Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Secret History of the Internet
Episode Date: May 5, 2023In this prequel to the 'ICANN and the 7 Keys to the Internet' podcast, David talks Marques and Andrew through the wildly interesting history of the internet. There's plenty of information out there ab...out the beginning of the World Wide Web in 1989, but what was happening before that? How did the internet start? How long did it take to turn on? And why does it always start with Sputnik? David answers all those questions and more while explaining how everything came to be. Special thanks to everyone that took the time to talk with us to make this episode. We hope you enjoy! Audio/Video Sources: David Hochfelder Interview with Vint: https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Vinton_Cerf AT&T Life of a tech operator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX8RHeSuZZc DARPA 50 Year video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8C2vXfRw8U DARPA Formative years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHK7Sn66vts&t=24s Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Twitters: Waveform: https://twitter.com/wvfrm Marques: https://twitter.com/mkbhd Andrew: https://twitter.com/andymanganelli David: https://twitter.com/DurvidImel Adam: https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh.
Be honest.
Between meetings, workout classes, and the kids' clubs,
who's got time to cook?
That's where HelloFresh comes in.
No matter how busy you get,
HelloFresh makes it easy to get a home-cooked meal on the table.
With flavor-packed recipes like crispy chicken parmigiana,
you'll be filling your kitchen with the cozy aromas of a homemade meal in no time.
Visit HelloFresh.ca and use code SPOTIFY for your exclusive offer.
This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack.
Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation
and an enhanced sound range,
making them perfect for enjoying music and podcasts.
Get up to 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled,
soft microfiber cushions engineered for
comfort and a range of colours and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from
DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage.
Accessories sold separately.
All right, welcome back to Waveform.
We got another special Longform episode for you today.
And this one is a long time coming.
We actually did that ICANN and the Seven Keys of the Internet episode way back in November.
We published it in December.
Turns out we did so much research for that episode, we ended up with two stories.
for that episode, we ended up with two stories.
We tried to slam both of those stories into one story, and it just became too tail-endy, tangential.
So we just decided we were going to cut it up into two.
And now, almost six months later, we have the second part.
Welcome to part two.
Welcome to part two.
If you haven't seen I Can and the Seven Keys of the Internet,
I do recommend going to watch that.
There's a lot of relevant stuff.
They're not directly related, but they are tangentially related so you should go watch
that either before or after this episode uh but yeah you guys ready to get started i am ready i'm
trying to recall as much from that as possible just so i have that context but yes fully i almost
forgot about this to be honest the most context you need is david never ordered that pizza at the
end yeah that was a cliffhanger spoiler for those of you who is David never ordered that pizza at the end. Yeah. That was a cliffhanger.
Spoiler.
For those of you who didn't yet see that episode,
the pizza was never ordered.
Yeah.
This is,
but we do own dot pizza now.
This is a lot more like a prequel rather than.
Yeah.
It's like a prequel.
It's the lore.
Yeah.
So Star Wars,
you know,
like backwards.
This is about to be like the phantom menace of waveform podcast.
I don't know if that's a good thing or not.
It's about to be the attack of the clones of Waveform podcast.
I like that one.
I like that.
I like that.
All right.
So if you guys could take a guess, where do you think that our story begins today?
David brainstorming something and four hours later making up a different story.
I should say, when do you think our story begins?
Oh.
The second you ordered that pizza.
As has been the case for the at least two other long-form podcasts that we've done so far,
our story begins on October 4th, 1957.
CBS television presents a special report on Sputnik 1, the Soviet space satellite.
Now, on October 4th, 1957, Russia launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit, right?
And I think we were both surprised and also completely unsurprised that this is where the story begins.
Because as it turns out, an insane amount of the technology that we use today comes from the United States' reaction to that one day.
So when the United States realized that Russia had put that satellite into space,
it went on full-on panic mode.
Because it meant that there was another
world superpower that was ahead of the United
States technologically.
If you know the United States, you know that that's
not going to fly. You can't just sit around and let that happen.
No, they don't like that.
The US was already freaking out about needing
to have the strongest military around.
This was also 10 years into the Cold War, which lasted 45 years.
So when they threw that satellite in this space, they were like, oh, God, oh, God, we are very behind here.
So if you remember from any of the other space episodes that we did, like the James Webb Space Telescope episode or the new Space Race episode, what did the U.S. do immediately after Sputnik got launched into orbit?
I think we started working
on our own launches.
Didn't we put man on the moon like 15 years later?
Yeah. Like the 60s?
Yeah, so what organization did they launch to do that?
Oh, NASA.
Well, that's where you're wrong, suckers!
Okay.
Got him.
So, like, technically, yes, that is
what happened, but what actually happened is that four months after Sputnik launched, the U.S. spun up something called ARPA, which is the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
So basically, if Russia was going to be pumping millions of dollars into missile, satellite and space technology, the U.S. was going to do that, too.
Right.
to do that too right DARPA shaping the future creating opportunities for new capabilities strategically tactically DARPA takes on the most difficult technical challenges for the
Department of Defense so you said ARPA but that's a DARPA right so the most difficult technical challenges for the Department of Defense. So you said ARPA, but that said DARPA.
Right.
So you might have noticed that.
It's because it switched back and forth between DARPA and ARPA like a million times.
It was ARPA and then DARPA and then ARPA like a few times.
And that's because it kept getting pulled in and out of the Department of Defense.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was DARPA,
and that Advanced Research Projects Agency was ARPA.
Just saying.
I like DARPA better.
Defense wins championships.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anyway, so the actual space program that the U.S. wanted to launch
was ARPA instead of NASA, right?
Just a couple months after that satellite went
into space. But pretty quickly, the US realized that it didn't have a lot of public support for
war, right? Like putting a ton of public funding into a military program was extremely unpopular.
This was right off the heels of World War Two. And add that to the fact that the US was kind
of at this time seen as this like aggressive colonial nation.
And they kind of realized that it was going to be a lot easier to fund a missile program
if they could make it public facing and sciency and fun, right?
