Dan Snow's History Hit - The Birth of the Internet

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

In the last 30 years, the internet has utterly changed the world in which we live and is now as vital as electricity in our daily lives. August 6, 1991, is the date given when the first website went live. Published by Tim Berners Lee at CERN it was a moment that would change the world but, as you'll hear in this podcast, that date is in fact not true. To explain what really happened and explore the history of the world wide web, how it works and the vitally important geopolitical issues that surround it Dan is joined by Dame Wendy Hall. Wendy is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and has recently published Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace. Wendy was very much involved in the 1990s as the web was being created and knows the pioneers who launched this groundbreaking technology so is the perfect guest to help remember the birth of the internet.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is the world's best history podcast. An assertion with absolutely no basis in fact at all. The result instead of my personal bias. But today on the podcast, this is going to blow your mind, this is why I think it's the best history podcast. Today on the podcast we're going to be talking about the World Wide Web. You might have used it. In fact, you know what? You've definitely used it if you listen to this podcast. The 6th of August, 1991 is the date given on the websites, on your newsletter that comes around, on the social media. The 6th of August, 1991 is given as the date the first website went live. Info.cern.ch. The web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, created that website. But as you can

hear in this podcast, that's not entirely true. In fact, it's not true at all, I'm afraid. It is 30 years since that website went live, but it wasn't actually on the 6th of August. On this podcast, I've got Dame Wendy Hall. She's the Regis Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. She's the Executive Director of the Web Science Institute. She is the oracle of web history. I've been trying to get her on this podcast for years, and eventually, thank goodness, she has said yes. She's held every important position that matters. She's chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute.

She was co-chair of the UK government's Artificial Intelligence Review. She was there in the 1990s when the web was being invented. She knows the players and she's written the histories. It's a huge, huge honor to have her on the show on this sort of anniversary. If you wish to listen to some of our other anniversaries, they're coming thick and fast actually, anniversaries. We had the anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war you know lots of people listened to that episode thank you for all of your feedback people said i was like the british dan carlin which i will take as a compliment i think if you want to listen to other shows please go and subscribe at historyhit.tv subscribe you get a month for free and you get access to all these back episodes

the podcast and you also get access to our tv channel hundreds of hours of new documentaries about all sorts of wonderful history on there so please head over and do that but in the meantime here is professor dame wendy hall talking about the web wendy thank you very much for coming on hi dan it Dan. It's a pleasure. It's hard to believe only 30 years ago-ish, the first website went live. You tell me. Well, the 6th of August tends to get cited as when the first website went up. In fact, Sir Tim Bunnersley will date the web from 1989 when he wrote his manifesto. And then I first met him at the European Hypertext Conference in December 1990 in Paris when he was talking about his ideas and the World Wide Web. That's the first time I met him and heard

about it. And he spent that Christmas 1990 finishing off the code and basically creating the first web server. And you could say the first website, the first page that went up on the web was then. So 6th of August 1991 was when he posted on alt.hypertext that this existed. The 6th of August has sort of become this mythological date as when the first website went up, but it was before that. And it's more of a continuum than a eureka moment. Of course, he's just sold all that he sold his code as a non-fungible token isn't he okay i didn't know that that would come on the ultimate non-fungible token so tell me i just finished gill lapore's very interesting book about

some of the history of tech in north america and in the 1960s and 70s, there was ideas around hooking computers up to each other, allowing them to talk to each other. At what point is that the internet? And at what point did it become the World Wide Web? Well, of course, Dan, what you need is my new book called Four Internets, which comes out this month. Well, that's exactly what I'm talking to you. That's good news. You have to differentiate between the internet and the World Wide Web. So the internet, which was invented in the 60s and 70s, is the network of computers. And the people who are credited with the invention of the internet

are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who invented TCPIP, the protocols that the computers used to talk to each other. They were and still are the ubiquitous handshake between computers that allows any computer to talk to any other computer on this network. It came out of DARPA and the defence industry in the States, the idea that you had a distributed system so that if one node of this network was taken out by, in those days we would have talked about a nuclear bomb, then the network stayed up and running. That was the foundation, that's the infrastructure. And that's the infrastructure that has stayed up and running all that time and enabled us to survive COVID, basically. The resilience of that is quite amazing and a tribute to the pioneers who

