're wrong, suckers. Oh,
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okay. Got him. So, like technically, yes, that is what happened. But what actually happened is
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that 4 months after Sputnik launched, the US spun up something called ARPA, which is the Advanced Research Projects
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Agency. So, basically, if Russia was going to be pumping millions of dollars into missile, satellite, and space
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technology, the US was going to do that, too, right?
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DARPA shaping the future. Creating opportunities for new capabilities
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strategically,
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tactically. DARPA takes on the most difficult technical challenges for the Department of Defense. So, you said
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ARPA, but that's a DARPA, right? So, you might have noticed that um it's because
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it switched back and forth between DARPA and ARPA like a million times. Okay. Uh it was ARPA and then DARPA and then ARPA
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like a few times and that's because it kept getting pulled in and out of the Department of Defense. Okay. Yeah. So,
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the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was DARPA and that advanced research projects agency was ARPA. Just
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saying I like DARPA better. Defense wins. That's true. That's true.
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Uh yeah. Okay. Anyway, so the actual space program that the US wanted to launch was ARPA uh instead of NASA,
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right? Just a couple months after that satellite went into space. But pretty quickly the US realized that it didn't
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have a lot of public support for war, right? Like putting a ton of of public
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funding into a military program was extremely unpopular. This was right off
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the heels of World War II. and add that to the fact that the US was kind of at this time seen as this like aggressive
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colonial nation. And they kind of realized that it was going to be a lot easier to fund a missile program if they
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could make it public facing and sciency and fun, right? So a couple months later, like literally a couple months
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after they founded DARPA, they founded NASA. We have one of the most challenging assignments that has ever
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been given to modern man. expansion of human knowledge about space. We've been
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assigned the mission of launching a scientific Earth satellite. 5 4 3 2 It's
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crazy how everyone from the 50s had the same voice. I know. And I wish I had that voice. The recognizable voice. I
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want the radio voice from the 50s. I'm David Al and brought to And this is way for
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coming up. Okay. Anyway,
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so so yeah, so NASA is doing serious research, right? They're doing serious rocket science. It's still obviously
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related to the what the US wanted to achieve with DARPA, but it was also more focused on the sciency aspect of it
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because, you know, that's what the public was into at the time. But the nice thing is that when you're trying to
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build missile defense and anti-air systems, building things for NASA is basically the same thing. M you're
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basically doing what you wanted to do with DARPA, but you're just doing it in a public facing way, right? But it's
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still not exactly what they wanted to do, right? Because the specific things that they wanted to be building were like literally anti-aircraft,
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anti-missile like detection systems, like nuclear detection systems, all this stuff. They really wanted ARPA, but
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within a few years of that, all of the civilian space programs of this new agency were being transferred to NASA.
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Right? So DARPA had existed, but everything was being funneled into NASA. and all of a sudden um they basically
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didn't have a lot of people working at DARPA anymore and they didn't really have any funding. So you end up with
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this extremely lean no money group and they became a high-risk highreward and
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far out research program. They were kind of happening behind the scenes. Um and the point of DARPA became to surprise
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other nations before they were surprised. So basically be the next Sputnneck. Mhm. NASA was spun out, the
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military side was spun out and a few years later in the early60s
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uh one part of that agency focused on uh application of computers and uh how to
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make big leaps forward. So that was Steve Crocker. Uh he's super pivotal in the early standardization of a lot of
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the stuff we're going to talk about later, but he was the one that we contacted for this story originally.
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that office that was created funded uh advanced work in computer science u time
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sharing systems artificial intelligence advanced graphics uh new new architectures multiprocessors and so
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forth big stuff at the time so since all those funds were from DARPA were getting funneled to NASA and you know since it
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was this big fund public-f facing agency it was getting a lot of support and DARPA had no money so but everyone knew
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that DARPA was really important right because like especially all the people in the government were like, "We still need to be putting resources into this."
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Um, and the first director of DARPA apparently left a $160,000 job at GE for
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an $18,000 job at at DARPA. Dang. Do do you know how much money that is today?
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Like $160,000 job. This might be double. That was $1.7 million today. Yeah.
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Jesus. Insane. Uh anyway, so when you can't employ that many people because you don't have that much money, like
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that director was getting paid $18,000 a year, uh maybe a smarter idea is to just
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sponsor all the smartest people in the world. You know, there's a famous quote that like all the smartest people don't
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work for you. And so what they did was they decided to sponsor universities
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instead. But here's a problem, right? These really big computers that researchers wanted to use, they were
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like really, really expensive. So there weren't a lot of them and it was really inefficient to have all these
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amazing state-of-the-art computers at some universities that were being sponsored by DARPA but not be able to
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use those resources at other universities for the same research purposes. And so they were all kind of
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working on this these different advanced computer science projects but they were in their own little isolated versions of
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the future. They weren't talking to each other. And I guess a critical thing to understand is that of course at each of
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our places we had already been selected and been working on advanced computer science activities. So we were in some
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sense living in the future in each of our little worlds. So pretty much they just realized that their resources were
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not being as efficient as possible because yeah essentially you're just doing the same work in multiple
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different areas. Right. Okay. You have all these supercomputers at these universities and it's like they're not talking to each other. Starting to think
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we're finding the connection to the episode. What if we could like connect
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all of them together? Maybe in some sort of like interconnected network of computers
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would be would that be like a good place to if you had that idea 60 years ago, you'd be considered a genius and you
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would have only gotten paid $18,000 a year. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So they obviously wanted to connect all these
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computers together because it became clear very quickly that there was a lot that you could do if you connected all
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of these supercomputers together. You could do time sharing like we talked about in the last episode. You could be
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sharing information so you weren't doing redundant research. It made a lot of sense. So in 1966 there was a proposal
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for the ARPANET right the advanced research projects agency network uh
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which was a network of computers that would connect all these different universities and research institutions and would allow the researchers to
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access the computing power of each other's supercomputers share information all this kind of stuff you're basically
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doing like um game streaming like right now game streaming is like you're using a computer somewhere else someone else's
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processing power Right. To do your own research. I mean game, right? I mean
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research. Mom, I'm doing research. I'm doing research. Like, do you guys um do you guys remember folding at home? Have
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you ever done folding at home? No. No. I think it's called origami. Folding at home.
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Folding at home is like a genetics project that was very popular where you could like while you were sleeping use
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your computer's computing power to do research for the World Genomics Association. Sounds like the the
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scientific version of mining Bitcoin when you're sleeping. You're going to go to Bit Torrent. It's pretty much the
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same thing as mining Bitcoin actually. I see. Anyway, uh same idea. Just real quick before you go any further for for
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my own sake, what approximately what year are we at right now? Because like a lot has happened. This started around
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like the 50s and yeah, so the ARPATE was proposed in 1966. Okay. So there was a decent amount of time between ARPA being
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spun up and this network being proposed, right? That's kind of a theme throughout this episode is there are large chunks
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of time between these new technologies being invented and actually getting rolled out. like you're going to see the timeline gets kind of wild, but this was
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actually pretty good timing uh because this guy that was working on the development of the ARPANET at a US
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government think tank as well as a separate guy in London came up with an idea called packet switching. Do you guys know what packet switching is?
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I've heard the term, but if you asked me to explain it, I would not be able to. Okay. I was going to say it sounds like one of those things where someone's
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like, "You're a nerd. What's packet switching?" I was like, "Ah, you wouldn't understand that." But I actually have no idea what that means.
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Well, so before packet switching, everything was circuit switched, which means that you had to have a direct line connection from like one node to
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another. So, think about an operator that would connect your phones together. What he was actually doing was literally
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switching the circuits. May I help you? Yeah, operator, uh, where's the nearest telephone?
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You're speaking from the nearest telephone. You were literally connected directly to the other phone to think
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about, which is insane, right? Yeah, that's really insane. Um, but a packet switch network is pretty different. So,
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basically the data that we have on our computers that we're sending to each other can be broken into packets. And a
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packet usually is like, you know, eight bits or something, a bite of data, some sort of data and it gets broken into
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these packets and set sent through various routes in the network depending on which which like line has the least
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load. So, usually on a circuit switch network, you have to go directly to each other. But now, you kind of learn about
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this in like queuing theory and computer science 101. If you have all of these different lines, there's going to be
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different amounts of load on each line, right? So, if you break your data up into a bunch of packets, each of those
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packets can go on a different line that has the least amount of traffic. Mhm. So, you can see it like eight lanes on a
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freeway, right? I was just going to say, I wish I could do this driving to work in the morning. Yeah, if there were
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Yeah, ways is just packet switching to cars, right? Funny enough, there's actually a thing in uh traffic theory
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where this is like it it's crazy. Traffic theory is very similar to um to
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like liquid flow theory, fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics where adding more lanes doesn't actually make traffic go faster.