So a couple months later, like literally a couple months after they founded DARPA, they
founded NASA.
We have one of the most challenging assignments that has ever been given to modern man.
Expansion of human knowledge about space.
We've been assigned the mission of launching a scientific earth satellite.
Five, four, three, two...
It's crazy how everyone from the 50s had the same voice.
I know.
And I wish I had that voice.
Recognizable voice. I want the radio voice from the fifties.
I'm David Amell and brought to you by...
And this is Wave 4.
Coming up.
Now, Sam.
Okay.
Anyway.
So, so yeah, so NASA is doing serious research, right?
They're doing serious rocket science.
It's still obviously related to what the US.S. wanted to achieve with DARPA,
but it was also more focused on the science-y aspect of it
because that's what the public was into at the time.
But the nice thing is that when you're trying to build missile defense
and anti-air systems, building things for NASA is basically the same thing.
You're basically doing what you
wanted to do with DARPA, but you're just doing it in a public facing way. Right. But it's still not
exactly what they wanted to do, right? Because the specific things that they wanted to be building
were like literally anti aircraft, anti missile, like detection systems, like nuclear detection
systems, all this stuff. They really wanted ARPA. But within a few years of that, all of the civilian
space programs of this new agency were being transferred to NASA, right?
So DARPA had existed, but everything was being funneled into NASA. And all of a sudden,
they basically didn't have a lot of people working at DARPA anymore, and they didn't really have any
funding. So you end up with this extremely lean, no money group, and they became a high risk,
high reward and far-out research
program.
They were kind of happening behind the scenes.
And the point of DARPA became to surprise other nations before they were surprised.
So basically, be the next Sputnik.
NASA was spun out.
The military side was spun out.
And a few years later, in the early 60s, one part of that agency focused on application of computers and how to make big leaps forward.
So that was Steve Crocker.
He's super pivotal in the early standardization of a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about later.
But he was the one that we contacted for this story originally. That office that was created funded advanced work in computer science,
time-sharing systems, artificial intelligence, advanced graphics,
new architectures, multiprocessors, and so forth.
Big stuff at the time.
So since all those funds from DARPA were getting funneled to NASA,
and since it was this big, fun, public-facing agency,
it was getting a lot of support, and DARPA had. So, but everyone knew that DARPA was really important,
right? Because like, especially all the people in the government were like, we still need to be
putting resources into this. Um, and the first director of DARPA apparently left a $160,000
job at GE for an $18,000 job at darpa dang do you know how much
money that is today like a hundred sixty thousand dollar job this might be double there's 1.7
million dollars today yeah insane uh anyway so when you can't employ that many people because
you don't have that much money like that director was getting paid eighteen thousand dollars a year
uh maybe a smarter idea is to just sponsor all the smartest people in the world.
You know, there's a famous quote that like all the smartest people don't work for you.
And so what they did was they decided to sponsor universities instead. But here's a problem,
right? These really big computers that researchers wanted to use, they were like really, really
expensive. So there weren't a lot of them.
And it was really inefficient
to have all these amazing state-of-the-art computers
at some universities that were being sponsored by DARPA,
but not be able to use those resources
at other universities for the same research purposes.
And so they were all kind of working
on these different advanced computer science projects,
but they were in their own little isolated versions
of the future. They weren't talking to each other. And I guess a critical thing to
understand is that, of course, at each of our places, we had already been selected and been
working on advanced computer science activities. So we were, in some sense, living in the future
in each of our little worlds. So pretty much they just realized that their resources were not being as efficient as possible
because essentially you're just doing the same work in multiple different areas.
Right.
Okay.
You have all these supercomputers at these universities and it's like they're not talking to each other.
I'm starting to think we're finding the connection to the ICANN episode.
What if we could like connect all of them together maybe?
Wow. In some sort of like interconnected network of computers?
That'll never work.
Would that be like a good place to start?
If you had that idea 60 years ago, you'd be considered a genius.
And you would have only gotten paid $18,000 a year.
Interesting.
Yeah, so they obviously wanted to connect all these computers together
because it became clear very quickly that there was a lot that you could do if you connected all of these supercomputers together.
You could do timesharing like we talked about in the last episode.
You could be sharing information so you weren't doing redundant research.
It made a lot of sense.
So in 1966, there was a proposal for the ARPANET, right?
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network uh which was a network of computers that
would connect all these different universities and research institutions and would allow the
researchers to access the computing power of each other's supercomputers share information
all this kind of stuff you're basically doing like um game streaming like right now game streaming is
like you're using a computer somewhere else someone else's processing power right to do your own research right i mean game right i mean research yeah mom i'm doing
research like do you guys um do you guys remember folding at home have you ever done folding at home
no no i think it's called origami
folding at home is like a genetics project that was very popular where you could like while you
were sleeping use your computer's computing power to do research for the world genomics association
sounds like the the scientific version of mining bitcoin when you're effectively
it's pretty much the same thing as mining Bitcoin, actually. I see. Anyway, same idea.
Just real quick, before you go any further,
for my own sake,
approximately what year are we at right now?
Because a lot has happened. It started
around the 50s. Yeah.
So the ARPANET was proposed in 1966.
So there was a decent amount of time between
ARPA being spun up and this network being
proposed. That's
kind of a theme throughout this
episode is there are large chunks of time between these new technologies being invented and actually
getting rolled out like you're gonna see the timeline gets kind of wild but this is actually
pretty good timing uh because this guy that was working on the development of the arpanet at a
u.s government think tank as well as a separate guy in london came up with an idea called packet
switching do you guys know what packet switching is?
I've heard the term, but if you asked me to explain it, I would not be able to.
Okay.
I was going to say, it sounds like one of those things where someone's like,
you're a nerd.
What's packet switching?
I was like, oh, you wouldn't understand that, but I actually have no idea.
Okay.
Well, so before packet switching, everything was circuit switched,
which means that you had to have a direct line connection from like one node to another.
