Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - http www

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Alex Schmidt and special guest Jason Pargin explore why "http www" is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Http www known for being internet famous for being URL front nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun let's find out why Http www is secretly incredibly fascinating Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm very much not alone. Katie McCose is out this week. I'm joined by a wonderful returning guest. You know him from his many novels, including his latest as I'm starting to

worry about this black box of doom. It is on sale now. It's wonderful and he has further novels coming. Please welcome Jason Parchin. Jason, hey! So to pull back the curtain a little bit, we record these over Zoom like many podcasts are. And every time I come on here, every time I log in, the prompt in the window to ask me to add an AI assistant to my Zoom calls gets bigger to where now when you log in, it's a tiny little thumbnail up to the top, like previewing what you're about to do, like your face. And then the rest of the other 90% of the screen is AI zoom AI companion.

Turn on now. They're so desperate for me to, I guess, activate a robot that will do the podcast for me. I've never clicked on it. I'm scared to, but it is fascinating to watch the progress because I remember like a year ago coming on to podcasts and have a little thing at the bottom, like, Hey, we're testing fascinating to watch the progress. I remember a year ago coming on the podcast and having a little thing at the bottom like, hey, we're testing out a new AI companion. You want to see it? We're no more than six months away from it requiring you to use their

AI companion. You seem to be using a human to do this. Why? Why would you want to do it that way? We've just put the AI companion up. You know what? You'll thank us later. Yeah. People will be curious when the podcast adds a new voice that's a radio morning zoo crew person that I don't seem to talk to or acknowledge or anything. But we'll just say stuff and then they'll be like, Oh yeah. Like, and then there'll be like soundboard stuff. Your AI hype man. Yeah.

So enjoy, I think the last of the human, human only podcasts and Zoom calls and just civilization in general, we're coming to the end of it because anyway, that's not what today's show is about. I'm just noticing that in order to get onto this call to talk about this other thing, I had to leapfrog several AI prompts. You're so right, Jason. Toilet flush, clip of a song. Can't get rid of them. And we have a very technological topic today. Thank you to The Empire Strikes First and the Discord for suggesting it. And always start with our relationship to the topic or opinion of it.

Jason, how do you feel about the front of a URL like http://www? Well, the reason I know what all of those letters stand for is because I went to college for journalism and then it took me about a year and a half to realize that that industry was dying a hard death. So way back in the mid 90s, mid to late 90s, it's been around probably 1997 or so, I started training in this new thing called the internet because it was just getting started and every company in the world was like we need to one have a website but two we need our own internet within the company like

internal emailed we want all of our all the stuff do you take for granted now that all of your HR stuff and all that's online it's like in the company's own internet this was back when everybody was realizing they needed something like that and And I had the thought, I bet the future is not in making content for the internet, this new thing that's coming. I bet the future is in repairing all of this equipment and in setting up the software. So I went out and spent thousands of dollars

to try to get a certification in learning all of these protocols, networking, how to set up, how to maintain a network, all of this stuff that we're about to talk about today. And it was in trying to get that certification that I realized I should give comedy another try. Because while there's no doubt all of the jobs are going to be in this right here, I'm not the guy who's ever going to be the one to do it.

I bet I would have kind of done the same thing. When I was a kid, I tried to take a little class in just computer programming and coding, and I really couldn't stand it and realized like, oh, I should focus on everything else that I like better. Yeah, because with content creation, you just have to sound smart. When doing the technical stuff, you actually have to be smart. Do you feel like you retained anything from that course, or it just all kind of dropped out of your head?

I retained the terminology, and I retained the fact that it is way, way more complicated than you think. And so I'm not blaming the guy who suggested this as a topic. It is something that everybody should have some understanding of because your entire life and every single thing you do every single day depends entirely on these obscure protocols. But if nothing else, you will take away from this episode something that is very true about the world that it's easy to forget. That every single tiny little thing you touch,

everything, just grab something off the table next to you. Here, I got this two of chapstick. This is the result of somebody's obsession. Like this chapstick, this little twisting mechanism that makes the stuff come out of it, getting that little twisting mechanism right was some nerd's' lifelong obsession. You don't know their name,

and when you grab something like an iPhone, just making a button that can be pressed 30,000 times without getting squishy or without losing its connection. Like inside in there is some tiny microscopic little lever and spring mechanism that somebody that was their lifelong obsession was making that little clicky thing that works 30,000 times in a row over the life of the device. Because if that thing doesn't work, the whole device stops working and we'll never know

their name. And that the things we think of as inventions are really that. They're the accumulation of nerds with all of their obsessions building on these things and these protocols that start now, gosh, 60 years ago. And from that, the modern world exists. This one's almost on the level of an episode topic of like a chemical element or something. It's so fundamental to everything I do every day in my whole life. Yeah, you can't do anything without it now.

And again, this is so, it happened so fast because I was, when I was getting those certifications, again, I realized some of your listeners are too young to have lived in a world without the internet. I was an adult before the World Wide Web came around. I was born in 1975. So by 1995, again, when only a tiny fraction of households had internet connections, I was 20.

And I think 1996 was the first year I logged on or sent an email, and that's because a class made me do it. And I remember thinking at the time, what am I gonna to, like, it only works if I can find another nerd who also has email. None of my friends are on here. Like, what, what is this even for? I didn't get it at all. And also with the progression of it just being in our lives, I remember learning that the WWW stands for World Wide Web. I don't know if young people know that. And then I never ever learned what HTTP stands for.

That was just mysterious. And we never wondered or asked. I remember the day I tried to go to a website and started typing in the HTTP, you know, slash slash, and the person saying, well, you don't have to type that part. You just type. Yeah, I remember that too, actually, yeah. Yeah, you just type whatever, aol.com,

and it takes you there. It's like, really? The entire system doesn't crash if you accidentally put three slashes instead of two, really? When do they change that? It's like, I don't know, one of the versions of the browser is like, I haven't done that ever. Like, oh, okay.

It's so fun thinking about this in depth at all. And also like little programming notes, this episode, it's really kind of two topics about the topic. We'll talk about how HTTP colon slash slash www works, like the technology of it. But the other topic is like why it's global and essential and frictionless. Because there's tons of technologies that just never reach this stature or this prominence. And the other thing is if people love this history of the internet kind of stuff that will be part of the show, there's a past stiff with me and Jason talking about undersea cables.

It's a lot of fun because it turns out cables under the ocean are also the entire reason we have an internet along with this. And our first fascinating thing about this topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called... It's been a hard day's stats and I count numbers like a dog. It's been a hard day's stats. I enjoy rhythms, comma, log. And the name was submitted by Mina. Thank you Mina.

There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian Wacky and Best possible. Submit through the Discord or to sifpottagmail.com. I count numbers like a dog, the part that I have a problem with. It feels like there's got to be some other thing that rhymes with dog that is actually something that's known for counting. We'll work on it later. And this is a short number section just because the takeaways are highly numerical too.

But the first number frames the episode. It's a date range. It is 1962 to 1993. 1962 to 1993 is when this entire episode happens. It's when the entire HTTP www comes into being. The beginning is April 1962. That's when an MIT grad student named Leonard Kleinrock published a paper about information flow in large communication nets. That was the title,

information flow in large communication nets. That became one piece of his successful PhD dissertation. The next year he became professor of computer science at UCLA. Leonard Kleinrock is still, it's like an emeritus thing, but he's still a professor of computer science at UCLA. He is 91 years old. And then his paper is the first scientific publication about what later became known as packet switching, which is the start of this whole thing. Yeah, and packet as when they talk about it

in like information as a thing that goes along the wires with the information in it. That term, I love that term packet because that's a term that you immediately know, if somebody asks you, well, in information technology, what do you think a packet is? I'd be like, well, it's got to be a little thing of data, right? It's a packet of data. That is the last term you're going to hear today where it is intuitive as to what it actually means. I love that back in the 1960s, apparently, you could refer to something as a packet, going to hear today where it is intuitive as to what it actually means.