invented it. When because of COVID, we all piled onto the internet with TikTok and Zooming and working from home and how the countries were talking to each other about how you defeated this virus. All happened on the internet and the whole world went onto the internet and it stayed up and running. Quite amazing. And can I ask, did they have a sense of what they'd created there? When Oppenheimer saw the first nuclear test, he said, okay, I've become a destroyer of wealth. I mean, I know exactly what's going on here. Did they know where, well, we still don't know what ends, of course, but did they know just how big that was? Yes and no. That's a very academic

answer. I'm sorry. I think they did. They had a grand vision. That was for sure. And the vision was that these protocols, the standards had to be open so that anybody can use them, not proprietary, so that any computer, whoever made it, could talk to any other computer anywhere in the world. And that's what makes the open internet run and enables you and I to talk and you and I to talk to America and China and Singapore and India. And that is really important that we protect that. What they didn't think about really was how you manage that on a global scale and what happened when the bad guys got hold of it. when the bad guys got hold of it.

I like to say that in the beginning, it was a league of gentlemen because there were a lot of women involved, but the people recognized as being the inventors are mostly men. And they set up the bulletin boards and ways of communicating between each other. And basically, if you did something wrong, you were taken aside and told not to do it.

But once you got the ability, once people who wanted to advertise things, so this is where people wanted to send out information to advertise, not the way we do advertising today, but just to tell other people that things existed. And you started getting blasts of emails and you were suddenly reaching people who were not necessarily going to behave in the way that the League of Gentlemen might have done. And then it really took off. So we were using the internet. I remember using it in the 1980s when I went to Southampton as a computer science lecturer and we started using email. So it was in the research lab, in the universities, in the big companies,

but it wasn't in homes. Nobody had personal computers. It wasn't an everyday thing. And what changed all that was Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the World Wide Web. So what Tim did, which a lot of people had been talking about, and you've been reading about people maybe like Ted Nelson. Ted Nelson invented the terms hypertext and hypermedia in the 60s, just as the internet was emerging. And he had this idea of a global information system where everything was linked up using hypertext, hyperlinking. He defined it,

and in many ways it was superior to Tim's system, but he didn't get what Tim got, which was if you built it on top of the internet in a decentralized way with open standards that anybody could use, in a decentralized way with open standards that anybody could use, then you would get the network effect and people would start using it in a way that made it greater than the sum of its parts. And what I think none of us really saw was how that might go toxic when it gets out of hand and pander to all the worst bits of human nature in many ways. Right. Well, that's obviously the big question of our age at the moment. We'll come back to that. But just to drill down for an absolute idiot like me, Tim's idea about websites, it was just about making access to this internet much, much easier.

Yes. HTTP, HTML. HTTP is the hypertext transfer protocol and html is the markup language so when you click on a link in a worldwide web page that sends a message across the internet using http to the computer whose address is in code in the html markup and then retrieves the information at that site tim's protocol sits on top of the internet and in some ways the World Wide Web is an application of the internet but it was the application that made it all take off because it was so easy to use. There was no central owner of this system so anybody once they'd learned how to do it and had downloaded the code from Tim's website initially, could set up a website and get going.

Governments are so protective of owning things, aren't they? And lots of technological developments in the past, particularly military ones, governments have tried to kind of own them and monopolise them and stamp them and control them. Did this one just slip away from them all because no one really understood what was going on apart from the people involved? Politicians, policymakers, civil servants, just nowhere near it. Nobody understood what was going to happen. I was one of the people I learned at the feet of Ted Nelson, right? And other people were involved. Vannevar Bush is the one that we all sort of cite all the time. His paper in 1945 called As We May Think, in which he described the Memex machine, which was a mechanical device. But the idea was you had documents that you could share with other

people in a global system. And Ted then built on that with his hypertext ideas. And then we had Douglas Engelbart, who everybody should know the name of, but nobody does. He invented Windows, a mouse, and clicking. And he gave his first demo of a working hypertext system in 1967 in San Francisco over the internet. 1967. And I learned at the feet of these guys. In the 80s, I was doing multimedia, what we call multimedia. And I discovered this idea of hypermedia and I got really interested in it there was a hypermedia conference that's where I met Tim right people were beginning to talk

there were lots and lots of different ways that you could build this sort of system we were building one at Southampton called microcosm but Tim's way was the one that succeeded because he built it on top of the internet if you like he used the internet to make it work and make it go global and work on the network effect but nobody could understand we used to go and talk to people in government in companies and say you really should get interested in this idea called the worldwide web you need to put your information on the worldwide web and companies would go well we've got our own document management system. What do I need to be on the World Wide Web for? What is it?