So think about an operator that would connect your phones together.
What he was actually doing was literally switching the circuits.
May I help you?
Yeah, operator, where's the nearest telephone?
You're speaking from the nearest telephone.
You were literally connected directly to the other phone.
It's wild to think about.
Which is insane right
yeah that's really insane um but a packet switch network is pretty different so basically the data
that we have on our computers that we're sending to each other can be broken into packets and a
packet usually is like you know eight bits or something a byte of data some sort of data and
it gets broken into these packets and set sent through various routes in the network, depending on which which like line has the least load. So usually, on a circuit
switch network, you have to go directly to each other. But now, you kind of learn about this in
like queuing theory and computer science 101. If you have all of these different lines, there's
going to be different amounts of load on each line right so if you break your data
up into a bunch of packets each of those packets can go on a different line that has the least
amount of traffic so you can see it like eight lanes on a freeway right i was just gonna say i
wish i could do this driving to work in the morning yeah if there were yeah there ways is just packet
switching cars right funny enough there's actually a thing in traffic theory where this is like, it's crazy.
Traffic theory is very similar to like liquid flow theory.
Fluid dynamics.
Fluid dynamics, where adding more lanes doesn't actually make traffic go faster.
So it's not the perfect analogy.
But imagine you're at the grocery store, right?
And you want to make hamburgers for dinner.
And you have five family members and there's five ingredients and there's five checkout lines.
It would be faster for each person to take one thing, check out at the same time, go home and build the hamburger.
Right.
Right.
Instead of like waiting in one line and then checking things out individually.
You're basically doing it five times faster.
So that's basically the idea of packet switching is you're breaking data up into little
packets, and you're sending it over this distributed network. So in a network, this actually
helps create something that is decentralized or more accurately distributed, because there's three
types of networks, there's centralized, decentralized and distributed networks. And this is actually a
distributed network. So imagine that DARPA connects four different universities, right? They're each
connected to each other, they're not just connected in a line.
And they can send data in packets.
And that allows them to send a ton of data through the queue with the least stuff in it.
So the data knows what order to rearrange itself in because it's got a little tag on it that says this is the first part of the data and this is the second part of the data.
Because data is just like bits, right?
Streams of ones and zeros.
But it knows like this is the first chunk
this is the second chunk this is the third chunk and it can rearrange itself that allows for a lot
of data to pass through in a much faster distributed way because data is traveling at the speed of
light right so even if you drop packets that's not a problem because you just resend it if you're
traveling at that speed it's like oh no i dropped you've probably seen this before like dropped
packet loss yeah dropped these packets there's like interference or something in the network but
it's like it doesn't matter because you're just sending data through the best thing to use when
you like miss a kill in valor just be like oh packet loss damn it my ping my ping yeah um anyway
so yeah so they get the first node set up in 1969 for this new ARPANET, right?
And this was running on the 1822 network protocol, which was implemented in 1970.
So it's just like time is going by slowly. Like they get the node set up, the next year they get the protocol implemented.
And the protocol is basically saying like, how is this data going to transfer across
the network?
How are the computers going to handle the data flowing between them?
So the network gets turned on in 1971, and it actually works really well.
And there's this really funny story about when they were at the ARPANET and they were
first starting to use it, and they connect all the computers together and they're getting
all excited and they want to log into another computer remotely, because that's what you're
doing if you're doing packet switching, right?
You're like, let's do remote desktop so they type l and the other person on the other side of
the line says yep got the l they type o and then the other person's like yep we got the o
they're trying to chop a lot type login they type g and the network crashes um but you know it works
and they had to do some modulation to fix it and make it a little better and like actually make and the network crashes. But, you know, it works.
And they had to do some modulation to fix it and make it a little better
and like actually make things work.
But that was the foundation of the ARPANET.
So they got the first computers connected
and it gets rocking.
Andrew just brought up a really good point
that the very first electronic message ever sent
might have just been L.
It was the original taking an L on the internet.
Yeah.
Imagine you took the first L on the internet. Imagine you took the first L on the
internet. And you didn't even know it. So over the next few years, the packet switch network idea
starts to really take off. All of a sudden you get a ton of universities and organizations that
are using their own packet switch networks with things like ethernet that had just gotten invented.
And there was something called token ring from IBM, which had a really gotten invented. And there was something called Token Ring from IBM,
which had a really small community.
And Xerox invented a new protocol called PUP,
and there was a French Cyclades network, right?
Like this was a protocol,
the way of doing packet switching was just how you send data over a network.
So all of a sudden we saw all these networks getting set up.
And these are all individual networks
only connected within themselves.
Correct. Not quite what we have today. Correct. So it was just, yeah, like the French had
their own network and then everyone was creating their own little like protocols, right? Because
the ARPANET was running on the 1822 protocol, but Token Ring was running on something else
just at IBM. Some universities make their own protocols that only ran at those universities.
So it sounds like at this point we have a bunch of little internets a bunch of little networks
yeah i have to keep reminding myself that they're just logging into these other compute they're
remoting into these other computers there's this isn't like creating this crazy internet that we
have today right this is super basic they're using each other's processing power they're sharing data
they're sharing files but it's within a small network.
A bunch of local networks.
Correct.
A bunch of intranets.
Intranets, if you will.
Networks, yeah.
Also, there isn't standard networking infrastructure yet,
which is why a lot of these networks have to run on separate protocols.
Because the 1822 protocol was DARPA, right? They weren't going to just
tell people how to run these networks.
And also, in the United
States, we had this full network
of phone lines set up. So when these
first universities were setting up
and wanted to connect via the ARPANET, they
literally just reached out to the phone companies and said,
hey, can we lease some time on this line?
So the University of Hawaii actually had this thing called
the Aloha Net, which was
basically doing packet switching over
radio, which was really
awesome. That is really cool, because
before we were doing straight phone lines, so radio,
this is kind of like the first
wireless, if you want to think about it.
They showed that you could do packet switching over any type of
network, which is really cool.