Back in the 1960s apparently you could refer to something as a packet and it's like, yes, that's intuitive. You're sending little bits of, hunks of data, packets of like, if you say we've lost packets of data, I know, I know, I get it. It's the same as losing a package in the mail. I get it. But this is an era in 1962, like this is a computer is the size of a building, right? The entire floor of a building.

So here's one of those things where everybody knew, just as everybody's known we would need AI, that's been in science fiction since before we had computers, everybody from the first time they built one of those computers knew it would be helpful if the computers could talk to each other because of course it would. This computer over here does the computations and sends the results over here. Like, to make the

system more powerful, you need them to talk to each other. So the idea, I think, was there even before they built the first machine. But note the dates here, 1962 to 1993. You're going to have an entire generation that's going to pass before you have something that looks like a worldwide web. It was 30 years of pecking away at this problem. That's right. And yeah, I hope focusing on Leonard Kleinrock doesn't make it sound like a lone genius kind of story.

We have so many really groups of people to talk about and we won't say all their names for sure because this is such a vast undertaking. So many people did that sort of making the button on the chapsticks kind of effort toward. Yeah. And it's not that they're not lone geniuses. It's that no one lone genius did it. It's an army of lone geniuses. This is the thing that I've made.

I made TikTok videos about this, that it's so funny to watch a movie like Back to the Future and see a character like Doc Brown. Because they used to have this character all the time. They had the character in Gremlins. It was the idea of one guy who builds an entire technology by himself. Because, again, Doc Brown didn't just build a time machine. He built a little nuclear reactor to run his car. And the idea that one person can do that, that's a Hollywood invention. But we love that idea of one guy running out of his garage and saying, I invented the internet. It's like, no.

It's an army of Doc Browns, all of them just as smart and just as obsessed. But there's no one guy with the knowledge to do the whole thing. And you can say the same thing about a thousand other technologies. Everybody is standing on the shoulders of other giants, mental giants. Yeah, a thousand percent. And with this timeline, the other end of it is April 30th, 1993. Because on that date, April 30th, 1993, the leaders of CERN signed and published a document relinquishing rights to the World Wide Web.

CERN, people may know the name as a particle accelerator place, it's the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The acronym CERN comes from the French language name. They're most famous for particle physics experiments with a big accelerator in France and Switzerland and then along the way they owned the idea of a worldwide web a WWW Will link a scan of their statement. It was about one page popular mechanics has an upload One part of it says quote CERN's intention in this is to further compatibility,

common practices and standards in networking and computer supporter collaboration, end quote. So just making the whole world fit together and communicate with itself. Juan, think of how much this doesn't happen if there's a European internet and an American internet and a Chinese internet and a Japanese. Like if every country had had their own incompatible standards, if they had all, if you could not send an email to somebody on the other side of the world or if you could not link to a router from here to there or a server from here to there because they're operating on different protocols. We take it for granted that all of this stuff works.

That's not something that just automatically happened on its own. These are decisions that were made to give away certain technology, to give away certain standards to not be territorial about some of this stuff. Because to make the internet work, it needed to be worldwide. That was the magic of it. This was the utopian ideal of the internet in the early days, that is a worldwide web that's going to tie us all together.

And again, we take it for granted, but this decision they made was momentous. Yeah, man, if continental Europe had kept WWW to itself, and America built its own three initial one. It's definitely USA dot whatever, right? Like a thousand percent. That's where we're going. But the other thing to note is that this is all for a long time through this process, all going to be government funded stuff. These are going to be university labs. This is CERN. This is all government money poured into something that private industry would not have done on their own

because it took a long time for anybody to make any money off this. So like any potential profit from this thing was way over the horizon. This is something they're gonna nurse along, we're gonna go through it, but they're gonna nurse this along for decades in the way that only a government project can.

Again, that's one reason why it's not every company has their own internet. It's because this is something that had to have been the coordination of problems here could only be solved by governments working together. And then later, companies made trillions of dollars off of it, but Jeff Bezos doesn't get to have Amazon without all of this groundwork getting laid first. Yeah, exactly. Maybe an easy comparison for people is the interstate highway system.

That needs to exist for all the Amazon trucks to make money going back and forth. I just love this statement about we're giving away the World Wide Web to make computers more compatible and network everybody more easily. They succeeded. I love it when a scientific goal or project goal just 100% they did it. There was basically the extra knock-on effect of people making money, and that's not incompatible with what they were going for. They set out to do a goal, they achieved it, and we're all living in it.

It's great. Because this technology, they don't even have this in Star Trek. Yes. A thing that you can just access that has everybody's information everywhere, they didn't even conceive of that in the utopian ideal of Star Trek. So yeah. Yeah, I know Star Wars is more of a rundown environment, but like in something like Rogue One, where they're trying to get physical drives from place to place and you live in a wifi world, it's kind of funny. It's kind of funny to think about. You can easily see it.

You can see a civilization never arriving at this, never stumbling across this because of whatever, you know, security fears or people being too territorial or not seeing the benefit of like, well, why should we let other people around the world access our, the stuff on our server? And it's like, yeah, it is. There's a certain utopian vision here that like, I don't think anybody back in 1969 or whatever, if you tried to explain to them what Skivity Toilet is, they probably would have struggled to get how we got there from where they were.

Since we mentioned Back to the Future, I'm thinking of, hey, listen to this with the phone, and then it's Skivity Toilet audio. So again, our entire timeframe for how this topic happened, 1962 to 1993, there's lots of other key dates. One of them is 1969. If folks know internet history, that's the first time two computers talk to each other. It was an experimental US system called ARPANET. The other key date is probably 1983. 1983 was the year of adoption of an internet

protocol called TCPIP, which we'll talk about a whole lot. TCPIP. There's no chance we'll cover every person and development in this entire story. We're focused on HTTP, WWW elements and each of them a little bit separately too. Yeah, and the TCP IP, this is the stuff I remember learning exactly how it worked and that knowledge does not exist in my brain anymore. But I do remember being amazed by it because the concept of you would think that the idea of, okay, sending this information from this computer

to that computer, well, that's easy. You got a wire between them, you send it over the wire somehow. But the whole thing with the internet is the information has to be able to find its way. It's like a swarm of ants trying to find their nest, or whatever. It has to be able to move across this network and bounce from here to here to here, and take these hops and arrive freaking across the ocean if necessary. We're going to bounce from here to here to here and take these hops and arrive freaking across the ocean, if necessary. We're going to get into the complexity of it, but what it does is borderline magic. And the other number before takeaways is July 2016. It's a quick number. July 2016 is when

the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a non-binding resolution about, quote, the promotion, protection, and enjoyment of human rights on the internet, end quote. On the one hand, non-binding UN resolutions don't affect anything, but on the other hand, it is a clear framework for the idea that open access to an uncensored and global internet is now an idea we have as a fundamental human right. Before it even existed, we didn't really conceive of it, but it builds on our other ideas of human rights and HTTP www makes that human right possible. It's really cool.