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So, it's not the perfect analogy, but imagine you're at the grocery store, right? And you want to make hamburgers for dinner and you have five family
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members and there's five ingredients and there's five checkout lines. It would be faster for each person to take one
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thing, check out at the same time, go home and build the hamburger. Right. Right. Instead of like waiting in one
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line and then checking things out individually. You're basically doing it five times faster. So that's basically
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the idea of packet switching is you're breaking data up into little packets and you're sending it over this distributed
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network. So in a network, this actually helps create something that is decentralized or more accurately
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distributed because there's three types of networks. There's centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks.
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And this is actually a distributed network. So imagine that DARPA connects four different universities, right?
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They're each connected to each other. They're not just connected in a line. And they can send data in packets. And
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that allows them to send a ton of data through the queue with the least stuff in it. So the data knows what order to
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rearrange itself in because it's got a little tag on it that says this is the first part of the data, and this is the second part of the data. Because data is
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just like bits, right? Streams of streams of ones and zeros. It knows like this is the first chunk, this is the
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second chunk, this is the third chunk and it can rearrange itself. That allows for a lot of data to pass through in a much faster distributed way because data
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is traveling at the speed of of light, right? So even if you drop packets, that's not a problem because you just
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resend it. If you're traveling at that speed, it's like, oh no, I dropped You've probably seen this before, like
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dropped packet loss, like dropped these packets. There's like interference or something in the network, but it's like it doesn't matter cuz you're just
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sending data through. Best thing to use when you like miss a kill in Valerant. Just be like, "Oh, packet lost. Damn it.
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My ping. My ping." Yeah. Um anyway, so yeah, so they get the first node set up
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in 1969 for this new arponet, right? And this was running on the 1822 network
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protocol which was implemented in 1970. So it's just like time is going by slowly like they get the node set up the
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next year. they get the protocol implemented and the protocol is basically saying like how is this data going to transfer across the network?
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How are the computers going to handle the data flowing between them? So the network gets turned on in 1971 and it
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actually works really well. Um and there's this really funny story about
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when they were at the Arpanet and they were first starting to use it and they connect all the computers together and
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they're getting all excited and they want to log into another computer remotely because that's what you're doing if you're doing packet switching,
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right? You're like let's do remote desktop. So they type L and the other person on the other side of the line
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says, "Yep, got the L." They type O took the L. And then the other person's like, "Yep, we got the O." They're trying to
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top lo type login. They type G and the network crashes. Um, but you know, it
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works and they had to do some modulation to fix it and make it a little better and like actually make things work. But
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that was the foundation of the Arponet. So, they got the first computers connected and it gets rocking. Andrew just brought up a really good point that
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the very first electronic message ever sent might have just been L. It was the
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original taking an L on the internet. Yeah. Imagine you took the first L. The first L on the internet and you didn't
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even know it. So, over the next few years, the packet switch network idea starts to really take off. All of a
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sudden, you get a ton of universities and organ organizations that are using their own packet switch networks with
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things like Ethernet that had just gotten invented. And there was something called token ring from IBM which had a
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really small community. And Xerox invented a new protocol called PUP. And there was a French Cyclades network,
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right? Like this was a proto the the way of doing packet switching was just how you send data over a network. Okay? So
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all of a sudden we saw all these networks getting set up and these are all individual networks only connected
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within themselves not quite what we have today. Correct. So it was just yeah like the French had their own network and
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then yeah everyone was creating their own little like protocols right because the arponet was running on the 18 um 22
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protocol but token ring was running on something else just at IBM. Some universities make their own protocols
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that only ran at those universities. So, it sounds like at this point we have a bunch of little internets, bunch of little networks. Yeah, I have to keep
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reminding myself that they're just logging into these other computer. They're remoting into these other computers there. This isn't like
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creating this crazy internet that we have today. This is super basic. They're using each other's processing powers.
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They're sharing data. They're sharing files, but it's within a small network. A bunch of local networks. Correct. A
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bunch of intranets. Intranets, if you will. Networks. Yeah. Also I you know
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there isn't standard networking infrastructure yet which is why a lot of these networks have to run on separate
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protocols like because the 1822 protocol was like DARPA right they weren't going
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to just tell people how to run these networks. Well and and also you know in the United States we had this like full
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network of phone lines set up. So when these first universities were setting up wanted to connect via the arponet, they
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literally just reached out to the phone companies and said, "Hey, can we lease some time on this line?" So the University of Hawaii actually had this
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thing called the Aloha Net, which was basically doing packet switching over radio, which was really awesome. That is
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really cool cuz before we were doing straight phone lines, so radio, this is like kind of like the first wireless if
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you want to think about it. They showed that you could do packet switching over any type of network, which is really cool. Um, we're going to take a quick ad
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break, but there's a lot more to the story. It gets very exciting. So, make sure you stick around and we'll catch you on the other
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side. All right, we're back. Welcome back to the Packet Switched podcast. Um,
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like we talked about before, there was all these networks that were being set up, right? But when you set up a network, you're buying this box from
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whatever the vendor you were using gave you, right? So you ended up with a software stack of applications that you
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could use on top of it and that was basically it. Okay? It was like they gave you this black box to set up your network and they ran all the protocols.
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They ran all this stuff and you couldn't really do a lot to it. Um, so now all of these vendors have their own protocols,
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their own data rates that they're transferring data over. None of these companies cared if their networks
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interconnected and they probably actually liked that. You know, it was like it was like using Android and iOS.
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Like Apple likes that iMessage doesn't work with Android because it keeps you in their ecosystem and all these
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companies wanted to keep you in their little network ecosystem. It's the same thing. And there's some level of control maybe over reliability or materials
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used, things like that. All these things. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a thing we have in tech. Yeah. Well, and and also
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uh the it was all like separate like in order to for everything to work together, there would have had to been a
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conscious effort from all these different groups to be like let's build one thing, right? Which they don't want to do. I mean, you can see this playing
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out today with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram. They all basically do the same thing, but none of them actually talk to
00:21:18
each other, right? There hasn't really been a universal messaging protocol that internet me for internet messaging that
00:21:24
RCS. Yeah. Well, bless you. The best thing we have is RCS, but you know how that's played out so far. Uh hopefully
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that comes into play eventually. But yeah, RCS RCS. But pretty pretty damn quickly, uh the Department of Defense
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started taking notice of all these networks, right? And as more of these distributed package switch networks got
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set up, the government was like, "Wait, we should use this in war,
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right? Pretty evergreen." Yeah. Classic government move. Yeah. They they could
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take a distributed communications network and they could hook it up to, you know, like planes and tanks and and
00:22:01
automobiles and all of these different things because at this point computers are getting more popularized and
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computers that were running on tanks or planes were going to have a strategic advantage over a plane or a tank that
00:22:13
didn't have a computer in it. That was just the way it went. Yep. Some people think older people don't know how to use
00:22:18
the internet. I have news for you. We invented it. It's possible to invent something and be totally behind on real.
00:22:26
I'm just saying. Well, you wouldn't say that to Vince Surf. Uh he's actually been he was working on the early ARPANET
00:22:32
design as well and he helped get a lot of the stuff online. Also, he's one of the most important people to ever
00:22:38
contribute to the internet. He is in the internet hall of fame. He is considered like internet zatti. Hall of Oh, yeah.
00:22:45
There's internet hall of fame. Yeah. the internet hall of fame which is like the most important people to ever contribute
00:22:52
to internet networking. How much Reddit karma does he have? Probably unbelievably a lot. Yeah. If you talk to
00:22:58
any like data systems engineer or any like computer science uh graduate they
00:23:04
he's like their like Wayne Gretzky. Yes. I don't know that reference but probably
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a lot of goals. Probably. Yes. A lot of goals. He's a very important person. The blank stair was everything I've ever
00:23:16
wanted in life. His title, LeBron James, his title at Google is internet evangelist. It's chief chief internet
00:23:23
evangelist. And he work he works at Google and his title is literally chief internet evangelist. Man, as if the
00:23:29
internet needs evangelizing. Well, you think it doesn't, but surprisingly, we'll get to that later. Okay. And in
00:23:35
the spring of 73, a guy named Bob Khan who had worked very much on the arponet
00:23:41
design uh left Bolt Baron Neck and Newman and went to DARPA and uh and he he showed up in my
00:23:50
office at Stanford in the spring of 73 and he says, "We have a problem." And you know, I'm thinking, "What do you
00:23:56
mean we?" and he says, um, well, the defense department has reached the
00:24:02
conclusion that computers could be useful in command and control, but the implication of using computers in
00:24:08
command or control is that you'd be putting computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and in airplanes in
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addition to dedicated computing facilities. Well, the Arponet was built out of computers that were in dedicated
00:24:21
computer rooms with air conditioning. Everything's all interconnected by dedicated telephone lines lines. And you
00:24:28
can't connect an airplane to a telephone line. That doesn't work. You know, the cars don't
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work or or the tanks, you know, they run over the wires. That doesn't work. Ships get all tangled up. Funny guy. Funny
00:24:42
guy. But he's It's true, right? So, the government noticed how well packet switch networks were working. So they
00:24:47
started uh spinning up satellite based packet switch networks because that doesn't use a line, right? You could
00:24:54
actually connect that to pretty much any type of military vehicle and they called that satnet, right? So, they made a
00:25:00
radio-based packet switch network because the military realized it's crazy useful with command and control. And
00:25:06
suddenly they want computers and airplanes and they want them in tanks and boats. And they spun up like all of
00:25:11
these different packet switch networks with different data rates and different packet sizes and different latencies cuz
00:25:16
they're all package switched, right? So, you you need different data rates and latencies and stuff with like, you know,
00:25:22
tanks and airplanes and stuff cuz they're far away. Yeah. Yeah, you have the inverse square law for like data
00:25:28
transfer and they all do different things and probably all have different requirements for bandwidth and what
00:25:33
types of things you're actually sending over that network. Yeah. And the thing is like the government and the military
00:25:38
have different like you know there's the air force and then there's the there's the the navy the army, right? So they
00:25:46
they're all spinning up their own different uh packet switch networks, but they're not really communicating that much and that becomes a problem. Uh, so
00:25:52
in 1973 they go to Vent and they say, "We've got a problem. We've got we need
00:25:58
something that can allow all of these networks to talk to each other because we need all of our military applications to be able to communicate." We're
00:26:04
looking at four different packet switch technologies, all of which are different. They're different data rates,
00:26:09
different packet sizes, different addressing, different latency. It just all different, but they're all packet
00:26:15
switched. So the question is how do you take all those different kinds of packet networks and connect them together in a
00:26:22
way that makes everything look uniform? That was the internet problem.