We're going to take a quick ad break, but there's a lot
more to this story. It gets very exciting, so make sure you stick around and we'll catch you on the other
side. BetMGM is your hockey home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,
a sports book worth a celly and an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League.
BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.
Must be 19 years of age or older to wager.
Ontario only.
Please play responsibly.
If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge.
BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.
You know what's great about ambition?
You can't see it.
Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving.
For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus.
You never know.
Ambition is on the inside.
So that thing you love, keep doing it.
Drive your ambition.
Mitsubishi Motors.
All right, we're back.
Welcome back to the Packet Switch podcast.
Like we talked about before,
there was all these networks that were being set up, right?
But when you set up a network,
you're buying this box from whatever the vendor you were using gave you, right?
So you ended up with a software stack of applications
that you could use on top of it, and that was basically it.
It was like they gave you this black box to set up your network,
and they ran all the protocols, they ran all this this stuff and you couldn't really do a lot to it
um so now all of these vendors have their own protocols their own data rates that they're
transferring data over none of these companies cared if their networks interconnected and they
probably actually liked that you know it was like it was like using Android and iOS, like Apple likes that iMessage
doesn't work with Android, because it keeps you in their
ecosystem. And all these companies wanted to keep you in
their little network ecosystem. The same thing.
And there's some level of control, maybe over
reliability, or materials used, things like that.
All these things. Yeah, yeah. It's just a thing we have in
tech. Yeah.
Well, and also, it was all separate.
In order for everything to work together, there would have had to have been a conscious effort from all these different groups to be like, let's build one thing.
Right, which they don't want to do.
I mean, you can see this playing out today with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram.
They all basically do the same thing, but none of them actually talk to each other.
There hasn't really been a universal messaging
protocol the internet mess for internet messaging that rcs yeah well the best thing we have is rcs
but you know how that's played out so far uh hopefully that comes into play eventually but
yeah rcs rcs but pretty pretty damn quickly uh the department of defense started taking notice
of all these networks right and as more of these distributed package switch networks got set up,
the government was like, wait, we should use this in war, right?
Pretty classic.
Classic government move.
Yeah, they could take a distributed communications network
and they could hook it up to, you know, like planes and tanks and automobiles
and all of these different things.
Because at this point, computers are getting more popularized
and computers that were running on tanks or planes
were going to have a strategic advantage over a plane or a tank
that didn't have a computer in it.
That was just the way it went.
Yep.
Some people think older people don't know how to use the internet.
I have news for you.
We invented it.
It's possible to invent something
and be totally behind on it.
Yeah, for real.
Well, you wouldn't say that to
Vint Cerf. He's actually been
he was working on the early ARPANET design
as well, and he helped get a lot of
the stuff online. Also, he's one of the
most important people to ever contribute
to the internet. He is in the Internet
Hall of Fame. He is considered like Internet Zdy hall of oh yeah there's an internet internet hall of fame yeah
the internet hall of fame which is like the most important people to ever contribute to
internet networking how much reddit karma does he have probably a lot yeah if you talk to any like
data systems engineer or any like computer science computer science graduate, he's, like, their, like.
Wayne Gretzky?
Yes.
I don't know that reference, but probably.
A lot of goals.
Probably, yes.
A lot of goals.
He's a very important person.
Long career.
The black stare was everything I've ever wanted in life.
His title.
LeBron James?
His title at Google is Internet Evangelist.
No, it's Chief Internet Evangelist. is Internet Evangelist. It's Chief Internet Evangelist.
And he works at Google, and his title is literally Chief Internet Evangelist.
Man, as if the internet needs evangelizing.
Well, you think it doesn't, but surprisingly, we'll get to that later.
Okay.
And in the spring of 73, a guy named Bob Kahn, who had worked very much on the ARPANET design,
left Bolt, Baranek, and Newman and went to DARPA. And he showed up in my office at Stanford in the
spring of 73, and he says, we have a problem. And I'm thinking, what do you mean we? And he says,
well, the Defense Department has reached the conclusion that computers could be useful in command and control.
But the implication of using computers in command and control is that you'd be putting computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and in airplanes, in addition to dedicated computing facilities.
Well, the ARPANET was built out of computers that were in dedicated computer rooms with air conditioning. Everything's all interconnected by dedicated telephone lines.
And you can't connect an airplane to a telephone line. That doesn't work. You know,
cars don't work or the tanks, you know, they run over the wires. That doesn't work.
Ship get all tangled up. Funny guy. Funny guy.
But it's true, right?
So the government noticed how well packet switch networks were working.
So they started spinning up satellite-based packet switch networks because that doesn't use a line, right?
You could actually connect that to pretty much any type of military vehicle.
And they called that SatNet, right?
So they made a radio-based packet switch network
because the military realized it's crazy useful to command and control.
And suddenly they want computers and airplanes
and they want them in tanks and boats.
And they spun up like all of these different packet switch networks
with different data rates and different packet sizes
and different latencies because they're all package switched, right?
So you need different data rates and latencies and stuff
with like, you know, tanks and airplanes and stuff because they're far away yeah you have the inverse
square law for like data transfer and they all do different things and probably all have different
requirements for bandwidth and what types of things you're actually sending over that network
yeah and the thing is like the government and the military have different like you know there's the
air force and then there's the there's the the navy the army right so they they're all spinning up their own
different set uh packet switch networks but they're not really communicating that much and
that becomes a problem uh so in 1973 they go to vent and they say we've got a problem we've got
we need something that can allow all of these networks to talk to each other because we need
all of our military applications to be able to communicate. We're looking at four different
packet switch technologies, all of which are different. They're different data rates,
different packet sizes, different addressing, different latency, just all different, but
they're all packet switched. So the question is, how do you take all those different kinds of
packet networks and connect them together in a way that makes everything look uniform?
That was the internet problem.
And we spent from the spring of 73 to the fall of 73
trying to figure out how to do that.