Yeah. And some people object to this concept because it's like, well, why should you have the right to an internet connection? But if every company in the world wants to go to where, for example, if you're banking, if you can only bank online, then yeah, access to that has to be considered human right. If every single organization, every institution, they all demand you have a smartphone, whether you're applying for a driver's license

or anything else. If they're going to move to that world, then yeah, access to that is now not optional. This is not about looking up funny toilet animations anymore. It's about, it's hard to convey this if you're not old enough to remember, but in the 90s, the whole thing was with the internet

was that it is just a toy. It's chat rooms, it's people stealing songs, to convey this if you're not old enough to remember. But in the 90s, the whole thing with the internet was that it is just a toy. It's chat rooms, it's people stealing songs, it's trading funny photos that took a half hour to load. But it was purely a time waster. You're surfing the internet, you're wasting time at work. So I think some old people still have it in their mind that it's like, oh, you think to be able to screw around

on YouTube is human right? It's like, well, you want you think to be able to screw around on YouTube as human right? It's like, well, no, we live in a different world now. You can't function basically. Yeah. And even like a physically different world. Like I didn't really work at this time, but there was a time when you would see your emails when you happen to be bothering to use a machine that had the emails on it. And otherwise people could not expect you to look at that.

And now it's different. Like, yeah, it's just the way it is. Some of us had a computer room in our house. It's the room that had the computer in it. You would go on the computer and then you would read your email or whatever and then you would turn it off completely. And then you would walk away. And for the rest of the day, you were not on the computer. You were living in the real world the whole time. It was like a separate thing you had to jack into, like the matrix. And folks, there's plenty more numbers to come,

but they're in many takeaways. And this first thing gets us into so much of what the heck this topic is, because mega takeaway number one, HTTP and WWW are two additional protocols built on top of the dominant protocol that makes a global and open internet possible. We're going to use the word protocol 700 more times in this podcast. What do we mean when we say, what does protocol mean in the world of computing and networking?

As I was compiling this, I kept thinking of the word standard. It's basically just an agreed upon format or standard for stuff. And protocol is just the word internet people like to use for that. In this technology, protocol is the term they use that it's like we are all agreeing that when the computers talk to each other, this is what this action means. Yeah. And unlike the world's languages that are spoken, unlike electrical plugs, the internet pretty much runs on one protocol for everybody.

The dominant one is TCPIP, the five letters you mentioned before, those have a slash in the middle, it's TCP slash IP. So then HTTP and the WW, those are both built on top of the TCPIP. And we'll explain what those letters and statements meant. I know it's still confusing. We're gonna try to make it as simple as

possible because infamously there's been there's an old meme with a politician years and years ago was trying to explain in Congress like how the internet worked. It was during somebody's congressional territory testimony talking about how the internet's like a series of tubes. I think Ted Stevens from Alaska, I think. Yeah, an elderly man trying to understand how this system works and trying to put it into terms that we're familiar with. This is what you're tempted to do, is to try to explain. Imagine it's like a hamster cage, and the data is like a hamster running along one of those plastic tubes, and he's carrying it in his mouth.

You're trying to bring it into terms, everyday terms, that helps you visualize it. Very difficult to do it accurately. Because that's the whole thing, is that none of this was intuitive to the people building it because the challenge they're trying to overcome is astronomical. You're trying to connect billions of machines. Machines that are all manufactured by different manufacturers. Sometimes we're running on different operating systems. They have totally different capabilities and processors and everything else, but they've all got to be able to talk to each other seamlessly in

a way that you don't even notice. It seems obvious now that it's already done, and you take it for granted, this was a mind-bending problem they were trying to solve. And I'm glad you bring up that series of tubes statement. It was a senator named Ted Stevens who was in the Senate for about half a century. So he was trying to figure out the internet. And one of our key sources basically references that. It's a book called Tubes, A Journey to the Center of the Internet.

It's by tech and design journalist Andrew Blum. Another key source is another book called How the Internet Happens from Netscape to the iPhone. And that's by tech writer and TED Talks resident Brian McCullough. And then Linking an Amazing Feature for Popular Mechanics by tech writer David Grossman. And a great web series by the team at SciShow on YouTube. The key to episodes are hosted by Olivia Gordon and by Hank Green. Kind of like Jason said, with this topic, we're going to explain it in a way that makes sense and also you could always dive deeper on the technology. Going to link Popular Mechanics

and also the personal blog of engineer James Marshall for lots more nitty gritty on TCP IP, HTTP, and www. www stands for World Wide Web. I feel like young people may not know that. And then HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The HT is hypertext and then transfer protocol. We'll explain that more later. When you see those in a URL,

that means the URL works with both of those. And then both HTTP and WWW are from the development of TCP slash IP. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol. IP stands for Internet Protocol. But it's pretty simple what those do in a general way. You've got TCP and IP. TCP transmission control protocol is a format for dividing information

into packets, taking the entire set of information and breaking it down into very small packets. And then IP is a format for the destination where the packets are going. So an IP address is the destination for packets on the internet. And that part makes the most sense to me. Because an IP address is just a series of numbers. So like, OK, numbers are something computers understand. So if I'm going to whatever, clowns.com,

clownriddles.com, whatever, that address is also tied. Do we have the same home page? We have the same home page.com, whatever. That address is also tied. Do we have the same homepage? We have the same homepage. That's amazing. It's tied to an IP address, which is a thing that the computer would understand, which is just a big old long string of numbers. And it's long enough that you can have trillions of them. And I know that they eventually had to change it because even that was finite and how many you could assign. But that part kind of makes sense. These are all robots talking to each other and they speak in numbers.

So an IP address is just in this metaphorical web where this is the thing you're trying to reach and talk to. The packets, I made that the beginning of our timeline because they make an internet possible. It's easy to understand them if we start with what came before, which is circuits. In the SciShow video, Olivia Gordon's go-to example is old phone calls, where you have a telephone switchboard operator, and they're switching a cord from one socket to another socket to link two phones.

That's called circuit switching. The internet thing we're talking about is packet switching. So circuit switching is you need one continuous connection between two things. And then people like Leonard Kleinrock said, that kind of system would make it incredibly limited and wonky to link more than two computers at all. If we do something where we break down the information into lots of little units, we can have a network of machines send the packets from machine to machine in all sorts of orders and in all sorts of starting

and stopping in a way that makes actually linking computers possible. So they basically invented the internet, but as a step that's different than inventing a phone call. Yeah. And this is as simple as it can be made to still be understandable to a lay person. But yeah, none of the rest of it. Because the idea of transmitting data had been, you know, obviously you have the telegraph, then they upgraded that to voice calls. Yeah.

Like you could use, I think, the telegraph as a metaphor for it where you're sending pulses because the telegraph was sending Morse code. So it's like a pulse of electricity. It's just that you need something more complex than that pulse. Like a packet has more information than that. But similarly, it has to be something

that's contained enough that it can hop from stop to stop to stop and kind of figure out where it's going along the way. Without that first, figuring out a technique of breaking the data down into packets, without that none of the rest of this happens. None of the rest of it is possible. Because now you're still just talking about trying to directly connect to computers and that's not what the internet is. The whole idea is that you don't have to be directly connected.

Exactly, and I'm glad you mentioned going from computer to computer to computer because that's the other element of TCP IP is that you can tell it the eventual IP address it's going to and then these packets are not only broken down into small units but they can go through the network in all sorts of different ways or whatever the most direct route is that makes networking computers possible. Otherwise it would just be one at a time selecting which second computer you want to talk to which would not work for any of the practical purposes that we use an internet for. And also, Kleinrock, there's an odd thing where he was one of three different people who sort of parallel invented this packet switching because they each focused on a different advantage of packet switching.