00:26:27
And we spent from the spring of 73 to the fall of 73 trying to figure out how to do that. Okay. Can I just take a
00:26:34
second and like the internet problem, right? You have all these networks. Mhm.
00:26:39
They're all packet switch networks. Mhm. Nets networks network network inter
00:26:45
networking problem. Mhm. This is the connection of all the other networks.
00:26:51
We're finally bringing everything together. Yeah. Because inter means everything under one umbrella and we
00:26:57
just take the word internet for granted right now. But it's like it's means all the networks are now connected. You're
00:27:03
making a giant network of smaller networks. And this was this was just the
00:27:08
government's networks. This wasn't every network from all the schools and and from everything else, but it was combining several networks that were
00:27:15
being used for several different things into one network. I don't know why this reminds
00:27:21
me of it, but but this is like when when Xbox first came out and you played like split screen and then you started going
00:27:27
to your friends and you played like interconnected like land parties and then Xbox Live comes out and now it's
00:27:33
like I don't have to go to my friend's house with eight other friends to play a player. All of us can sit. That's
00:27:38
exactly correct. You have your own little network when you're doing like a land party and then all of a sudden you're on the internet. Yeah. A bunch of
00:27:45
little networks. And it's funny to think that at the time there were computer scientists working on networking and then there were computer scientists
00:27:51
working on internet networking. Yeah. Yeah. Really awesome. Um so how do you
00:27:58
get all these computers to talk to each other? That's a big problem because they're all using different protocols, different data rates, different like all
00:28:05
latency, all these things. So, like Vin just said, between just between like 6
00:28:10
months, they came up with a way to solve the internet networking problem. We eventually came up with a protocol we
00:28:17
call the transmission control protocol or TCP. Have you guys heard of TCP before? Oh, we're starting to get into
00:28:23
modern terms. Yeah. TCP IP. All these things are starting to sound familiar. TCP IP. Insane clown posy.
00:28:31
So, TCP Yeah. Yeah. So transmission control protocol and internet protocol
00:28:36
and these are the protocols that allow all these different networks to talk to each other on the internet, right? Very
00:28:42
cool. Um Vince Surf in invented TCP IP
00:28:47
probably internet hall of fame. That makes sense. That guy's pretty good in like six months. Okay, that's that's
00:28:53
pretty good. That's pretty good. He's very important. Um but yeah, TCP is basically a list of agreed upon actions that allow these networks to communicate
00:28:59
and pass data between each other and let that data stay intact. So that you know if you drop data, you can just throw it
00:29:06
back in. Uh back then it meant that if your computers and your network can use TCP, you can connect to any other
00:29:12
network that's also using TCP. The local network at the University of Southern California could now connect to the
00:29:18
local network at the University of London. They could share their research. Yeah, it was like the USB of internet
00:29:24
protocols basically like a standard. It was a standard. A standard, right? So scientists can now communicate with very
00:29:31
early forms of email across the entire world because they had email when they
00:29:36
first set up these networks. It was very primitive, but it was like there's an email there was an email protocol. Um,
00:29:44
which is why this is the reason that you can use Gmail or Spark or whatever. You
00:29:49
don't have to like if you think about like Telegram versus WhatsApp versus like iMessage those all use different
00:29:55
protocols but there is an email protocol so that Gmail and Spark and Outlook and
00:30:00
all yeah it doesn't matter what client you're using you're sending the same data and it's getting across which is
00:30:07
dope like I wish you could send a telegram message and it came through on WhatsApp but you can't anyway
00:30:15
I so they were working on TCP for a long time they had four different iterations of it. They made a lot of mistakes. Um,
00:30:22
and it took them 10 years, right? Like they came up with the first iteration of it in like 6 months, but it took them 10
00:30:28
years. Um, within that span of time, the first cell phone came out, the first digital camera came out, the VCR came
00:30:34
out, the first Apple computers came out, the GPS, the Walkman. Basically like an insane amount of technology came out in
00:30:40
the 1970s. The first season of retro tech right there. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much pretty much all from the 1970s.
00:30:47
Yeah. Um, and Vince says they pretty much finished the protocol in 1978, but it took them five more years for it to
00:30:53
get implemented. Yeah. So, there are large spans of time between any of this stuff happening. So, we shouldn't expect
00:30:59
Masttodon to have any sort of reckoning in the next year. It's probably going to take a while for a new standard to hook
00:31:04
up. If we ever have a universal standard for that, it's probably going to take 10 to 15 years. Take a long time. Yeah. And
00:31:10
it's probably because it's not being implemented by the government. This was the government. Yeah. Right. That feels
00:31:16
like the big difference between back then and today is like this all started through the government, right? This is
00:31:21
kind of a tangent, but like the only reason that the internet or that email was able to do that was because it was
00:31:26
kind of run by the government. We just didn't have internet messaging that the
00:31:31
government created, right? Internet messaging was created in an era where private or p public companies, private
00:31:38
companies, companies created all these messaging clients. So, it wasn't the government that said you guys all have
00:31:44
to use this, right? Um anyway, to get TCP IP implemented, you still had to
00:31:50
force everybody to use it. That was a problem, right? For a universal protocol to work, everyone has to be in on board,
00:31:57
which is why I was so excited for this matter episode because everyone started using it and matter is basically TCP IP,
00:32:03
which is awesome. It's like already it already exists. Um I mean, matter used to be called chip, which is connected
00:32:08
home over IP. It literally is IP. It's internet protocol, which V invented. Crazy, right? Um, and since everyone's
00:32:15
signing on to use the protocol, everyone becomes happier. But Vince's like, "We need people to use TCP IP." So he makes
00:32:21
this absolutely baller move. Uh, he knows that everyone's going to be happier if they're using it. And there
00:32:28
are benefits to the military for the military for that happening, too, because DARPA is a military organization
00:32:33
at the end of the day. And they need command and control to be able to communicate. And researchers are going to love it. And Vince's just like, "No,
00:32:39
I have to force people to use TCP IP even if they don't know it yet." right that they're going to love it. So event
00:32:45
goes to everyone on the arponet um which again there's all these research universities and stuff and it's being
00:32:51
funded by the government but they're still research universities doing their own thing and they create their own little networks and they don't really
00:32:56
want to use TCP because they're use their own little networks. They don't really care. Um so he goes everyone to
00:33:02
the Arpanet which at that point is about 400 computers and he tells them you all need to switch to TCP IP by January 1st
00:33:08
1983 or you're off the network. Power move. Power move. He's basically like,
00:33:14
"We are cutting off your funding. We are taking your computers. You have to use TCPIP." And he has that type of control.
00:33:22
Yeah. Because it's being funded by ARPA, which is the government. They were funding these research projects and
00:33:27
they're like, "We literally will come in and take your computers. Turn off your access." Yeah. And they didn't want that. They've been they by this time,
00:33:33
this is like 15 years into this project, they like hooked into using computers. Imagine if somebody came and were like,
00:33:39
"We're gonna take your computers away if you don't just switch this protocol." You know, yes, we're switching. So, by
00:33:45
the time 1990, 1978 rolls around, we are basically ready to freeze the protocol
00:33:52
spec after having gone through four iterations and start implementing like crazy. We get to the point in
00:33:59
1982 or late 81, early 82 where we are now ready to force every computer on
00:34:08
every one of the networks supported by ARPAD to switch over from the earlier ARPANET protocols to the internet
00:34:15
protocols. And so we set a deadline of January 1, 1983. There are only 400 computers involved.