Okay, can I just take a second and like the internet problem, right?
You have all these networks.
They're all packet switch networks.
Nets.
Networks, network, network, network network network inter networking problem right this is the connection of all the other networks
we're finally bringing everything together yeah yeah because inter means everything under one
umbrella and we just take the word internet for granted right now but it's like it means all the
networks are now connected you're making a giant network of smaller networks and this was this was just
the government's networks this wasn't every network from all the schools and from everything
else but it was combining several networks that were being used for several different things
into one internet network yeah network okay i don't know why this reminds me of it but
but this is like when Xbox first came out
and you played like split screen
and then you started going to your friends
and you played like interconnected like LAN parties
and then Xbox Live comes out
and now it's like,
I don't have to go to my friend's house
with eight other friends to play eight player.
All of us can sit at our house and just play.
No, that's exactly correct.
You have your own little network
when you're doing like a LAN party and then all of a sudden you're on the internet yeah a bunch of little networks
it's funny to think that at the time there were computer scientists working on networking and
then there were computer scientists working on inter networking yeah yeah really awesome um so
how do you get all these computers to talk to each other that's a big problem because they're
all using different protocols different data rates different like all get all these computers to talk to each other? That's a big problem because they're all using different protocols, different data rates, different latency, all of these things.
So like Vint just said, just between like six months, they came up with a way to solve the internetworking problem.
We eventually came up with a protocol we call the Transmission Control Protocol or TCP.
Have you guys heard of TCP before?
Oh, we're starting to get into modern terms.
Yeah, TCP IP, all these things are starting to sound familiar.
TCP IP.
Okay.
Insane clown posse.
So TCP, yeah.
Yeah.
So Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol.
And these are the protocols that allow all these different networks
to talk to each other on the internet.
Right?
Very cool.
Vint Cerf invented
TCPIP.
I can see how he's in the Internet Hall of Fame.
That makes sense.
In like six months.
That's pretty good.
He's very important.
TCP is basically a list of agreed upon actions that allow these
networks to communicate and pass data between
each other and let that data stay intact so that if know if you drop data you can just throw it back in
back then it meant that if your computers and your network can use tcp you can connect to any
other network that's also using tcp the local network at the university of southern california
could now connect to the local network at the University of London. They could share their research.
It was like the USB of internet protocols.
Basically.
Like a standard.
It was a standard.
A standard.
Right.
So scientists can now communicate with very early forms of email
across the entire world.
Because they had email
when they first set up these networks.
It was very primitive,
but it was like,
there was an email protocol
which is why this is the reason that you can use gmail or spark or whatever you don't have to like
if you think about like telegram versus whatsapp versus like imessage those all use different
protocols but there is an email protocol so that gmaillook and I map. Yeah, it doesn't matter what client you're
using. You're sending the same data and it's getting across, which is dope. Like I wish you
could send a telegram message and it came through on WhatsApp, but you can't. Anyway.
So they were working on TCP for a long time. They had four different iterations of it. They made a
lot of mistakes. Um, And it took them 10 years.
They came up with the first
iteration of it in six months.
But it took them 10 years.
Within that span of time, the first
cell phone came out. The first digital camera
came out. The VCR came out. The first
Apple computers came out. The GPS, the
Walkman. Basically, an insane
amount of technology came out in the 1970s.
The first season of retro tech right there. Yeah, like an insane amount of technology came out in the 1970s. The first season
of Retro Tech right there.
Yeah, exactly.
Pretty much.
Pretty much all
from the 1970s.
Yeah.
And Vince says
they pretty much
finished the protocol
in 1978,
but it took them
five more years
for it to get implemented.
Huh.
Yeah.
So there are large spans
of time between
any of the stuff happening.
So we shouldn't expect
Mastodon to have
any sort of
reckoning in the next
year it's probably gonna take a while for any standard to hook up if we ever have a universal
standard for that it's probably gonna take 10 to 15 years yeah and it's probably because it's not
being implemented by the government this was the government yeah right that feels like the big
difference between back then and today is like this all started through the government right
this is kind of a tangent but like the only reason that the internet or that email was able to do that was
because it was kind of run by the government we just didn't have internet messaging that the
government created right internet messaging was created in an era where what private or public
companies private companies companies created all these messaging clients. So it wasn't the government that said, you guys all have to use this, right?
Anyway, to get TCP IP implemented, you still had to force everybody to use it.
That was a problem, right?
For a universal protocol to work, everyone has to be on board, which is why I was so
excited for this Matter episode, because everyone started using it and Matter is basically IP which is awesome it's like already it already exists um I mean matter
used to be called chip which is connected home over IP it literally is IP it's internet protocol
which event invented crazy right um and since everyone's signing on to use the protocol everyone
becomes happier but Vince like we need people to use TCP IP. So he makes this absolutely baller move.
He knows that everyone's going to be happier if they're using it.
And there are benefits to the military, for the military, for that happening too, because DARPA is a military organization at the end of the day.
And they need command and control to be able to communicate.
And researchers are going to love it.
And Vint's just like, no, I have to force people to use TCP IP, even if they don't know it yet, right, that they're going to love it. So Vint goes no i have to force people to use tcp ip even if they don't
know it yet right that they're going to love it so vent goes to everyone on the arpanet um which
again there's all these research universities and stuff and it's being funded by the government but
they're still research universities doing their own thing and they create their own little networks
and they don't really want to use tcp because they're just no little networks they don't really
care um so he goes everyone to the arpa
net which at that point is about 400 computers and he tells them you all need to switch to tcpip
by january 1st 1983 or you're off the network power move power move he's basically like we
are cutting off your funding we are taking your computers you have to use tcpip and he has that
type of control yeah because it's being funded
by arpa which is the government they were funding these research projects and they're like we
literally will come in and take your computers turn off your access yeah when they didn't want
that they've been they by this time this is like 15 years into this project they're like hooked
into using computers imagine if somebody came and we're like we're gonna take your computers imagine if somebody came and we're like we're going to take your computers away if you don't just switch this protocol you know i guess we're switching so by the time 1990 1978 rolls
around we are basically ready to freeze the protocol spec after having gone through four
iterations and start implementing like crazy we get to the point in 1982, or late 81, early 82, where we are now ready to force every computer on every
one of the networks supported by ARPA to switch over from the earlier ARPANET protocols to the
internet protocols. And so we set a deadline of January 1, 1983, there were only 400 computers involved, and said, you all have
to be running TCP IP by January 1, 1983, or you're off the net.