Packet switching is highly efficient. It also lets one line of communication work with lots of different machines because it can basically switch from job to job to job on the same line. Third advantage is packet switching lets you distribute information across a network. So no one machine is totally crucial to the entire system being able to hold together. And so those advantages, the first advantage efficiency was what Leonard Kleinrock was most interested in. And he published about it in a public way because that's just a general advantage. And then in parallel, a British computer scientist named Donald Davies was excited about that second advantage of one line of communication working with lots of different machines. By the way,

Davies also coined the name packet, that very good name for these units of data. And Davies was hoping to maximize Britain's telecom infrastructure. He said the limited amount of telecom lines in Britain, we can help scientists and also commercial businesses if just that one line can do more for them. And then the third advantage of the system not needing to be dependent on just one central machine or one hub. That was exciting to Paul Baran. And he was American like Kleinrock, but he was working on secret projects at the Rand Corporation for the Cold War US government. And his interest in

decentralization was partly driven by if the Russians execute a series of nuclear strikes on the United States, what communication system would keep running? Now see, this is what I was told was the origin of the early Internet and then ARPANET and all of that. I was told that, and I think I learned this in college, that the whole idea back then on the United States side was they wanted a system that would continue running even if the Russians wiped out 80% of it in a nuclear strike. In other words, instead of having a central tower that sends out signals, if they take that out then the whole system goes dark. They wanted something that could keep running with whatever of the network was left. So you have a net of routers and switches and servers and that

the packets of data were what would let it travel across that and get to whoever remains on the network rather than the whole thing going dark. Like a clickbait title for this podcast would be how the nuclear war gave us skibbity toilet. But of course the reality is you've just pointed out... Because it mutated the toilets, right. a skibbity toilet. But of course the reality is you've just pointed out is that- Because it mutated the toilets, right. Right, right, right. That version of history does what we always do with our history in the United States, which is we omit everyone who's not American, that a lot of this is from Europe and that

this is a lot of parallel invention. Because everybody, much like flight, we think of the Wright brothers as being the first people to have the idea of what if we could just, of having to walk along the ground on our legs. It's like no, they were part of a scene. There was a bunch of engineers all trying to solve not the concept of flying, but very specific challenges having to do with control and weight and how it was motorized. There was very specific, again, nerd obsession things they were trying to solve, and the same thing here. The Wright Brothers one is always the funniest to me because it's as if no one else had ever seen birds

or insects or, like, come on, people thought about this, be a bum. Yeah, and everybody was racing to try to be the ones to do prolonged, like, motorized flight. Like it was, but it was a whole scene. They all knew each other, they were all competing with each other, to try to be the ones to do prolonged motorized flight. But it was a whole scene. They all knew each other. They were all competing with each other.

And it's like, well, I heard this guy in whatever, in Germany, I heard he went 20 meters on his. And they're all trying to beat each other. And the same thing here. In the early days of the internet after this, there's going to be this whole scene of like at-home hacker types, including guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, people who are just part of this scene of, you know, buying this hardware and screwing around with it and trying to make software and back when

you could kind of do that stuff, you know, at home. But yeah. Right. Yeah, like it's the second Northern California gold rush. Just everybody is a prospector running over there and trying to do it. And yeah, and in this early stage also, it involves a lot of, like we said, universities and governments because they just had the resources and the giant computers. That packet switching is one of many discoveries and ideas that leads to the first connection between computers. The data is October 29th, 1969.

And that's when a computer at UCLA supervised by Leonard Kleinrock, the US packet switching guy. That's when a UCLA computer talked to a computer at Stanford. I know I say talk to because that's slang, but it transmitted information. Those were two of a set of four machines built by the US Department of Defense. The Defense Department ran a program with the acronym name ARPANET at UCLA Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. And for this episode's topic, those initial transmissions are not all that interesting.

What's interesting is that within a couple years, making computers talk to each other got more complicated because four machines all for one program in one country, they are formatted to talk to each other. But then additional computer scientists set up additional computers at other US universities and defense labs. Then other countries like the UK and Norway build their own computers. And pretty soon these different engineering teams, different institutions, they found that, hey, you

format your packets differently than us. And the short-term solution was just these extremely skilled coders who only think about computers, figured out ways to sort that out. But the more you try to bring an internet beyond a few incredibly technical people, you need a simpler system. Yeah, and I suspect that some of, we're going to get into in a moment here, some of the improvised solutions they have to kind of like slap together to make stuff work. I suspect that some of their clutches still exist. I think there's probably along the way here some decisions that were just made spur of

the moment by one guy on a Friday afternoon that we now, we still live with to this day. Again, why were we having to type those letters at the beginning of web addresses for so long? It's like, well, for a while, that was the way you told the computer what you were trying to reach. Yeah, it used to matter. And I'm glad you used that word, cludge. Learned that in the process of researching this. Cludge is computer programming slang for a hack together one time solution.

And my favorite one in the early internet, Andrew Blum writes about a 1973 computing conference in the UK, it's in Sussex. Some of the participants said, hey, what if we link a UK computer to ARPANET in the US for the first time ever? They put together a one-time connection through a satellite orbiting the earth to connect the UK conference with the US. That was not a stable way of doing it. They had to figure out new ways later. And it also led to probably the least scientific use of the internet of all time at that point. Because 1973, it's

really only been used by researchers and important institutions. But again, this guy, Leonard Kleinrock, he goes from LA to attend that UK conference, flies home to LA, realizes he left his electric razor back at the hotel. And then that satellite connection, that clutch they threw together was still set up at the moment. So he used the equivalent of a chat room to chat someone to mail him his razor from Britain to California, which is not an important use of it, but it was still hooked up. So he was like, why not? Yeah. And they are bouncing this signal off of a billion dollar satellite in outer space to

transmit that around the globe. But that's now, don't even think about it, that you will text somebody in China about some package they've not mailed you yet. And you don't think about how many different pieces of hardware were involved in getting that message to them because we just take it for granted. No, this is brand new. Only in the last 30 some years has any human on earth ever been able to just instantly talk to somebody on the other side of the planet via text or instantly send them data or images or whatever. That's how long it went from being magic to being, oh, of course I can do that. Why

wouldn't I be able to? So speedy, yeah. Moving one year beyond that 1973 conference, basically two phenomena happen at the same time. As soon as 1974, people sketch out the workable basics of what became TCPIP. They start saying, let's sketch out one protocol, one standard, one format for networked computer information to travel for an internet. But at the same time, the other phenomenon is that other institutions are setting up their own individual computer networks at a really rapid rate. And Andrew Blum says that by the early 80s, big computer companies like IBM, Xerox, or Digital Equipment Corporation, and large government agencies like NASA and the

Department of Energy were running their own independent computer networks, each with its own acronym name. And he lists a ton of them. High energy physicists used something called HEP-NET. Space physicists had SPAN. Magnetic fusion researchers had MFE-NET. I'm stunned high energy physicists and magnetic fusion researchers did not collaborate. That's great. Do you think it's related? And there were a couple different ones in Europe. There were a bunch of little regional ones in the US, especially Midnet and Westnet and

Northwestnet. And Blum says the trouble is that the networks weren't connected and they operated in effect as private highways. The main thing they shared is that the networks weren't connected and they operated in effect as private highways. The main thing they shared is that they were all using the lines of the public telephone system, but otherwise they were independent of each other. You're throwing all these acronyms out there. You have to understand that to make this into the one unified thing we think of today was a lot of work because the development happened in parallel with all of these different companies, all in parallel with all of these different companies, all these different universities, all these different groups who all had an

interest in being able to network their machines, but not necessarily networking the world. That wasn't a thing yet. It's almost mind-bending, at least from where I'm standing in time, to imagine it because as people are using networked computers and sending each other emails, it doesn't have any of the URLs or the HTTPs or the WWWs that I'm used to. Apparently the first email systems, some people on ARPANET had a paper map of which computers were connected to each other.