00:34:22
uh and said, "You all have to be running TCP IP by January 1, 1983 or you're off
00:34:28
the net." And and you know, so everybody sort of there was some grumbling about
00:34:34
that, but since I was running the program at the time, I could say things like, "You know what? If you're not on
00:34:40
the net by January 1 of 83, I'm not funding your research anymore." And what was that? What was incentive program
00:34:47
that you were running technically? Was there a name for that? Uh oh. Well, it
00:34:52
was the interneting program. The interneting program. Wow. Yeah. Like we
00:34:58
take that for granted now, but Yeah. Serious. Someone had to flip that switch to get us all together. To get them all
00:35:03
together. Yeah. Yeah. So, he gets that switch flipped. Now, all the 400 computers that were all using whatever
00:35:10
older protocols are all now using TCP IP. They can all now talk to each other and all future computers that use TCP IP
00:35:16
can all talk to each other. It's a pretty good starting point. So in between or right around now TCP and IP
00:35:25
actually got split, right? Which is why we just call them IP addresses instead of TCP IP addresses. And the reason for
00:35:31
that is pretty nifty. Um the important part of the IP part is the addressing part, which if you listen to the part
00:35:37
one of this whole thing, you'll know is like this big complicated thing that needed to get figured out. So they appi
00:35:42
they said that IP addresses should be universal for all devices that are now connecting to this inter networking
00:35:49
project. Um but TCP isn't the best way to get data across in every scenario. Um
00:35:56
you know for example TCP sends confirmation back like hey I received
00:36:01
each packet. Um which is useful if I'm trying to send you like a word document and I need to know that you missed a few
00:36:08
words. But for example, like the lights behind you in the studio, um they work
00:36:13
on an internet protocol, but if one of the packets gets lost when I'm sending stuff there, I I don't need to know the
00:36:20
packet gets lost. Like I can visually see that the packet gets lost. Um so we
00:36:25
use a different protocol called UDP and that you the user datagram protocol
00:36:30
which is like a slimmer, less reliable but faster sort of thing. Um, and all of
00:36:36
these things are now working under IP, right? Yeah. So, everything has an IP address, which is just a address for
00:36:42
your computer, so it knows where the data should go. But they split TCP IP, so it's officially called
00:36:47
TCP/IP is what it's called now. Uh, so so we we turned the internet on on January 1st, 1983, basically, and it's
00:36:55
been running ever since. No big deal. We turned the internet on. This guy's Wayne Gretzky. Yeah, for
00:37:02
sure. Yeah. Yeah. Most shots on goal, most goals scored. Yes. Amazing. That's
00:37:08
pretty sick. Um, so the internet's on, baby. It's going. Uh, a lot of people have access to it. Suddenly you've got
00:37:14
this distributed network that can send packets between computers, super long distances. You can share information.
00:37:19
You can remote log into super powerful computers. This internet thing is pretty rad. Um, and before we break into the ne
00:37:26
the next act, I just want to tell this really funny story. Uh, first you got to know that Vince Surf wears a three-piece
00:37:32
suit to literally everything. I looked him up on Google images. Yeah, you are correct. Yes. Like he is like this white
00:37:39
beard, white hair, three-piece suit. Like he is a serious man. He's so dope.
00:37:44
Um, yeah, he looks really good in it. And uh I've been calling him internet zatty for quite a while now because
00:37:50
that's what I Anyway. Yeah. Uh title title of the podcast. Internet Z. I have
00:37:55
that written down for some reason. Anyway, uh he has this funny story where he's in he's at an internet engineering
00:38:01
task force meeting, which is like these meetings that they were having to talk about internet protocols and stuff in 198 1992. Um and he does this strip
00:38:10
tease in his three-piece suit. And under the suit, he has a shirt that says IP on
00:38:16
everything because at the time he was trying to push the adoption of internet protocol being on all networking
00:38:22
equipment and like nobody was really having it. So, he does a freaking strip tease at this internet meeting. I'm glad
00:38:30
the inventor of the internet was an OG me. Yeah. Yes. It was like off the net
00:38:36
memeing right here. Anyway, it works and it becomes the foundation of the internet and home networking and the
00:38:41
internet of things and basically all the technology that we use right now that does networking is based on TCP IP. And
00:38:48
this guy made it in like 6 months. Incredible. Well played. Um, yeah. So,
00:38:53
there's more to that story. um quite a bit more into the story and it gets very interesting. So, we're going to explore
00:38:58
that after the [Music]
00:39:10
break. All right, we're back. So, the internet's on and it's working and it's scaling really, really fast. Uh
00:39:17
originally on the Yeah, it scaled very quickly. Uh originally on the Arpanet, there was no central address book for
00:39:22
these computers. You know, each network node had its own address book that was sort of maintained by the network
00:39:28
administrator, but there was no way to prevent duplicates in the address book or update the address book networkwide.
00:39:35
So when all these networks came together to form the internet, uh that was a problem and it was scaling really
00:39:40
quickly. You know, this is similar to this is the act two is called the DNS
00:39:45
and I have a it's very abridged because we did an entire episode on the DNS. I was going to say this sounds like it
00:39:52
could lead straight into last episode. It basically could. What you could do is you could like listen to last episode
00:39:58
and then come back if you really wanted to. Um, but think about this. When TCP IP was introduced, it introduced the
00:40:04
idea that every computer needed an address. So, if you think about packet switching again, you realize it's
00:40:10
important that each packet of data knows where it's going. So, of course, it's bouncing off all these network nodes
00:40:15
trying to find the path of least resistance to get there as fast as possible, but it needs to be sent to a specific address. So, back then, if you
00:40:21
were a computer at UCLA and you wanted to get on a computer at UC Berkeley, you had to type in the IP address to connect
00:40:27
to that computer. Um, this was mostly fine at the beginning when there was only a certain number of computers on
00:40:32
the network. Uh, but you know, there was only four universities computed at the ve there were only four universities
00:40:39
connected at the very beginning. So, you had this very small list of IP addresses, but the internet scaled very
00:40:44
quickly. Um, there were already 400 connected when the internet got turned on. And can you imagine having a
00:40:50
spreadsheet of like 400 computers, each with different IP addresses, and every single time you wanted to connect to
00:40:55
one, you had to like look through the spreadsheet with your granny glasses and find, you know, which IP address was
00:41:01
correct. Like, not great. IP addresses always in the format that they are today which is like there are there have been
00:41:07
different there's like IPv4 IPv6 and that basically just like adds extra
00:41:12
digits which exponentially scales the amount of computers. That's what I'm thinking like at the time oh there's only 400 computers so if we just have
00:41:18
like a fourdigit IP address we're good and then suddenly that's not well there are many stories of people being like oh
00:41:24
yeah IPv4 like that'll last for the next 500 years. No it did not. Not even
00:41:29
close. Um, now we're on I believe we're on IPv6 right now and that should last a while, but who knows? We're making a lot
00:41:35
of devices cuz every individual device that connects to the internet and it's unique IP address. It's crazy. Um, yeah,
00:41:42
we talked about this in the I can the seven keys of the internet episode, but the original solution to this IP address
00:41:48
indexing problem was one guy named John Pastell. He created a document called
00:41:53
host.ext text that would contain every single computer's IP address. So you
00:41:58
Yeah, you'd call up John. You'd be like, I want to connect my computer to the internet and he'd be like, okay, so you're uh this IP address and I'm going
00:42:05
to put you and then he would distribute this host.ext spreadsheet to the entire internet and you'd download the host.ext
00:42:12
spreadsheet every day of the entire internet. Yeah, basically um because he was handling the assigning of IP
00:42:18
address, he became known as the Ayanna or the internet assigned numbers authority. Um, very similarly, yeah,
00:42:24
there's a lot of redundant information, but I'm just trying to skim over it. Go watch our I can in the seven keys of the internet episode. Yeah. So, this was not
00:42:31
a scalable solution. Uh, so a call of proposals on how to improve that system was made and a man named Paul Makipetus
00:42:38
came up with the DM DNS or the domain name system, which was a way to automatically map domain names or word
00:42:45
versions of IP addresses to the server's actual IP address. Became a lot easier. It's very lightweight. It's very
00:42:50
elegant. It's great. Um, yeah. So, while all this DNS stuff was happening, Vid decided maybe he
00:42:57
should go and join the private sector, right? He'd been working on government stuff for like a very long time and he
00:43:02
was interested in trying something new cuz, you know, he just created the internet basically. He's like, h could
00:43:08
go do something in the private sector and make a lot more money. Side hustle. I was going to say, is he still getting paid like garbage at this point? Pretty
00:43:14
much. Yeah. No, he was lit. He literally told us like, I want to send my daughter to college. So I think he was yeah he
00:43:22
was like I could make a lot more money in the private sector. Um oh his two sons to college. Sorry. So right before
00:43:28
ARPA turns the internet on like right before they turn the internet on but he had it ready. Everything was ready. He
00:43:34
left and went to go work for this company called MCI. [Music]
00:43:40
It starts with the office equipment you've already got. It ends with a message delivered to anyone anywhere.