And, you know, so everybody sort of, there was some grumbling about that.
But since I was running the program at the time, I could say things like, you know what,
if you're not on the net by January 1 of 83, I'm not funding your research anymore.
And what was that program that you were running technically?
Was there a name for that?
Oh, well, it was the internetting program.
The internetting program.
Wow.
Yeah.
Like we take that for granted now, but.
Yeah.
Serious.
Someone had to flip that switch to get us all together. Yeah. To get them all together. Yeah. Yeah. So he take that for granted now, but. Yeah. Serious. Someone had to flip that switch to get us all together.
Yeah.
To get them all together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he gets that switch flipped.
Now all the 400 computers, they were all using whatever older protocols are all now using
TCP IP.
They can all now talk to each other and all future computers that use TCP IP can all talk
to each other.
It's a pretty good starting point.
each other it's pretty good starting point so in between or right around now tcp and ip actually got split right which is why we just call them ip addresses instead of tcp id addresses and the
reason for that is pretty nifty um the important part of the ip part is the addressing part which
if you listen to part one of this whole thing you'll know is like this big complicated thing
that needed to get figured out so they So they said that IP addresses should be universal for all devices
that are now connecting to this internetworking project. But TCP isn't the best way to get data
across in every scenario. You know, for example, TCP sends confirmation back, like, hey, I received each packet, which is useful if
I'm trying to send you like a Word document, and I need to know that you missed a few words.
But for example, like the lights behind you in the studio, they work on an internet protocol.
But if one of the packets gets lost when I'm sending stuff there, I don't need to know the
packet gets lost, like I can visually see that the packet gets lost. So we use a different protocol called UDP, and that the
user datagram protocol, which is like a slimmer, less reliable, but faster sort of thing. And all
of these things are now working under IP. Right. Yeah. So everything has an IP address, which is
just a address for your computer. So it knows where the data should go. But they split TCP IP. Right. Yeah. So everything has an IP address, which is just a address for your computer.
So it knows where the data should go,
but they split TCP IP.
So it's officially called TCP slash IP.
Okay.
That's what it's called now.
So we,
we turned the internet on on January 1st,
1983,
basically.
And it's been running ever since.
Hmm.
No big deal.
We turned the internet on.
This guy's Wayne Gretzky.
Yeah.
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Most shots on goal. Most goals scored. no big deal we turn the internet on this guy's wayne gretzky yeah for sure yeah yeah most shots
on goal most goals scored yes amazing yeah that's pretty sick um so the internet's on baby it's
going uh a lot of people have access to it suddenly you've got this distributed network
that can send packets between computers super long distances you can share information you
can remote log into super powerful computers this internet thing is pretty rad um and before we break into the next act i just want to tell
this really funny story uh first you got to know that vint surf wears a three-piece suit to
literally everything i looked him up on google images yeah you are correct yes like he is like
this white beard white hair three-piece suit like he is a serious man. He's so dope. Yeah, he looks really good in it. And I've been calling him Internet Zaddy for quite a while now because that's what I anyway. Yeah.
Anyway, he has this funny story where he's in he's at an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting, which is like these meetings that they were having to talk about Internet protocols and stuff in 1992.
And he does this strip tease in his three piece suit.
And under the suit, he has a shirt that says IP on everything, because at the time he was trying to push the adoption of Internet protocol being on all networking equipment and like nobody was really having it so he does a freaking strip tease
at this internet meeting i'm glad the inventor of the internet was an og memer yeah yes it was like
off the net memeing right here anyway it works and it becomes the foundation of the internet
and home networking and the internet of things.
And basically all the technology that we use right now that does networking is based on TCP IP.
And this guy made it in like six months.
Incredible.
Well played.
Yeah.
So there's more to that story.
Quite a bit more to the story.
And it gets very interesting.
So we're going to explore that after the break.
This NFL season, get in on all the hard hitting action with FanDuel,
North America's number one sports book.
You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props or combine your bets in a same game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout plus with super simple live betting lightning fast bet settlement and instant withdrawals
fan duel makes betting on the nfl easier than ever before so make the most of this football season
and download fan duel today 19 plus and physically located in ontario gambling palm call 1-866-531-2600
or visit connectsontario.ca. are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle. This top-rated cloud ERP brings accounting,
financial management, inventory, HR,
and more onto one unified platform,
letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs.
With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools,
you're not just managing your business,
you're anticipating its next move.
You can close the books in days, not weeks,
and keep your focus forward on what's coming next.
Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your
business and how to best seize this new opportunity.
So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash
waveform.
The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform.
netsuite.com slash waveform.
All right, we're back.
So the internet's on and it's working and it's scaling really, really fast.
Originally on the, yeah, it scaled very quickly.
Originally on the ARPANET, there was no central address book for these computers.
You know, each network node had its own address book that was sort of maintained by the network
administrator, but there was no way to prevent duplicates in the address book or update the
address book network wide so when all these networks came together to form the internet
uh that was a problem and it was scaling really quickly you know this is similar to this is the
act two is called the dns and i have a it's very abridged because we did an entire episode on the
d i was gonna say this sounds like it could lead straight into last episode you basically could what you could do is you could like listen to last episode and
then come back if you really wanted to um but think about this when tzipip was introduced
it introduced the idea that every computer needed an address so if you think about packet switching
again you realize it's important that each packet of data knows where it's going so of course it's bouncing off all these network nodes trying to find the path of least resistance to get there
as fast as possible. But it needs to be sent to a specific address. So back then, if you were a
computer at UCLA, and you wanted to get on a computer at UC Berkeley, you had to type in the
IP address to connect to that computer. This was mostly fine at the beginning when there was only
a certain number of computers on the network. Uh, but you know, there was only four universities computed at the very, there were only four
universities connected at the very beginning.