So you could punch in which computers you needed to specifically send the message through. You need to think about it. And then this got a lot hairier starting in the late 1970s when commercial businesses tried to sell a tiny subset of an internet to customers, everyday consumers. Hank Green says one of the big ones was run by the tech company CompuServe. In the late 1970s, CompuServe, they just had a bunch of computers and servers and power, and they started offering a service called Micronet, which was a set of computers that talked to each other. You could read a digital version of a newspaper

was the biggest feature. But then also CompuServe restricted Micronaut users to just nights and weekends at specific hours because their machines needed to do different computing labor for bigger corporate clients and business clients during the weekdays. Now in the 1980s, you would see ads for CompuServe. And I didn't know what it was. It wasn't clear what it was for. It was purely nerd hacker stuff. But keep in mind, in the 1980s, you're starting to get this in the culture.

Like the film War Games is about a hacker who goes over the phone lines with his computer and hacks into the Pentagon's network. And the whole thing is, at the time, this was like magic. A person at home is in our system somehow? How is that? Then the movie Weird Science, they get into a government database and create an AI girlfriend or whatever. That also was treated as a form of magic. But you started to get this idea of people using phone lines to use their computer to talk

to other computers and to draw data from everywhere. That was the ancient BBS systems, a lot of the chat rooms and stuff. It was ultra nerd hacker stuff. Because to have the gear to do this cost more than a car at the time. This is a few very privileged people being able to do this stuff. CompuServe was not for the masses. It was for a few nerds. It was in magazines, I think, like Popular Mechanics. I think there'd be ads for CompuServe And I remember looking at it, like, yeah, but what is it for? Because I didn't even have a PC at the time.

That was something that a few rich kids had. They had Apple computers. It's like, yeah, but what is it? Why would I want to be able to talk to his computer? But no, it was the 80s when the whole idea of a cyber future started to percolate into the culture. Yeah, even the pitch from CompuServe of you can read a newspaper on it. I'm sure people at the time were like, yeah, a newspaper, I get a newspaper.

Like what are you, okay? Like sure. It's this harsh screen. It's like green text on black background. Why would I want to read something like that? It hurts my eyes. Yeah. Like, if I go to a store, I could get a newspaper and a donut. You know what I mean?

Like, come on. Think about it. And yeah, and so it truly was wizard stuff, like people with the extremely specific money and time and skills to bother to do it. Not that you have to be magic. It's just it was a very limited subset of the population was using networked computers and these protocols

changed that. And on New Year's Day 1983, people had codified TCPIP enough and also convinced the people running ARPANET to use that. So on New Year's Day in 1983, they flipped a switch that made ARPANET's information run on the TCP IP system. Andrew Blum says it was such a big engineering task. One system admin made buttons for people to wear that read, I survived the TCP IP transition. And people were proud to wear them. This was an enormous landmark achievement.

And we were relatively lucky that lots of scientists got on board with it and that ARPANET was central enough to the US's systems, which were central enough to the world's systems. We lucked into lots and lots and lots of unheralded people making that early internet run one way in a way that kind of made it possible for regular people to use it from there. We cannot convey the stress, the collective anxiety and stress and sleepless nights that it takes to make something like this happen. If you have ever lost a night of sleep trying to troubleshoot your own computer because you had lost some work, a paper for school, or you needed it to log in or whatever, and you spent all night

trying to fix some incredibly frustrating error message and then you briefly got it to go away and then it came back and then you started getting a different error message. This is like that, only there's nobody you can ask for help because you're inventing it and you're trying to do something that's can ask for help because you're inventing it. And you're trying to do something that's never been done before. And you're trying to work with people on the other side of the planet and people with different motivations and different funding. Because now you're getting institutions depending on it.

Now you're getting money. Now you're getting government money being spent. Now you're getting companies saying, hey, there's going to be real money in this soon. We're going to be able to fire a whole lot of people and automate a lot of tasks with this soon. So yeah, the pressure is on and we don't appreciate that enough that somewhere there's somebody freaking out about every little thing. Absolutely. Yeah. Also, partly nobody knew they were doing it because they hadn't done the change yet that got people excited about the internet broadly. That was a sea change.

People wanted to join this thing that's easier because it's one format. By the fall of 1985, more than 2,000 computers were on it. By the end of 1987, 30,000 computers. End of 1989, 159,000 computers. And today there's at least two billion internet users, many of them with more than one device that can access it. You know what that world is like now. And as recently as the mid 1980s, the internet was kind of just for wizards. But making everything run on one format made it possible for that change to happen.

And also a lot of the people who are billionaires today in tech are that first generation of guys. They're people who happen to have gone to college right when this stuff was new and they were lucky enough to go to a college that had a computer. Because if you went to college in the 60s or 70s, going to a college that had a computer, because if you went to college in the 60s or 70s, going to a college that had a computer

was the equivalent of having a helicopter on campus. Like you had access to tinker with a thing, this is what Bill Gates had, this is what a lot of these guys had, that not everybody had. Some people are still thinking in terms of, oh yeah, this university would be able to transmit a research paper instantly to this university

and the scientists there can read it. It's like, no, everybody, everybody can transmit everything all the time. Every thought they have, they can transmit it to the whole world. You don't understand. This is not making it faster for banks to send transactions back and forth. This is for banks to send transactions back and forth. This is changing the way the brain works, changing the way the species works. One other idea on top of that too, it's from a Columbia Law School professor, Tim Wu. He suggests that the one mental scheme that people had for this kind of TCPIP thing where just everyone can do it on one format was pre-existing telephone line networks. Because the internet was running on those networks and also phones systems in the US

were at least somewhat decentralized and universal by 1983. And part of that is luck. In January 1982, one year earlier, there was a legal decision that broke up the Bell phone monopoly in the US. In 1982, one year earlier, there was a legal decision that broke up the Bell phone monopoly in the US. But he suggests that the one comparison people could make easily, I guess the other would be letter mail through the postal service or something. But if you buy a phone at the store in the US, it'll work on the US phone system.

You plug it in and it makes sense. And it's for everybody. That infrastructure and that concept helps people conceive of an internet that's for everybody and not just some really specific little network for a few people. Yeah, of getting to a world where you don't have to talk to anyone face to face ever again. Like phones took us part of the way there, but we're going to get to a point where people will think it's weird if you want to talk to them face to face. That's our goal. You can do all the communication without leaving your room. Order food someday.

Yeah. I mean, the face is a source of shame and it should be hidden. But yeah, and this might seem a little roundabout that now we're getting to exactly how HTTP was on top of this, but you need to know everything about the miracle of TCPIP for it to make sense. HTTP, again, that is hypertext transfer protocol. Hypertext transfer protocol. And it's basically an idea from the 1960s that was then layered on top of TCPIP. And the 1960s idea is hypertext.