00:43:49
faster, cheaper, or both. It's MCI
00:43:54
mail. And it's what business uses to communicate when communicating means
00:44:00
business. Uh, this is very much business. Those
00:44:06
movie makers. Yeah. 1983 ' 80s encapsulated. Oh, yeah. Um,
00:44:12
yeah. So effectively MCI mail was basically an early version of commercial email because before this digital
00:44:19
messaging like email was only available to government employees and the university researchers. There was no
00:44:25
like public version of email at that time. Yeah. Yeah. So nobody had a lot of
00:44:31
access to this stuff. Um, so MCI started putting computers in places like hotels,
00:44:37
business centers, airports, or you could get them at home if you were rich enough to have an actual computer. You could
00:44:43
boot up your MCI like software, right? So it was basic it was basically email
00:44:49
for rich people or business people and it wasn't connected to this new internet
00:44:54
like like MCI was going was leasing their own telephone lines from the phone companies and building their own that
00:45:00
that's why it was like they had it had to be a separate thing because like David said like you had to be doing
00:45:05
government research if you wanted internet access at this point the internet was still only for government
00:45:11
people and military and this is the private side the private sector yeah because the technology was there. So,
00:45:16
some MCI has spun up and they were like, "We could do this on our own network, right?" Um, yeah. So, MCI mail was
00:45:23
actually really cool cuz it did some other really wacky things like you could enter a physical address into the address bar and it would send a letter.
00:45:31
Oh, I was going to make that joke. No, literally a joke. Okay. Literally. Yeah. You could you would pay different rates
00:45:37
based on like what kind of telecom communic like communications platform you wanted to use. That's hilarious. So,
00:45:43
if you thought like, "Oh, I want to send this MCI mail to this other person, but I'm not sure they're going to get it in time." Send it in letter format to this
00:45:50
guy's hotel. It was like business, you know, big business. The pigeon would take off with it. Yeah. Um, so Vent
00:45:57
actually launched MCI Mail. He went to MCI to build MCI Mail for MCI and he launched it very quickly uh in September
00:46:05
of 1983, which was the same year they turned the internet on, right? like he he left ARPA right before they turned
00:46:12
the internet on, built this email client for MCI, and they launched it that same year, which was pretty wild. Um, and I
00:46:19
think and it went kind of okay, like the launch of MCI mail. This is like the first commercial email service. I think
00:46:25
they were expecting it to be like insanely profitable because Vint saw like the value of the internet and being
00:46:31
able to communicate like that, but it didn't really turn out that way. Um, they tried a lot of different marketing
00:46:36
campaigns to try to get people to use MCI Mail, but it just didn't gain a ton of hype. It took a while. They were just
00:46:42
too early basically, and that'll happen, you know. So, Vince stayed at MCI for a
00:46:48
while, like eight years. Uh, but he got pretty bored again because, you know, he created the internet. He's probably
00:46:54
wanting to know. You're just itching for that next uh Yeah. next high. Exactly.
00:47:01
Yeah. And so Bob Khan um who was actually the guy who went to Vent to try to get him to build TCPIP for the
00:47:08
military had just created this new um nonprofit called CNRI or the Corporation
00:47:14
for National Research Initiatives. Basically a think tank if you know what a think tank is. Just like we do all
00:47:19
these this research and then we sell it to the government or something like that. Um so Vent went to do that instead
00:47:25
cuz it was just way more fun. Like they got to like just build a lot of random different stuff. So they gallivant
00:47:31
together on this eight-year exploration of what the internet could be used for because I had just got turned on. They
00:47:37
were the only ones that knew how valuable it was. And so, you know, they they started making all this crazy stuff
00:47:43
like digital libraries, mobile software, knowledge robots, which were basically early forms of AI. Jesus. Yeah. They for
00:47:51
eight years they were just like, let's go freaking wild. And just made all this crazy stuff. Um, so but in the
00:47:58
background, this is over the course of eight years, there's a lot of stuff developing in the internet community. Like the National Science Foundation uh
00:48:04
decided that they wanted to connect 3,000 universities to the internet. And remember when the internet got turned
00:48:10
on, it was only 400 computers. Yeah. Computers. Not even just universities, like 400 computers. Wow. Yeah. And they
00:48:17
want to connect 3,000 universities. So what they were going to do was build a multi-etwork system um or something
00:48:23
called an internet backbone. So basically like there are clusters of computers of servers that run the
00:48:29
internet, right? Right now we have like Google and Facebook and like these are all these servers that are just giant
00:48:36
clusters that route your data around. That's called an internet backbone. Um and then all of a sudden
00:48:43
the department of energy and NASA decided that they also wanted to create these big clusters, these internet
00:48:49
backbones. And by the mid 80s there were suddenly four different massive government internet backbones that were
00:48:55
growing and that required a lot of networking equipment. So during this period there was suddenly a huge influx
00:49:01
of networking equipment manufacturers that were popping up to create the backbones, right? Cuz suddenly you're
00:49:08
like, "Oh yeah, we need 3,000 universities connected, but we have no equipment to fill that need." Yeah.
00:49:13
Yeah. So people are going to come in and make money. Mhm. Um, but something happened around this time that made Vent
00:49:19
realize that he needed to get the internet into the hands of the public and that the internet was going to be a
00:49:25
very big deal because again still only for research universities but is growing so quickly. Um, but Vent has this story
00:49:32
where in 1988 he went to an internet trade show which just became a thing at the time which was basically just
00:49:38
networking equipment manufacturers that were showing off their stuff. Yeah. But he saw all these companies that had
00:49:44
these huge booths and huge displays and huge TVs that were like and he's like,
00:49:49
"Oh my god, like people are putting real money into networking equipment. Like this is like millions of dollars of
00:49:54
stuff." Mhm. Um yeah, it made sense. I mean over this time it became pretty clear that personal computing was blowing up. Uh the Apple Macintosh came
00:50:01
out in 1984. Personal computers were getting really popular. They had their own personal software that ran locally.
00:50:08
People were getting computers in their homes. And Vince's like, "Oh, these are computers and we have the internet." I
00:50:14
mean, they were made to go together, right? Hey, got you. You got your computer and
00:50:21
my internet. No, you got your internet and my computer. But the governments and
00:50:26
the universities were the only ones that had access to the internet. Um, which, you know, for the people who knew how
00:50:31
useful the internet was, was really freaking useful. So Vince at this trade show and he's seeing how much money is
00:50:36
being thrown at it and he realizes that if the general public could get access that the internet could be a
00:50:42
self-sustaining entity because again like these millions of dollars are being put into the industry that are only
00:50:48
being sold to the government, military and universities right now. But what if the public suddenly became a customer?
00:50:55
You know, you have this really limited amount of people and it's still blowing up. Then all of a sudden it's just like
00:51:00
everybody the the biggest industry of all time is about to explode. Yeah. And
00:51:06
I mean and government funding always is like it's a question mark like this in the start of this all happened because
00:51:12
the government basically stopped funding ARPA DARPA whatever it was back then. Exactly. They got to the point they were
00:51:17
so small that they had to work on this project. I'm sure they've got that in the back of their minds like we could
00:51:23
lose this again. Yeah. It could be like a huge waste of money, right? Uh but the problem was one big thing needed to
00:51:29
change before this was going to be put into the hands of the public. That was the law. Um cuz even with stuff like MCI
00:51:36
Mail, there's only one application that people had access to. If you wanted to be on the actual internet and you wanted
00:51:42
to grow, something needed to be done to get people on that thing. And Vent went full gangster mode. He's like, "How can
00:51:49
I break the law?" Nice. Yeah. And so, uh, I remember thinking in 1988, how are
00:51:56
we going to get the general public access to the internet? And, uh, I thought, well,
00:52:03
there's a problem because there was something called an appropriate use policy of the government backbone
00:52:09
networks. You could only use them for government sponsored research. That was the basic rule. And so, I had to figure
00:52:17
out, how could I break that rule? How do I break this rule that only allows the government access to the internet? So,
00:52:24
he has this idea. What if he's able to put MCI Mail, which he just made for a
00:52:29
private company, uh the commercial email service, not just on MCI's network, but
00:52:36
on the internet, like the internet. Mhm. He's like, well, first of all, this
00:52:41
wasn't even necessarily made to be on the internet. Like, I don't really know the protocols were made for a local
00:52:47
network, not necessarily the internet. Um, and I don't even know if this is going to work, but I also just want to
00:52:54
break the rules because I want to see if I can get commercial traffic on the internet, right? So, in ' 88, he goes to
00:53:01
the Federal Networking Council and he asked them, "Can I hook up MCI mail to the internet?" And they said yes. Nice.