And when it was only a handful of websites, it was rather dull, right? There was not a lot to look at. I can remember the first thing we did with it at Southampton and many universities, because we had a relatively fast internet in a university, in a computer science department, we put our lecture notes onto the World Wide Web in 1993, I think. And so our students started looking at the web. And it very much grew from within the research lab and university base. Because Tim, obviously, he put it up.

He developed it in order to enable physicists to share information. He was at CERN at the time. So he was trying to get physicists to share information on the internet. And Tim and Robert Kye were trying very hard to get the very young european commission interested and cern weren't interested either they let tim make the code open access but they said we're physicists this is not core cern stuff if you want to do that sort of work you've got to go somewhere else that's why tim moved to mit in the states because he could get the money there to have a team around him to develop the code that was needed. Then he developed the World Wide Web Consortium. He set that up

to promote the use of the web and the development of the standards around the world. But having invented that code and then set it free on the world, was Tim Berners-Lee's job done. His creation has gone forth and multiplied. There's nothing he can do about it now, right? There's two things about that. Yes. One, that is true. I mean, if you look somewhere on the web,

it says what's the net worth of Tim Berners-Lee and it rates it very high. Tim's never made any money out of the web whatsoever. And he has always kept himself completely vendor neutral. He's never accepted any company money because to him, it was so important that this thing was for everybody. Do you remember at the Olympic Games, the London Olympic Games, when he was in the middle and he pressed that button and said, this is for everyone? It is what he meant for the World Wide Web. This is for everyone. And he won't be happy until

everybody on the planet has access to the internet via the World Wide Web. But of course, at the same time, he and all of us are worried about what's happened with it, the things that have gone wrong, and the way it's being misused, abused, used to control people, used to hurt people, used to steal from you, used to bully you, and all the hate speech and misinformation that we see now. As I said before, this is sort of the worst aspects of human nature on steroids on the web. I believe, I mean, I can't talk for him, but I think his mission now is to fix that. And he's got a new project called SOLID, which stands for social link data, which is really trying to re-decentralize the World Wide Web and give it back to the people and take it away from the monopolies of the tech companies that have grown up that so dominate the space and whilst as companies

they're not trying to do harm to the world the way they manage our information they have a lot of control over us and they play on our psychology to advertise to us to keep us using this technology and not necessarily doing great things with it. And, you know, we've got the tension between governments and the tech companies about who's responsible for censorship, who's responsible for managing our behavior. And I find that quite amazing because actually we're in this too. And there's a moral sense here as well as we can expect governments to regulate the big things. But I think we should learn to behave better. And that's about education. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit.

More from Professor Dame Wendy Hall on the internet and web after this. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb. And in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, and Webb after this. podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History we uncover the epic

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what is it also about those early years of the world wide web looking back decisions taken and not taken that fundamentally shape the nature of the World Wide Web, looking back, decisions taken and not taken that fundamentally shape the nature of the World Wide Web today? How could it have gone differently? Well, it's interesting you should say that. To answer your question, I'm going to tell you a story, right, if that's OK. So, Vint Cerf, the inventor of the internet, or the TCPIP,

his latest venture is the internet in space. You're going to love this. His latest report is the Internet for the solar system. It's all about how do we get an Internet to Mars? When I talk about this, I say, you wouldn't want to go to Mars without Netflix, would you? Now, technically, that is incredibly difficult. Doable, I think. Vince Report says it's doable, but it's all about how you get the packets from planet to planet and what you bounce them off of in order to get to where you want it to go. But the other thing that Vince Report says is the first chapter in his report is lessons learned. What did we do wrong with the first internet and the web that came on it that we need to do better this time.

And I think it comes down to, to a certain extent, thinking more about governance. Because when the governments didn't care about it, nobody cared about governance. So now we're in a situation where we have a critical infrastructure that is not owned or governed by anybody. And we don't want it to have a single owner or one government. It has to be something that belongs to the people. But at the same time, it needs to be well managed and well governed. And so Vince's thesis is, if we think about, you know, we've got a new playing field in terms of the internet in space, and we could then reflect that back onto how we manage things on this planet.