Hypertext, the word was coined to mean text that extends to other text. The idea is from the 1940s. Back in 1945, a computer scientist named Vannevar Bush wrote an essay called As We May Think. And it was read widely. It was in the Atlantic magazine. It was not a secret or something. But the theory was a machine that he named the MemEx. And the idea was the machine could store and retrieve information as easily as a brain

does. We just make associative links between things in our minds. His idea was what if one document, one concept in the MemEx just leads to another seamlessly. People build hypertext links between things long before we had an internet. A few episodes we've talked about what's called the mother of all demos. It was a tech demonstration in 1968 by computer scientist Douglas Engelbart. In 1968, he showed just a contained set of hyperlinks between various pages. And so then people built hypertext links in their 1970s networks before we had TCPIP. And then a step toward turning that into one protocol was in 1980 when a British computer

scientist named Tim Berners-Lee started a very temporary six-month contract to work basically freelance at CERN. CERN mainly is doing particle physics research and nuclear research. Tim Berners-Lee was support staff. The idea was, can you help us just link together the nuclear research we've done? He was only there six months, but he built an entire database where there was hyperlinks putting together all the information. But it's not a internet for everybody yet.

It's just the networks, computers at CERN. And then luckily from there, in 1983, the US switched to TCPIP happens. Later in the 1980s there's better internet connections between the US and Europe, so that influences European systems to want to use TCPIP. And then in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee returns to work at CERN for a new job, immediately revives his old idea. And he and a colleague named Robert Kayu write a proposal for a robust hypertext system, unifying all the information and documents at CERN using one single protocol for the hypertext. So HTTP is one standard for hypertext

built on top of TCP IP. And again, that was a lot of years, a lot of people. It took a lot of labor to make this simple and easy. Yeah, and the first time I ever saw Hyperlink, I remember it vividly, but it was pre-internet. It was in high school, I think. They had their PC there and there. We didn't have a computer lab right then. We had one weird teacher at a computer in his classroom. And he had on, it would have been CD-ROM or maybe on floppy disk, but it was like the Encyclopedia Britannica or something. But he was showing us, and they did whatever encyclopedia this was,

it did links the way now, it's just automatic. If you're in Wikipedia, it's like a parrot is a type of bird and then bird is the link you can click on and now you're on the page for birds. Or he was showing us that and it made total sense. I remember being totally unimpressed by it. It's like, well, okay, that's, I guess, slightly easier to get from one page of the encyclopedia

to the next or whatever. Did not realize I was looking at the future, but now it's one of those things that it's like, well, of course it works that way. If there's a term you're unfamiliar with, you'd be able to, you click it and it brings up a thing telling you, it's like, well, yeah, but that did not exist prior to like 1980 something. The concept was brand new to humanity.

It was the stuff of science fiction and just thought experiments prior to that. Exactly. Yeah. And it's easy to take it for granted as one piece of the broader thing. HTTP, it's almost like a constitutional amendment for TCP IP. TCP IP means the whole internet's on one format. HTTP means the hypertext will be one format too. And then it took a further and different step to develop the idea of WWW, a worldwide web.

Because until Tim Berners-Lee returned to working at CERN, we had an internet, but we didn't have a web. That had not been invented yet. These were not interchangeable ideas yet. And the word internet is actually from the 1970s. It's from the longer word internetworking. Because internetworking was the challenge. The internet is a network of networks. You are making networks talk to each other. And

the coinage of the web idea is from 1991. A couple of decades later, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a basically proposal on CERN's internal computer network, saying, what if we have a global internet based on HTTP, which is based on TCP IP, and then that replaces the prior system of separate internets with names like ARPANET and HEPNET and EUNET. And that feels default now, but it was mostly a philosophy, and it needed to rely on HTTP and TCP IP and the other prior protocols to exist. And to get everybody to agree to a protocol. Yeah.

And for not anybody to insist on their proprietary one that they thought was better or whatever. Because the ones they used, I don't know that they are the best of the ones. They are the ones they agree to use. Most protocols where people have agreed to a standard, it's just the one that they could get everybody to agree to use. Most protocols where people have agreed to a standard, it's just the one that they could get everybody to agree to. There's a whole issue in the last couple decades with electric vehicle charging. Having a charging standard that every vehicle uses when every company wants their own. It's this whole deal. The one they wound up with is not the absolute best possible one. It's the one that, through whatever deals were made, is the one they wound up with is not the absolute best possible one. It's the one that through whatever deals were made is the one that they...

But yeah, none of this works unless everybody agrees on a standard and that's ultimately what would happen for the most part. That's right. And yeah, and so the WWW indicates both technologically and philosophically that your web address is part of the agreement. It's part of the deal. And then HTTP is an extra part of the main part of the formatting that makes it all work. And that's why it's there at all. And it's also why it was a gradual process of not seeing it in URLs anymore.

Because when it was first introduced, it was not necessarily universal. It was one idea. And I remember distinctly being in school when I took a class explaining what the Internet was and they made it very clear the worldwide web and the Internet are two different things, you should not switch the two terms interchangeably. They lost that battle immediately from the very first day people were getting their AOL accounts on their PCs at home. I'm going on the internet or I'm going on the web. They thought it was just two terms for the same thing. There was never a time in my life when people actually knew what the distinction was.

Again, I had never thought about it until researching this. It's thrilling. And folks, that's a humongous amount of technology. We're gonna take a short break, then get a lot weirder with the World Wide Web and with Hypertext Transfer Protocol. We're back and we're back with three further takeaways. And I wanna let people know they'll all pretty much revolve around Tim Berners-Lee, who is one British person that we described just before he dominates the second half of the episode. Especially takeaway number two, Tim Berners-Lee picked the name WWW after brainstorming several much sillier ideas,

including Tim. It could have been T-I-M, which is Tim Berners-Lee's name. I am fascinated by through history where you have some inventions that forever are a guy's name because they insist. Like the exercise Pilates. Do people realize there's a guy's name because they insist. Like the exercise Pilates, like do people realize that there's a guy named that? That's why that's what that is. It's not named after a philosophy. There's a person. I did not know that. Because once upon a time it's like, no, this engine will be known as the Henderson Johnson motorization. So here he had a choice to make. Do I want to try to stamp my name

on this as if it was my idea? Or do we go with something that's just more universal? I'm always the most fascinated with those when it's a negative or tragic thing. I don't know anything about Dr. Alzheimer, but he really was good with it. He was like, yeah, think of me with this all the time. Yeah, actually, it is possessive. It's his. It's like he came up with it. Like, I've got an idea for the worst thing.

And I've trademarked it. Think of me. And his kids are like, dad, I don't know. Hey. And his grandkids are like, same question. Great grandkids, same question. I am Dr. Crone. I want to be known.

I want to be remembered forever. And yeah, I just love this takeaway. The key sources interviews with Tim Berners-Lee himself, especially at Reddit AMA in 2014, and I've also been further digging by The Daily Dot by Smithsonian Magazine. It turns out World Wide Web was the name with the least weird acronym. That's why it's WWW. Also, we partly got that because Tim Berners-Lee is British. She speaks English and it just like feels fun that there's the alliteration. And also apparently when he was setting it up, there were not any other specific computer network names

starting with W. So it was just kind of available. But if something else has started with W, he might not have gone with it. You can't forget that acronym. If they had chosen anything else, anything, if they had, if somehow, like let's say AOL somehow gotten this, like every address starts with AOL. You would have old people 25 years into it.