So you had this very small list of IP addresses, but the internet scaled very quickly.
Um, there were already 400 connected when the internet got turned on.
And can you imagine having a spreadsheet of like 400 computers each with different IP addresses
and every single time you wanted to connect to one you had to like look through the spreadsheet
with your granny glasses and find you know which IP address was correct like not great IP address
is always in the format that they are today which is like there are there have been different there's
like IPv4 IPv6 and that basically just like adds extra digits which exponentially scales the amount
of computers that's what I'm thinking like at the time oh there's only 400 computers so if we just
have like a four digit IP address we're good yeah and then suddenly that's well there are many
stories of people being like oh yeah IPv4 like that'll last for the next 500 years no it did not
not even close um now we're I believe we're on IPv6 right now and that should last a while, but who knows?
We're making a lot of devices because every
individual device that connects to the internet
has a new IP address.
It's crazy. We talked about this
in the ICANN and the 7 Keys of the Internet episode,
but the original solution
to this IP address indexing
problem was one guy named John Postel.
He created
a document called host.txt that would contain
every single computer's ip address so you know yeah you'd call up john you'd be like i want to
connect my computer to the internet and he'd be like okay so you're uh this ip address and i'm
gonna put you and then he would distribute this host.txt spreadsheet to the entire internet and
you'd download the host.txt spreadsheet every day. The yellow pages of the entire internet.
Yeah, basically. Because he was handling the assigning of IP address, he became known as
the IANA or the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Very similarly, yeah, there's a
lot of redundant information, but I'm just trying to skim over it. Go watch our I Can
and the Seven Keys of the Internet episode.
Do it.
Yeah. So this was not a scalable solution. So a call of proposals on how
to improve that system was made.
And a man named Paul Mokopetris came up with
the DNS, or the domain
name system, which was a way to
automatically map domain names
or word versions of IP addresses
to the server's actual IP address.
Became a lot easier. It's very lightweight.
It's very elegant. It's great.
Yeah. So while all this
dns stuff was happening vid decided maybe he should go and join the private sector right he'd
been working on government stuff for like a very long time and he was interested in trying something
new because you know he just created the internet basically he's like yeah you could go do something
in the private sector and make a lot more money yeah hustle i was gonna say is he still getting
paid like garbage at this point?
Pretty much.
Yeah.
No, he was literally, he literally told us like, I want to send my daughter to college.
So I think he was, yeah, he was like, I could make a lot more money in the private sector.
Oh, his two sons to college.
Sorry.
So right before ARPA turns the internet on, like right before they turned the internet
on, but he had it ready.
Everything was ready.
turns the internet on, like right before they turn the internet on, but he had it ready.
Everything was ready. He left and went to go work for this company called MCI,
where he created something called MCI Mail.
It starts with the office equipment you've already got. It ends with a message delivered to anyone, anywhere. Faster, cheaper, or both.
It's MCI Mail.
And it's what business uses to communicate, when communicating means business.
This is very much business.
Those movie makers.
Yeah.
1983, this came out. I was going to say, that's the 80s encapsulated oh yeah um yeah
so effectively mci mail was basically an early version of commercial email because before this
digital messaging like email was only available to government employees and the university
researchers there was no like public version of email at that time yeah yeah so nobody
had a lot of access to this stuff um so mci started putting computers in places like hotels
business centers airports or you could get them at home if you were rich enough to have an actual
computer you could boot up your mci like software right so it was basic it was basically email for rich people or
business people and it wasn't connected to this new internet yeah like mci was going was leasing
their own telephone lines from the phone companies and building their own that that's why it was like
they had it had to be a separate thing because like david said like you had to be doing government
research if you wanted internet access at this point.
The internet was still only for government people and military.
And this is the private sector.
Yeah, because the technology was there.
So some MCI spun up and they were like, we could do this on our own network.
Right.
Yeah.
So MCI mail was actually really cool because it did some other really wacky things.
Like you could enter a physical address into the address bar and it would send a letter oh i was gonna make that joke no
literally joke okay literally yeah you could you would pay different rates based on like what kind
of telecommunication like communications platform you wanted to use that's hilarious so if you
thought like oh i want to send this mci mail to this other person but i'm not sure they're going
to get it in time send it in letter format to this guy's hotel.
It was like business, you know, big business.
A pigeon would take off with it.
Yeah.
So Vin actually launched MCI mail.
He went to MCI to build MCI mail for MCI.
And he launched it very quickly in September of 1983, which was the same year they turned the Internet on.
Right. in September of 1983, which was the same year they turned the internet on, right?
Like he left ARPA right before they turned the internet on,
built this email client for MCI
and they launched it that same year,
which was pretty wild.
And I think it went kind of okay,
like the launch of MCI mail.
This was like the first commercial email service.
I think they were expecting it to be like insanely profitable
because Mint saw like the value of the internet and expecting it to be like insanely profitable because Mint saw like
the value of the internet and being able to communicate like that. But it didn't really
turn out that way. They tried a lot of different marketing campaigns to try to get people to use
MCI mail, but it just didn't gain a ton of hype. It took a while. They were just too early,
basically. And that'll happen, you know. So, Vince stayed at mci for a while like eight years uh but he got
pretty bored again because you know he created the internet he's probably wanting to you're just
itching for that next yeah yeah yeah and you're at high exactly yeah and so bob khan um who was
actually the guy who went to vint to try to get him to build TCPIP for the military,
had just created this new nonprofit called CNRI, or the Corporation for National Research
Initiatives.
Basically a think tank, if you know what a think tank is.
Just like we do all this research and then we sell it to the government or something
like that.
So Vint went to do that instead because it was just way more fun.