The big issue, which we write about in The Four Internets, is amongst democracies, you can sort of get an understanding of what you want to achieve with the internet, what's right, what's wrong. You can have a discussion about who should control the data, who should control the censorship. When you go to the non-democratic countries that have a completely different culture, like China and the other autocracies of this world, Russia, it's a very different debate. It's just the same as with the climate crisis. You have to have everybody at the table or you aren't sorting the problems out. And so it's a huge dilemma as to what type of internet do you want? Because different governments will want different types of internet and different mechanisms of control and different ways of managing the companies. Even China's realising it's got to manage its big companies in ways it hadn't thought about before. And we're all struggling in Europe and the US as to how do we deal with Google and Facebook and Amazon and WhatsApp?

So my point of view is I think we need to have a complete rethink about what this means and how we think about global governance of this incredibly important global infrastructure. But when it emerged, I remember Bill Clinton saying it's like nailing jelly to a wall. You can't control the internet. But China and other places have controlled the internet, controlled the World Wide Web. What happened there? Why did the internet's dream of this thing that would spread freedom and good information and defeat propaganda and authoritarianism, why has it done the opposite? Big question.

Sorry, Wendy, but that's a massive one. It is a big question. I can remember the early heady days of the World Wide Web. And we used to talk about the democratisation of knowledge because it was all about getting information to everybody. And there was this big dream that we would extend democracies because people would see the openness of information and learn more about the world they lived in and what they could have

access to. We've seen the experiments of the Arab Spring. And I think they're saying that with Tunisia, that's the last of the Arab Spring revolutions that led to a democracy that has now fallen back to a military autocratic government. And when the internet was spreading around the world, it went to China in the 1990s. I know the people who introduced the internet to China, the technology point of view, it works there the same as it does everywhere else. But the Chinese government saw quite quickly that it was not just a way to give information to people, disseminate information, it was also a way to control and work out who was saying what about what. And so from the very beginning, they established the principle that a company that

runs on the internet has to share its data with the government if they ask for it, which is a completely different principle to the one we have in the West, the principles of protecting people's privacy and security and data protection issues. And China is such a vast country, it can exist. And because of the language differences, it can afford to have its people not having access to the rest of the internet. Most of the people in China, if they can't speak a language other than China, are happy with the Chinese internet. They're gradually getting everybody onto the internet. And of course, China's introducing Africa to the internet.

It's putting a lot of money into that through the Belt and Road Initiative. And in the book, we talk about the role of India in the future because India's a democracy and it has 1.4 billion people, nearly as big as China. And the way India goes in terms of the internet, whether it stays as an open internet or it closes it down more, will actually shape the future of the internet is a big geopolitical issue here in the 90s when people getting very excited about the internet having

lots of ideas about it we thought this was yet another example of how the nation state was going to be overtaken and eroded in this new transnational globalized world we lived in but nation states have proved pretty able to kind of switch bits of it off or censor bits of it or do what they want to the internet. Why is that? Is it about mundane things like beacons and things that still physically have to exist in the territory of a state? And will that change when Mark Zuckerberg is bouncing internet off balloons and drones and things? Well, you've got Elon Musk with his satellites. Well, this is Vince's point about the internet and the solar system, because it isn't just about getting to Mars. It's about how we manage the internet at the satellite level too who manages that who governs that

where do we all get our signal from to do that every government has the ability because the internet basically at some level it's actually all about wires and cables running under the sea at the moment that transmits all this stuff. So there's always the ability for governments to actually physically cut off access to bits of the internet. The problem is for them that unless you're like China and you thought about this from the very beginning and you have a big enough scale to manage, basically China has all the things we have. It has search engines, it has shopping. It has gaming. It has its equivalent of Facebook and WeChat and everything. But that's all inside China.

Most other countries, including all of us democracies, everything's interconnected. So if you try and shut yourself off from the internet, you lose those connections, and you also lose connections within your country. Russia's trying very hard to take itself off the internet and create an intranet in Russia, but I think they're finding it much more difficult than they have openly discussed

because the way it's evolved, it's really quite hard to do that. But inside a country, I mean, India, if there's a problem in Kashmir, they'll shut off access to the internet. Egypt was the first to try it, but they soon have to switch it back on because they lose internal connections as well as external ones, and of course it destroys their business. So it's all too immersed as a society. They can't just switch it off and run without it.