Now is it, it's A-A-A-L-O? What is it? No, you can't forget www. Like you can't. It's fun to say. It's fun to look at. It's just a bunch of spikes. It's no, it's perfect. It's just a sweet little anonymous zigzag. It's great. Yeah. World Wide Web is also a good description of Tim Berners-Lee's goals and CERN's goals because he and the institution wanted to give it away within a few years. But he had thought of a lot of other names that accomplished the same message. And he had three leading contenders before World Wide Web. One of them was the Mesh, M-E-S-H, Mesh. And then the others were Mine of Information

and The Information Mine. So those were his pitches. It's so funny because, you know, any of those were not any weirder than what we came up with, really. It's like you read old science fiction novels from the 1950s and 60s. A lot of them have in their futuristic computer talks to other computers. If they're in space, their spaceship computer has to be able to talk to the computer.

It's just assumed there's some sort of a network of machines. There'll be some hacker story written in 1968. The guy's like, I've got to get my computation machine logged into the data tube. And you're sitting there like, not even close, idiot. It's called the internet. How could you not? What a fool that you didn't know what it was. Like, well, it could have been called lots of things. We just chose it.

06 Yeah, internet is a word I never really examine because if I pick at it too much, I'll think it's weird. I just move on. Yeah. And yeah, and each of those name ideas, the mesh mind of information and the information mind, they each just didn't quite work because of how English or French or the person Tim Berners-Lee feels. Because the mesh, apparently when people said it, they kept saying the mass instead. And Tim Berners-Lee decided that that's too negative and I want to do that. Yeah, or mush. It just, yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah. But he apparently he was so into that mesh name, that was the name in his head as he

laid these things out. Like that was what he conceived of it as until late in the game. And then the other two name ideas caused acronym trouble that World Wide Web doesn't have. Mine of Information becomes the acronym MOI. If that had been the name of this, our URLs would be http://moi. And unfortunately MOI is moi in French, it's me. And lots of people speak French, CERN is halfway in France. And Berners-Lee was concerned that either it would feel too French or it would feel like Berners-Lee was pointing to himself.

Like look at me. And then my favorite is the information mine, as foreshadowed, the information mine would be http://tim. And Tim Berners-Lee thought it would seem selfish and self-aggrandizing if he named this completely after himself for the entire world. Yeah. And also we don't like being reminded that everything we have comes from minds, from true people working in horrible conditions and digging the stuff out of the ground.

We don't like to think that everything in our phone, in our PC, in these servers, in the routers, all of the stuff they're made of was dug up from a mine in horrible conditions. We don't like to think about it. You're reminded of that every time we log on. And yeah, I just like the idea that Tim would have become too much of an internet word and like the name would have gone out of fashion or something.

It's such a different path we could have been on. But instead, World Wide Web, just very inoffensive to everybody. It works. The way Amazon killed the name Alexa, parents do not name their kids Alexa anymore. That dropped down to almost zero because the idea that it's going to activate your smart device every time you call for your child. Yes. Tell your friend Tim, their name could have been wonky with the internet itself.

That's so weird. I could have gotten bullied over that. And yeah, and so that's why it's specifically the letters WWW. And with the other half of the topic, takeaway number three. HTTP was the second draft of an idea based on a mid 1800s fun facts book. As we mentioned in the first takeaway, Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN in 1980 and built a prototype of a hypertext database. And then in 1989 came back and did much more of a worldwide web approach. But his first prototype was named after and inspired by a Victorian era fun facts book.

It was printed in England in 1856 before the US Civil War, a long time ago. And key sources for this are A Piece for Time magazine by Josh Quintner, as well as Andrew Blum's book cited earlier. Allegedly when Tim Berners-Lee was just a contractor doing support work at CERN trying to index information, he was unaware of previous theories about hypertext. He didn't know about Vannevar Bush or Douglas Engelbart or other people who theorized it. What he did know about his recent work in networking computer systems and his parents' bookshelf from when he was a kid. Tim Berners-Lee grew up in a geeky environment in the London area. Both of his parents were mathematicians. He was encouraged to read widely and learn and grow. And they had weird old books on their shelves, including a book called Enquire Within Upon Everything.

And Enquire Within Upon Everything is from 1856. The concept was that it would be a short and handy guide to everything about English domestic life and really everything. It had pages on party planning and how to preserve flowers and how to play parlor games, but also laundry, recipes, tips on headache cures. There was even a set of ceremonial tips and legal advice for weddings and also for funerals and the execution of wills.

Nothing specifically in the book was important, but the premise stuck with Tim Berners-Lee and he said, what if I do this Victorian book, but with hypertext in the certain computer systems? Yeah, and just the idea that, because these days I think people, kids probably ask, well, like, if you're watching a movie today, you know, like, who's that actor? It's like, oh, look it up on IMDB.

It's like, yeah, what did people do before you had Google, before you had IMDB? How did you know things? How did you know what detergents you could, what household chemicals you could safely mix? Like you had a book. Yeah. You had a book on the shelf that was something that was just a guide of household chemicals.

You had a book on how to repair clothes. You had a book on, you know, obviously recipes, cookbooks, but also just on general things. One day it would be nice if you just had the ability to click on that knowledge, if you needed to know something. If in the future you could just, could not have, could not have began to conceive of how a smartphone works or what it does. There's no way. conceive of how a smartphone works or what it does. There's no way. Yeah. And I also like that besides books, people also had nothing. You would just wonder, and you wouldn't know. Yeah. The odds of your specific question being answerable and something you had on your shelf. Yeah. Very, very slim. Yeah. And so like this inquire within upon

everything was extraordinarily ambitious. It was trying to tell you how to do everything in a relatively small book for regular consumers. And so that was specifically inspiring to Tim Berners-Lee when he built his prototype hypertext database in 1980. He named it Enquire. It was named after the book Enquire within upon everything. And that didn't catch on because he just wasn't there long enough and didn't get enough buy-in from people working there. But when he came back, he picked more ordinary names for HTTP.

The original name was this extremely specific reference from really nobody else's life. Like he's an old person, but he's not from the 1800s. It's such a unique to this guy choice. And I also just like that the early internet we've been talking about was really seen as specific to so-called important things, like research and science and data. And then this Inquirer book is a lot more

like the modern internet, where I just want to know something and try to Google it real fast. Yeah, just the everyday things that come up in a life. Yeah. Like you said, things like table manners, stuff that people in high society know, like which side of the plate do you put your fork on or whatever, but the average person doesn't. Here's a way to find out.

Now everybody would just look it up. Exactly, yeah. So it was really oddly a forerunner of everything, even though no one's ever heard of the book. Off of that, we've got one last takeaway for the main show. Takeaway number four. The World Wide Web started out as a philosophy and also as a web browser. It turns out Tim Berners-Lee assigned that name World Wide Web to a browser that he and others coded to use the World Wide Web. And the browser's gone away, but it influenced the rest of browsers and we still have the philosophy.