00:53:08
There are no rules. Yeah. It's easy to break the rules when they just let you do it right off the bat. Exactly. It was
00:53:14
like he was very conf like I'm not even sure if they knew what they were agreeing to. They probably didn't because he's an internet person and
00:53:20
they're just like, "Oh, technology. I don't know. You do your thing, right?" Uh, but they did. And so now all of a
00:53:25
sudden, anyone that was using an M MCI mail was also interacting with people on
00:53:30
the internet. So suddenly you had commercial traffic flowing over a government service hosted by public
00:53:38
universities. None of these things are ever supposed to touch. These are three separate organizations that are not
00:53:44
supposed to be intertwined. can't be commercialized unless we get the government to change its policy. So, as
00:53:51
a relatively new employee of CNRI about a couple of years into the into working
00:53:58
there, um I went to the Federal Networking Council and asked them for
00:54:04
permission to hook up MCI mail, which is a commercial email package to the internet. Mhm. And my purpose was
00:54:10
twofold. I wanted to see what would happen if we did that because the two systems were not necessarily designed to
00:54:16
work. And second, I wanted to break the policy log jam that said you couldn't put anything commercial on the internet.
00:54:22
I figured until we did that, we'd never be able to turn it into a self-supporting system and it would never spread, at least not much. Well,
00:54:30
much to my astonishment, they said yes. Which is just crazy. Uh yeah. So
00:54:35
naturally, other email providers would started saying like, wait, that's not fair. Because at the at this point in
00:54:41
time, MCI Mail was not the only Yeah. There were other ones that were popping up. Yeah. And everyone was like,
00:54:48
why does MCI get to be on the internet and we have to have our own little local network? Like that's a private
00:54:53
organization that's has like a weird deal with the government. Very strange. Um, so the government becomes in a jam
00:54:59
or as V puts it in a log jam. I mean, they let this happen. They open the floodgates, right? So they had to let
00:55:06
other businesses connect to the internet, too. they couldn't just only let MCI connect to the internet. So, you
00:55:12
can imagine the surprise when people suddenly start suddenly they're not in these little silos of services anymore.
00:55:18
Like imagine that you're using WhatsApp and you get a WhatsApp message in
00:55:23
Telegram or iMessage all of a sudden. You've got these separate apps and you're used to using WhatsApp and all of
00:55:29
a sudden someone who messages you on through Telegram just comes into your WhatsApp. You're like, that's that's really weird. That's basically what was
00:55:35
happening. like all these independent protocols just opened up and pretty
00:55:41
rapidly infrastructure started to pop up to route people to the internet. These were these became internet service
00:55:47
providers, right? Because all of a sudden the public has access to the internet through these commercial
00:55:52
services and these things like MCI mail or their competitors became the internet
00:55:58
service providers that we know today. So you needed the person to be the athome private citizen having their
00:56:05
stuff connected into this this now network of government and private citizens and universities and everything
00:56:12
because they didn't know they couldn't get to there before. Yeah. So someone had to lead them to water right lead
00:56:19
them to water. MCI was connected now to the internet but they had to connect you into the internet because you had just
00:56:24
been connected to MCI before. Um so this is the funny thing. people are technically, you know, like on the
00:56:31
internet now, but in a very limited way. Like they're just trading data. They're not browsing the web. Um, and notice
00:56:37
that I use the used web for the first time. Things don't actually start heating up for another 10 years. There's
00:56:44
just all this periods of time between all of this stuff. And now we get to the creation of the worldwide web. So, what
00:56:50
year are we in now? 1999. Hey, Ellis Adam here from the Waveform
00:56:57
Podcast. Despite the fact that we've been researching this story for almost a year, both of us somehow missed David
00:57:04
saying that the worldwide web was invented in 1999. The worldwide web was actually
00:57:09
invented by Tim Bernersley in 1989. So, if you will for the next 3 or
00:57:15
so minutes, just imagine David saying 1989 every time you hear
00:57:21
1999. Thanks. So, now we get to the creation of the worldwide web. A man named Tim Berners Lee at CERN came up
00:57:28
with an idea. You may have heard of this man. Uh so the internet's already running. It's already connecting the world with very basic applications. But
00:57:35
isn't the point of the internet to share information and not just share like data and applications? Yeah. Um yeah. Were
00:57:43
you going to say something? I agree. Okay. Yeah. So that's happening of course, but
00:57:48
like primarily in the sense that you were going to be using individual web pages. You're going to specific web
00:57:55
addresses and websites and you're consuming the information that was available on those websites. That was
00:58:01
all that was happening at the time. So like how do you research now? Like what's the best way to jump around to
00:58:07
different web pages on the internet and find what you need? Search search engine. What happens when you search on
00:58:13
Google? It crawls all of the internet and what does it show you? And shows you a list
00:58:19
of websites related to your search. And what is that when you click on one of
00:58:25
those things? What is that called? When you click a URL. Yeah. Forwarding.
00:58:30
Hyperlink. Hyperlink. Oh, you click the hyperlink. Hyperlink, right? Hypertext.
00:58:36
Yes. Yes. Hypertext transfer protocol. Yeah. We're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting Boom. Boom.
00:58:41
Hypertext. Oh, yeah. So, it's information that tosses you to other information. It's like the foundation of
00:58:47
information discovery. Like there's there's those Wikipedia games where they're like, "How do you get from this Wikipedia page to this incubator as fast
00:58:53
as possible?" Fun fact, this is total tangent. My friend made back in high school, he made an app. He called it
00:58:58
Wiki Golf. And literally the entire point was like it would give you a par4 and it would give you the two subjects
00:59:04
and it was your job to get from one to the We couldn't believe it didn't take off. I'm uh I'm so good at that game.
00:59:10
I'm like I don't want to brag, but we need to bring that back. I'll take anyone off. We need a studio video. Yeah. Yeah. We used to play that
00:59:18
in in middle school all the time. It was pretty fun. Yeah. Oh, I'll lose. Yeah. So, hypertext was actually invented way
00:59:25
before 1999. Um, the coin the term was actually coined in 1963, but originally it was useful for
00:59:32
jumping around a single document, right? Like quickly getting to the references page or that kind of stuff. But like
00:59:38
what if hypertext, the thing that was actually very useful for finding stuff on one document, could link to other
00:59:44
stuff on the entire internet? Because at the time it was just like click here to go down to this part of the page. But
00:59:49
what if you clicked here and it went to a website you didn't even know about. Yeah. Like a table of contents for the
00:59:54
entire internet. Internet fire. Very cool. Yeah. So at CERN all these physicists are showing up with their own little networks and their own little
01:00:01
protocols and these scientists would need to access information from all these universities around the world. So
01:00:06
if you connected hypertext to the internet, suddenly you could just jump around the internet and find all this
01:00:12
information so much faster. Like imagine you're just trying to like do research and you know it's somewhere on the internet but you have nowhere to look
01:00:19
and you can't do search. Like there's no hypertext on the internet. That's annoying as heck. Yeah. There's no Dewey
01:00:25
decimal system, right? For like knowing everything. Yeah. It's like how we used to remember people's phone numbers. Like
01:00:30
you you have a limit to that. You can't remember everybody's phone number. Yeah. Well, maybe. I don't know. The brain's
01:00:36
pretty cool. Um anyway, Tim Berners Lee creates the worldwide web, which most people don't know is actually different
01:00:42
from the internet. Like a lot of people say like the internet and the worldwide web. Um but just like the internet is a
01:00:48
super network that covers all networks. The worldwide web is all the hyperlinks that connect to all the other
01:00:54
hyperlinks. H yeah it's a web of hyperlinks because they're it's like this interconnected thing, right? The
01:01:01
internet was already there which was a network to cover all networks but he only became a web when they started linking connecting to one another. So
01:01:07
Tim's like okay well sick. Let's connect all of these sites together with hypertext. So the next couple of months he works and he builds an very early
01:01:14
internet browser which he literally calls worldwide web which is the first internet browser. Uh and then later he
01:01:21
renamed it to Nexist because he wanted to avoid confusion with the worldwide web which was like the idea of all the
01:01:28
hyperlinks connecting to each other and the product worldwide web. Okay. Yeah. Um it wasn't the kind of browser you're
01:01:34
probably familiar with today. That really started with Netscape and Mosaic which came out a couple years later. Classics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't
01:01:41
like a guey based interface, but it was basically a document reader that just allowed you to jump around to other like
01:01:46
documents. Can I interject real quick? You guys keep saying gooey. Oh, what graphical user interface, which is just
01:01:53
having things to click on and having photos and I dig it. Yeah, I'm team
01:01:58
gooey. The first the first what is preuey called? Textu text UI dos. I feel
01:02:05
like it's referred to as DOS. It was a text UI and you had to know all the commands and it was like in terminal or
01:02:11
command. Oh, okay. Command center. Was it TUI? I don't know if it had like an umbrella term, but I'm going to call it
01:02:17
command line interface CLI. Okay. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So, this picks up really really freaking fast.
01:02:22
And like that, the browser wars are suddenly on in full force. You've got all these browsers that are popping up
01:02:28
that are trying to make the most market share possible. And they off all offer like different services and all this
01:02:33
different kind of stuff. Tool bars. Tool bars. And that's generally where the history
01:02:39
of the internet, podcasts, books, and other stories begin is 1999 with Tim Bernard Lee. Um because pretty soon
01:02:46
after that, the browser war started. You got Mosaic, which was trying to make the web look like a magazine, and Netscape
01:02:52
and AOL. There's so many podcasts that cover this era in like really intense detail, so I didn't want to like go over
01:02:58
that again. Um, but that is the secret history of the internet, how the
01:03:04
internet got started. Um, but what's next, right? That was the question I
01:03:11
had. And it turns out Vince is working on an a version of the web and the
01:03:17
internet that he thinks is going to be the future of the internet right now.