But therefore, when we are bouncing it from space or low Earth orbit, then everything might change again. Absolutely. Yes, it might. And the balance of power will probably change. All the big technical countries, the countries that have the ability are going out into space now, either onto the moon or into the satellite space. And that's why I think Vint is sensible in saying, let's think about how it's going to work out there and then we can map that back down because that's where the change is going to come so instead of our internet packets coming under the sea in a cable and arriving in land's end it will come from a satellite and it's going to change everything potentially I got a funny feeling the Chinese going to work out a way of restricting that well I have a funny feeling they will too.

But I think that's where we could learn a lot from the Chinese, actually. There's several things about their system that is very credible. They have their social credit system, or they have the beginnings of one. The question for me is, could you run something like that in a democracy? This comes back to behaviour and education, saying to people, if you're racist in what you're doing, then we're going to take your account away. But of course, the question is, who judges whether you've done right or wrong in this space? It's so difficult. When you're talking to all your colleagues and your friends about the alien set,

do they have a particular thing that they wish they could change was there a little switch a little moment little decision or is it like the printing press is it just too too massive and destructive well the one i always give tim will probably hate me for this oh i don't know about hate me i'm not sure he would necessarily agree we've talked about this lots but ted nelson who came up with his hypertext system Xanadu, Tim's won out because it was open and it was free and universal. Ted had proprietary commands that he wanted to control, but he said that this will only work if the way you access information is using micropayments. And the big thing for me is the internet and the web as the application and all the Facebooks and the Googles and the Ebays,

they run on advertising. They have to get more information about us to customise the adverts to us and it drives that whole lack of who's got control over your data. And if we'd gone for a micropayment model, then we might not have needed advertising. If every time you wanted a piece of information, you paid a few tenths of a cent for something, like we do on mobile phone bills, that's the way you got your films. Because what happened with the way the web was designed was basically people had to give things away for free to get people to use their system. And when

they got enough people using their system, they could start advertising to them. And that was the business model. And I think if we'd gone the micropayment route that TED proposed, the business models would have been different. And so we might not have had these huge monopolies, tech companies, but we can't rerun that experiment. No, that ship has sailed. That's with the fascinating counterfactual, isn't it? And it would be a huge risk for somebody to come on and say, I've got this great idea for how I'm going to get you entertainment and movies and I'm going to do it all by micropayment

and not advertising. Just imagine taking that risk. Yeah. The first 30 years, here we are 30 years on. It has changed every aspect of our lives are the next 30 years going to be as revolutionary or less or more more it isn't just going to be what we do here on earth things are going to come at us from different ways we're between 50 and 60 percent of the planet on the internet so early 2020 was they reckon about

50 percent of the planet has access to the internet, which is amazing. That means that in 30 years, we've got 50% of the planet on the internet. Amazing. But it also means there's just under 50% of the planet's come on and most of those people live in rural China, rural India and rural Africa. So if in the next 30 years, we get to the point where 100% of the people on the planet, it could be the majority of the people using the internet might be using an internet that's more like a Chinese internet than a Western internet. That's just thinking about it as it is now, without all the changes that are going to come from the internet coming to us from space and satellite and how that all works out in terms of governments governing it and the economies of that system.

And does the internet move inside our bodies? Do we need devices? Oh, definitely. I think so. Oh, what a happy thought. Because we'll get a version of Google Glass. Apple are going to produce something, I think, soon, which you'll be able to see things on your glasses. something I think soon which you'll be able to see things on your glasses and it's very much coming from the gaming community that we will be having much more immersive interactions with the internet and before long it will be chips in your brain I expect. And then the exciting news is that we can all have brains like yours, Dame Wendy Hall. I hope not.

My husband would say that would be a nightmare. Well, I think it'd be a wonderful thing. I'd love to have a brain like yours. Thank you so much. Tell us the name of the book. Oh, Four Internets, Oxford University Press. Four Internets. Go and get everyone.

Thank you so much for making the time to come on the podcast. Oh, thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history,

our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate

listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial to that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.