And the concept of the browser, that's a separate show. There's so much history and the tangled history of, because again, something you take for granted. It's like, well, of course you need, but if you've got a computer and it's like, I'm going to go on the internet. It's like, okay, well, here's the command lines you type in to connect to the TCIP address of the server. It's like, well, no, I want to look at this stuff on the Internet. It's like, okay, you need a separate piece of software that is its own enormous technical

challenge to the point that Microsoft would not successfully do it really very well. We're not able to keep doing it. But that can go out and grab all of this stuff and show it to you and do it regardless of what kind of a machine you're on. It's a whole, we're going to touch on it, but trust me, browsers are a whole separate. You have an entire series of books on how browsers came about and the battles that took place there. Exactly. And we'll do one somewhat in the bonus show. It's about in particular Netscape Navigator. That and also Internet Explorer were really foundational to people beginning to use the internet. And they both pretty much replaced and partly borrowed from a browser called the World Wide

Web, which Tim Berners-Lee built for the machines at CERN apparently by 1993, right when they started giving away World Wide Web. It did many of the modern functions of a browser. You see hyperlinks, you click them, you go anywhere. Its main drawback was that he wrote it for the operating systems of computers we don't use anymore. It was computers from a company called Next, N-E-X-T with a little E. And if folks don't know, that's the company Steve Jobs built in between starting Apple and coming back to Apple. And so the machines weren't all that common even

when Next was a company. And so Berners-Lee's colleagues had to port the browser to other systems. But he also didn't really push it that hard. Other people were the people who tried to monetize web browsing. And so he just gave that away in 1993. And that same year, other programmers built a browser called Mosaic. And according to Brian McCullough's book, that year, 1993, was the start of just tons of websites because of browsing. At the start of 93, there were a few hundred websites. By the end of 93, there were tens of thousands. And it's because this was yet another step in making the internet common. Once everyone's connected, can you do the easy browsing where I would like to eat some nuts so I type nuts.com and there are nuts, you know?

Yeah, you may or may not get that. But again, when I first got on the internet, you could go to McDonald's.com and you would not get the McDonald's at a restaurant. There was some guy who had just seized that domain because corporations were very slow to get on here. I distinctly remember browsing at a time when it's like, okay, I've looked at all of the websites. I guess I'm done today.

None of the 13 websites that exist have updated. Because there was nothing on there. Most corporations weren't on there. Most companies, including Microsoft, were slow to get online. Lots of companies were. Especially companies that were kind of old, as old money type companies, and they didn't see the advantage. It's like, well, why would we? We're a newspaper. old money type companies and they didn't see the advantage.

It's like, well, why would we? We're a newspaper. Why would we give away our news on the internet? Why? We're a bank. Why would we need to be on the internet? We're an investment bank. Why would we need to be on the internet?

You heard this all the time. All the big domains, just any of them, generalmotors.com, some guy just owned it because the internet was just this empty thing. These newspapers, these journalists, this seems like if we just put all of our stuff on here, it would utterly obliterate our entire industry. Why would we want to do that? It's like, yeah, that's a good point, but you can do it anyway. And yes, you will all lose your jobs.

It's weird. The one of those I remember the clearest in terms of domain squatting is when I was a little kid at the end of the Clinton administration, adults would tell me, we can't tell you all the details of what Bill Clinton is up to because it's too dirty. And also do not type in whitehouse.com. Like obviously.gov is the government one, but like whitehouse.com was some kind of pornography website because of the Clinton Association and it was just unrelated. Yeah, there's this bidding war over pizza.com

because back then these hackers would just go to these domain registries and just grab as many as they could think of shoes.com because they knew someday this is going to be worth a billion dollars because they knew someday everybody's going to have to be on here. And most of the companies did not. It was a wild, wild West back then. All right.

And also terrible in many ways. And it, yeah, and it's the flowering of everything of what the internet is. Like just this topic is fundamentally that everyone started using the internet. And so it's all the good and bad. It's everything all at once. And without this HTTP and WWW built on TCP IP, it doesn't happen. Or it's very separate little networks. Yeah.

And everything you use in the world works to some degree like this, where if it is something that every, you know, the fact that your vehicle can run on the same gasoline at any station anywhere, wasn't always like that. The fact that your money spends the same from one town to the next wasn't always like that. It used to be towns would have their own currency. It was a whole thing. Coming up with standards that everybody uses, it is a boring subject to most people. And if you met somebody and you're at dinner and it's like one guy, it's like,

well, I'm a YouTuber, I've got 4 million followers. And the other guy is like, well, actually, I worked on the protocols that actually make video, real-time video sharing possible everybody only wants to talk to that first guy it's like yeah but that guy wouldn't he couldn't play video games and then make funny faces at the video games and get paid four million dollars a year to do that without the other guy is like well no actually there was a real challenge and

because you're doing real-time video transcoding where you upload and then it has to transcode it and then send it out. So being able to do that in real time, there's like a technique of the packets being... It's like, okay, all right, Roger, he's talking about protocols again. No, but tell us... So Bobby, you open toys on video and you make $7 million a year unboxing toys. Tell me about that. How did you get into that? It's called La Boo Boo. And I heard about it yesterday. All my kids are huge fans of you, not of this other weirdo who made the technology possible

and worked for 15 straight years pulling his hair out trying to solve all of these technical. Tell us about your new unboxing video. It got 30 million views. You got paid more than Roger's entire yearly salary for that one video. Tell us about it. We love you, Roger. You're the best. Folks, that is the main episode for this week.

A big thank you to wonderful returning guest Jason Partjian for helping make an episode happen. And also, as I think I've said before on episodes he's guested on, Jason is a full-time novelist. He is of course making many videos on social media as well, especially TikTok and Instagram. But he's a full-time novelist. All those things fund that.

And I cannot recommend his latest novel enough. Again, it's called, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. I think of all the books I've read, it's called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. I think of all the books I've read, it's the most rooted in the internet without being like detached from real life, if that makes sense. It is such a book for people who have spent time online and also 1000% relevant to your everyday life and understandable if you're not in some sort of super specific community online or something. It's brilliant, it's funny, please check it out. It's also standalone, it's not part of his other wonderful series.

I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. On sale now. Have a good read. In the meantime, you're in the outro of this podcast episode with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, really the whole first half of the show. HTTP and WWW are two additional protocols built on top of the dominant protocol that makes the global and open internet possible.

HTTP and WWW were put on top of TCP IP. Takeaway number two, Tim Berners-Lee picked the name WWW after brainstorming several sillier ideas such as Tim. Tell your friend Tim it was almost HTTP colon slash as Tim. Tell your friend Tim, it was almost http://tim. Takeaway number three, HTTP was the second draft of an idea called Enquirer, based on the mid-1800s fun facts book, Enquirer Within Upon Everything. Takeaway number four, the World Wide Web started out as a generous global philosophy and also as the name of a web browser. And then, as I'm sure you heard so many numbers this week, especially timelines of things,

we really set out 1962 to 1993 as the timeline for the whole topic, and 1962 is when Leonard Kleinrock began to theorize packet switching. I'm so glad packet switching brought you this episode. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story

related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the contentious public-private partnership that built Netscape Navigator and by extension, most internet use. If you're really young, you might not have heard of Netscape Navigator, the internet browser. Ask anyone older on earth, most internet use. If you're really young, you might not have heard of Netscape Navigator, the internet browser. Ask anyone older on earth, they know it.

And visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, also for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs that podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include two amazing books about how we got here online. One of those books is Tubes, a Journey to the Center of the Internet. That's by tech and

design journalist Andrew Blum. The other is How the Internet Happened from Netscape to the iPhone by tech writer and TED Talks resident Brian McCullough Also leading on a phenomenal web series by the team at SciShow, which is a wonderful donor-supported show on YouTube. The key two episodes we're linking, one is hosted by Olivia Gordon, the other is hosted by Hank Green, and then further amazing digital resources from Popular Mechanics, in particular writer David Grossman, as well as the Daily Dot, Smithsonian Magazine, Time Magazine, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca.

Hey, another website! I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Saatsayaha peoples, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode,

and join the free CIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is a fun one because it's episode 191, that's about the topic of Microsoft Excel. That's an episode with me and Katie and Jason.

And fun fact there, Microsoft Excel is an amazing program and also when people over-rely on it, it changes the entire global economy. Whoops. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Boodos Band.

Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks to Godor and members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

["The New York Times"] Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.