01:03:22
Right now. He's working on that now. Now Wayne Greski is working on a new thing now. We should probably hear about this. You have a guess for what you think it
01:03:28
is. Web three. Say web three. It's not web three. It's not web three. This is
01:03:33
internet zatti. We're not We're talking about web four. Maybe four piece suits. No, I don't know. I I imagine it's got
01:03:40
to be a way to connect an even bigger set of things, but I can't really think of it. The mind. The mind. Oh, wow. I
01:03:47
don't know. I don't know. You're You're correct. What is it? An interplanetary internet. Oh, true. The biggest set of
01:03:54
things. The biggest set of things. That is the biggest set of things. that we know. So yeah, the reason I
01:03:59
wanted to like cut off the the history of the internet and not do the browser wars and stuff, there's so many podcasts, so many books that cover that
01:04:05
in such intense detail. I wanted to cover the secret history of the internet, which was what came before it.
01:04:11
And then the interplanetary internet. Yeah. Right. Okay. So now we're going to
01:04:17
take a left turn pretty hardcore here. Let's go to Mars. Very cool. It will not take that long, but it's very cool.
01:04:22
Okay. All right. So the first successful Marsh mission was in 1976 with two
01:04:28
Viking landers, right? But at that point um for about 20 years they couldn't do it again. They couldn't land more stuff
01:04:35
on Mars again for like 20 years. Things were just crashing. They weren't having any success. And then miraculously about
01:04:41
20 years later in 1997, there's this mission called Pathfinder and it finally works. And it's driving around, it's
01:04:47
taking photos and it's transmitting data from Mars. Pretty cool. Mhm. Um I think that we probably think of the more
01:04:53
modern Mars rovers right now, but we actually had them back in 1997 that was actually taking data and sending it to
01:04:58
us. Very cool. So Vince in 1997 flies out to JPL, the Jet Propulsion
01:05:04
Laboratory after that mission and they start seriously talking about something they might need 25 years down the line,
01:05:11
right? Because they just set up the internet. They were like, "Well, we should get started on like everything
01:05:16
that we do related to the internet takes like 15 years. we should start work on the next thing now. So they're like,
01:05:23
well, what if we had an interplanetary backbone network, right? There's these backbone networks that were getting set
01:05:29
up by the National Science Foundation and stuff on the internet. What if we had an interplanetary back backbone
01:05:35
network? Um, they're originally just going to use TCPIP for the interplanetary backbone network, but
01:05:42
because of the delays, because the distance between planets, it would be way the delay would be way too high,
01:05:48
right? Yeah. So what's the what's the stat now? So if we want to send a command to the Curiosity Rover on Mars,
01:05:54
we're a certain number of light minutes away from Mars, right? And so that
01:05:59
latency is gigantic. Yeah. So from Earth to Mars, when they're closest together, when Earth and Mars are the closest
01:06:05
possible together, they're 35 million miles together, which means that it'll take 3 and 12 minutes to get a signal at
01:06:12
the speed of light from Earth to Mars. And when are the furthest
01:06:17
apart apart TCP not exactly built to handle round
01:06:24
trips that take 40 minutes cuz remember if you're dropping packets right now speed of light on Earth you just resend
01:06:30
the packet you notice no no change but imagine it takes 40 minutes to get some data over there and you drop some
01:06:36
packets the ping is crazy on Mars it's crazy on Mars and then you have to take
01:06:42
relativity into account and like all stuff and time and all that stuff's weird. Okay. Um, we talked about that in
01:06:48
the uh James Webb Space Telescope episode. Little plug. Go listen to that if you haven't listened to it already.
01:06:54
Uh, yeah. So, there it's not built for 40-minute round trips. That's definitely not going to work. And there's also the
01:07:00
fact that the planets are rotating. So, you've only got a small period of time where you can transmit data from the
01:07:07
planet to a node in space. because the nodes in space, the like satellites that are rotating around the earth and stuff
01:07:14
go behind the earth and then they can't send the data anymore, right? Big problems. Um, so they decided they
01:07:21
basically needed to make a mesh network that stores information that can be sent. Um, they were going to need a
01:07:28
whole new suite of protocols that took relativity and the speed of light into account. Oh my god. Yeah. So they start
01:07:33
getting heavy on this math stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so they started working on this new protocol suite and they're working
01:07:39
on this and then suddenly in 2004 there's another successful Mars mission and the original idea was to just send
01:07:46
data directly from those rovers to these huge satellite dishes that were scattered at various strategic points
01:07:52
around Earth. Right? There was one in um CRA, Australia, one in Madrid, Spain,
01:07:58
and one in Goldstone, California. So these are like as separately apart as you can make them and they're like 70
01:08:05
meters wide. They're massive satellite dishes because you're sending data through Mars. You've got like you know
01:08:11
the information is going like this. You got to have the biggest bucket as possible to collect as much data as you
01:08:16
can. Just so we're on the same page 70 m that's about 220 ft. Is that true?
01:08:22
You're welcome. Did you do that just now? Yeah. It's like 3.1 ft per meter. He's European. 229 ft. Sorry about it.
01:08:31
Just for those United States weirdos. Anyway, imagine a 230 ft satellite dish. Yeah, that's huge. That's huge. Yeah.
01:08:37
Yeah. Anyway, they try to do this. Um, and the data rate is about 28 kilobits per second.
01:08:44
Not fast. That's very slow. Feels like the internet in this building someday.
01:08:50
Anyway, uh yeah, it's really slow and the researchers did not love that. So, while the data is transmitting, well,
01:08:56
they start trying to do this, right? They're sending data from the Mars rovers. They're transmitting the data and the radios on the rovers start
01:09:02
overheating. That's really bad. Um because you don't want to burn out the radios on Mars
01:09:07
rovers that are like insanely expensive and took forever to get there. Like if you imagine you just send these rovers
01:09:13
over and they just start transmitting data and they just burn up like they just that's no fun. Yeah, they overheat.
01:09:18
Um, so at this point they came up with a new thing called store and forward which
01:09:25
is different from packet switching. So we talked about packet switching before where you're just sending all this data through the path of least resistance.
01:09:32
You drop a packet, you send it again, it's fine. Mhm. Store and forward is a little bit different where instead of
01:09:38
just sending like a steady stream of data and like taking a bunch of different routes, you send all of the
01:09:44
data directly to one node and you make sure that all of that data gets to one node before it goes somewhere else. But
01:09:49
it's it becomes a mesh networking system. So instead of the rover sending all of the data through space and
01:09:56
hitting these satellite dishes to try to get all the information there, you're actually sending it to like these different satellites in strategic points
01:10:03
in space. I was okay. So when you say mesh network, we are literally talking about
01:10:09
several satellites strategically positioned between Earth and Mars. Yes.
01:10:14
That will relay data to each other on the way to Mars to minimize packet loss.
01:10:22
Yeah. And I don't know what that does to speed, but I know that's faster because if you create a network and all of these
01:10:28
different satellites are closer together, there's this thing called the inverse square law where the power of
01:10:34
data being sent through space like goes down over time. Okay. So, if you you can
01:10:39
send a lot more data if the things are closer together effectively. I I feel like I have a baseball analogy that
01:10:44
Ellis might appreciate. It's like it's like a cut off throw from the outfield, right? Rather than throwing from center
01:10:51
field to home base and letting it just like dribble in really slow, you hit someone else on the way in and then they
01:10:56
throw it again multiple points on the way forward. If you had like seven cut off throws, you could throw a much
01:11:02
bigger object than a baseball. No, that's kind of it's exactly it. It's like it's like picture instead of an
01:11:09
outfielder trying to throw someone out at home, you give them nine baseballs
01:11:14
and they have to throw over and over again each base one baseball to each base. It's like the percentage of those
01:11:21
that are actually going to hit is very low. But if you write little numbers on the baseball, you know, you can reorder
01:11:27
them into the correct thing. Whereas this space internet thing is much more like waiting for the perfect moment and
01:11:34
then throwing make a giant baseball. Make it have everything. Throw it. Catch
01:11:40
it. Yeah. Yeah. Because so much so much of normal packet switching TCP IP stuff
01:11:45
is just blasting out information and then send it again. Well, no. And then putting it back together again at the
01:11:52
other end. Whereas this is much more about like wait for it, wait for it now.
01:11:59
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. That sounds like a lot of expensive hardware, too. It's called store and store and forward networking, right? So,
01:12:06
at this point, they've been working on this new protocol software, and they're like, wait. So, they stop sending the
01:12:11
data from the Mars rovers cuz they're burning up. And there's like, hm, there are Xband radios on the rovers, but
01:12:18
there's also Xband radios on the orbiters that are orbiting Mars that they were using to you to create a map
01:12:26
of the surface of Mars to know where they wanted the rovers to like land. Mhm. So, you've got satellites that are
01:12:31
orbiting orbiting Mars and you've also got the actual orbiter on Mars and they
01:12:36
both have this specific type of radio. So, what if you could upload these new protocols that Vent had been working on
01:12:43
for the last number of years because again, he got started on this a while ago and see if you can use this store
01:12:49
and forward method instead of the packet switch TCP IP direct transmission,
01:12:55
right? So, they push these new protocols to the orbiters and to the rover rovers over they basically update the software.
01:13:01
Yeah. To be a completely different protocol. Um, and now when the orbiters
01:13:09
circle overhead of the rovers on Mars, the rovers now push all of their image
01:13:16
data, their sound data, whatever data they collected to these orbiters at 128
01:13:21
kilobits per second instead of 28 kilobits per second. They're not burning up burning up because of their
01:13:26
proximity. They're way faster. And this kind of kicks off this whole push for this new inter interplanetary internet
01:13:33
system because imagine we have different strategic orbiters or satellites placed
01:13:40
different at different parts of the solar system. If you have all these nodes that are closer to each other, you
01:13:45
can just start pingponging information. Yeah. Between these different orbiters.
01:13:51
Wow. That's I have so many questions about just like the possibil I mean we talk about like having a whole bunch of
01:13:57
things in orbit around Earth and how that's kind of a lot of debris and
01:14:02
possibly interference for observation of space cuz now there's just stuff in the way. I'm sure those are all things being
01:14:08
considered but definitely. Yeah. But I mean the cool thing is like in the James Webb Space Telescope episode we talked
01:14:13
about Lrange point 2. Yep. which is a very special metastable point where the James Web Space Telescope is being
01:14:19
pulled at the same velocity in all directions which makes it basically super stable and every planet has five
01:14:26
different Lrangee points, right? And I asked Vent if can we put one of these nodes like at a Lrangee point cuz then
01:14:33
you could just place different satellites instead of orbiting a planet, you can basically have them stationary
01:14:39
in space relative to the Earth. Yeah. Yeah. Or whatever, you know. The Earth
01:14:45
is moving around the sun and then the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy and the galaxy is moving. So it's it's all
01:14:51
relative stable relative to Earth, right? And hope because Mars is going to
01:14:57
keep spinning separately from Earth. And so we probably just have a ton of stuff but relative to Earth at least you have this satellite that is super far away
01:15:04
from Earth but is way closer than Mars is to Earth at any given time. If you can place enough of these of these
01:15:10
network nodes throughout the galaxy. Is that so cool? This is pretty wild.
01:15:17
Solar system. Solar system. Eventually, maybe the galaxy. We'll start with our solar system. We'll work on it. I just like the idea that you have like little
01:15:23
nest nest Wi-Fi just floating in space like transmitting data. This like reminds me of a Mr. beast video. I want
01:15:29
to pitch it to a board where to see if he can get a Wi-Fi access from the east coast to the west coast by just planting
01:15:35
mesh network points all the way across the country. I'm pretty sure it would lose so much power it would just
01:15:41
probably all we need is 128 kilobit per second. If you can even get one bit that would be pretty awesome. Yeah. Um yeah.
01:15:48
So, one thing that Vince's really excited about is the amount of commercial interest that's been pouring into this stuff, even in just the last 3
01:15:55
years since like commercial interests have finally caught up and kind of over like surpassed government interest when
01:16:01
it comes to space exploration with things like Starlink, SpaceX, you know, all these companies now want to throw
01:16:07
these orbiters into space. So, it's going to be cheaper and easier to maybe get SpaceX or somebody to be like,
01:16:13
"Throw up an orbiter at Lrange point 2 so you can create this interplanetary backbone network." Yeah. Yeah. I guess
01:16:21
they're all slightly more unique missions now because planting things on
01:16:26
the way to Mars is seems like a bunch of spots we haven't been to in space before. But yeah, that is a really
01:16:33
fascinating idea. I think I remember having this conversation maybe maybe with Neil Degrasse Tyson, I'm not sure,
01:16:39
but about how the internet on Mars right now could be completely different from
01:16:45
the internet on Earth because we're accessing all these servers on Earth. We talk to the satellites, we're all using Earth. Yeah. And then on Mars, it's just
01:16:52
it could just be a brand new internet. So, obviously Vent has been thinking about this much longer than I have because he's thinking about how to
01:16:58
connect the two to the point where maybe a live stream from somebody Twitch
01:17:04
streaming on Earth could be live streamed to Mars and actually kind of work maybe. Yeah. I like the idea that
01:17:11
Vent was like, I'm in the the Hall of Fame for the internet, but that's not good enough. I want to be in the inner
01:17:18
in the intergalactic hall of fame. So like we we were doing this like interview with him and we're trying to
01:17:23
be all like you know respectful and polite and proper and we end the interview we stopped recording and we were just like wait a second how did you
01:17:30
also know space stuff like we just asked him like like you're like this internet god you you're you're a computer you
01:17:37
were like on the cutting edge of computer science how did you also know how rocket ships work and he just
01:17:43
casually he was like oh yeah like right after high school I like did some engineering work for NASA you know like helping people yeah just casually
01:17:50
Yeah. Also, should I share this? I've got a fun fact. So, um, we didn't really
01:17:57
know where to put this in the episode, but it's too fun a fact like not to mention, and that's that, um, John
01:18:03
Pastel, the Ayanna, the guy we focused on last episode in the DNS episode.
01:18:09
Exactly. Uh Vince Surf, the main guy of this episode, and Steve Crocker, the the
01:18:14
first internet guy that we, you know, all three huge foundational people in the internet, all went to high school
01:18:20
together. Yeah, they went to school. Van Vanise High School about 10 minutes away
01:18:28
from where I grew up. Vince Surf and I have the same uh cell phone area code. That's pretty intense. Yeah, they
01:18:33
literally all went to high school together. all separated and like didn't really know each other and then they like did graduate work together and
01:18:39
built the arponet together. Wow. That school's hall of fame goes so hard. It
01:18:44
goes hard. That's sick. Yeah, it does go hard. Um, yeah. So, there you have it.
01:18:49
That's the secret history of the internet and the upcoming potential interplanetary future of the internet,
01:18:54
which is quite cool. I'm excited for Mars internet. I hope I hope Mars internet is This guy is still storing
01:19:01
scoring goals, man. He's still he's still putting up satellites and thinking about things. I hope Mars internet is
01:19:08
pretty fire. Yeah. Yeah. So, before we before we depart, um well, first I want to have a little conversation. Did you
01:19:13
guys learn anything new that you didn't really know? I knew all of that. No sh No, I learned a lot. Yeah, that's
01:19:21
that was if I ever meet Vince Surf at a bar, I will buy him a beer and thank him
01:19:26
for the internet. Whenever I tell people like, "Oh, yeah, I've got an episode coming up. We interviewed this guy named Vince Surf." They're always like, "You
01:19:31
talked to Vince Surf?" Like, he is like an internet god to a lot of people. Twice. Yeah. Twice. Twice. Yeah. Twice.
01:19:38
And the second time we called him and he was like, "Good to see you again, David." And I was like, "Start balling your ass." Yeah. So,
01:19:45
that's the secret history of the internet, but I have one more thing uh that I want to do with Adam and Ellis
01:19:51
right now to sign off. I just have one message that I want to tell you guys and also all the viewers that are watching
01:19:56
and listening right now. Oh, I have buttons. Oh, I didn't get the unutton button. Unbutton it.
01:20:06
Wow. Is it in focus? Nice. For audio listeners, they've all coordinated. Put
01:20:12
a good pause in there. That say IP on everything. That's spelled IP E. No,
01:20:21
for the audio listeners, this is the shirt that Vent wore to that internet and task force meeting. Very nice. Anyway, just wanted to I assume there's
01:20:28
a strip tease coming. Thanks for watching. That was it. Yeah, sure. That was the
01:20:34
strip tease. Uh, and yeah, that was a that was a good learning experience. The secret history of how we accidentally made an internet and we'll soon have
01:20:41
intergalactic internet, which would be awesome. Yeah, it's kind of all uh folded into a lot of the other episodes that we've done. Go watch the I cannon
01:20:48
the secret I can and the seven keys of the internet all about the DNS, which we skimmed over here. Uh we talked about
01:20:55
the new space race which is about sort of the satellites that are throwing into orbit. The James Space Telescope episode
01:21:01
which is called how the James Space Telescope sees into the past or something like that. We got a lot of
01:21:07
cool space and internet and light and data episodes. So go check those out. Leave your requests for other crazy long
01:21:13
form stuff you want us to tackle in the comments below because I will be reading those and we'll have some we'll get some
01:21:18
fun ideas and we'll make David go crazy over it. Yeah. And we'll have some shirts made of course. And maybe I'll order pizza. Thanks for watching. Catch
01:21:25
you guys in the next one. Peace. [Music]