They got to just build a lot of random different stuff.
So they gallivant together on this eight year exploration of what the internet could be
used for.
Cause I had just got turned on.
They were the only ones that knew how valuable it was.
And so, you know, they, they started making all this crazy stuff like digital libraries,
mobile software, knowledge robots, which were basically early forms of ai
yeah they for eight years they were just like let's go freaking wild and just made all this
crazy stuff um so but in the background this is over the course of eight years there's a lot of
stuff developing in the internet community like the national science foundation uh decided that
they wanted to connect 3 000 universities to the internet and remember
when the internet got turned on it was only 400 computers yeah computers not even just universities
like 400 computers oh yeah and they want to connect 3 000 universities so what they were
going to do was build a multi-network system um or something called an internet backbone
so basically like there are clusters of computers of servers that run the
internet right right now we have like google and facebook and like these are all these servers that
are just giant clusters that route your data around that's called an internet backbone um
and then all of a sudden the department of energy and nasa decided they also wanted to create these
big clusters, these internet
backbones.
And by the mid 80s, there were suddenly four different massive government internet backbones
that were growing.
And that required a lot of networking equipment.
So during this period, there was suddenly a huge influx of networking equipment manufacturers
that were popping up to create the backbones, right?
Because suddenly you're like, oh yeah, we need 3,000 universities connected,
but we have no equipment.
To fill that need.
Yeah, yeah.
So people are going to come in and make money.
But something happened around this time
that made Vint realize that he needed to get the internet
into the hands of the public
and that the internet was going to be a very big deal.
Because again, still only for research universities,
but it's growing so quickly.
But Vint has this story where in 1988,
he went to an internet trade show,
which just became a thing at the time,
which is basically just networking equipment manufacturers
that were showing off their stuff.
Yeah.
But he saw all these companies that had these huge booths
and huge displays and huge TVs that were like, and he's like, oh my God, like people are putting real money into networking equipment.
Like this is like millions of dollars of stuff.
Yeah, it made sense.
I mean, over this time, it became pretty clear that personal computing was blowing up.
The Apple Macintosh came out in 1984.
Personal computers were getting really popular.
They had their own personal software that ran locally.
People were getting computers in their homes.
And Vince was like, oh, these are computers, and we have the internet.
I mean, they were made to go together, right?
I hate the interests.
Hey, you got your computer and my internet.
No, you got your internet and my computer.
But the governments and the universities were the only ones that had access to the internet,
My computer.
But the governments and the universities were the only ones that had access to the internet,
which, you know, for the people who knew how useful the internet was, was really freaking useful.
So Vince sets this trade show and he's seeing how much money is being thrown at it.
And he realizes that if the general public could get access, that the internet could
be a self-sustaining entity.
Because again, like these millions of dollars are being put into the industry that are only
being sold to the government, military and universities right now but what if the public suddenly became
a customer you know you have this really limited amount of people and it's still blowing up then
all of a sudden it's just like everybody the the biggest industry of all time is about to
explode yeah and i mean and government funding always is like it's a question mark like this in
the start of this all happened because the government basically stopped funding arpa darpa
whatever it was back then exactly they got to the point they were so small that they had to work on
this project yeah i'm sure they've got that in the back of their minds like we could lose this again
yeah yeah yeah it could be like a huge waste of money right uh but the problem was one big thing
needed to change before this was going to be put into the hands of the public that was the law um
because even with stuff like mci mail there's only one application that people had access to if you
wanted to be on the actual internet and you wanted to grow something needed to be done to get people
on that thing and vent went full gangster mode. He's like,
how can I break the law? Nice. Yeah. And so I remember thinking in 1988,
how are we going to get the general public access to the internet?
And I thought, well, there's a problem because there was something called an appropriate use
policy of the government backbone
networks you could only use them for government sponsored research that was the basic rule and so
i had to figure out how could i break that rule how do i break this rule that only allows the
government access to the internet so he has this idea what if he's able to put MCI mail, which he just made for a private company, the commercial email service, not just on MCI's network, but on the internet?
Like the internet internet.
He's like, well, first of all, this wasn't even necessarily made to be on the internet.
Like, I don't really know.
The protocols were made for a local network, not necessarily the internet um and i don't even know if this is going to work but i also just want to
break the rules because i want to see if i can get commercial traffic on the internet right so in 88
he goes to the federal networking council and he asked them can i hook up mci mail to the internet
and they said yes nice there are no rules yeah it's easy to the internet? And they said, yes. Nice.
There are no rules.
Yeah.
It's easy to break the rules
when they just let you do it right off the bat.
Exactly.
It was like, he was very,
like, I'm not even sure if they knew
what they were agreeing to.
They probably didn't
because he's an internet person
and they're just like, oh, technology.
I don't know how you do your thing, right?
But they did.
And so now, all of a sudden,
anyone that was using an MCI mail
was also interacting with people on the Internet.
So suddenly you had commercial traffic flowing over a government service hosted by public universities.
None of these things are ever supposed to touch.
These are three separate organizations that are not supposed to be intertwined.
Can't be commercialized unless we get the government to change its policy.
So as a relatively new employee of CNRI,
a couple of years into working there,
I went to the Federal Networking Council
and asked them for permission to hook up MCI Mail,
which is a commercial email package, to the Internet.
My purpose was twofold.
I wanted to see what would happen if we did that
because the two systems were not necessarily designed
to do their work.
And second, I wanted to break the policy logjam
that said you couldn't put anything commercial
on the internet.
I figured until we did that,
we'd never be able to turn it into a self-supporting system
and it would never spread, at least not much. Well, much to my astonishment, they said yes.
Which is just crazy. Yeah. So naturally, other email providers would start saying like, wait,
that's not fair. Because at this point in time, MCI mail was not the only.
Yeah, there were other ones that were popping up. And everyone's like, why does MCI get to be on the internet and we have to have our own little local network?
That's a private organization that has like a weird deal with the government.
Very strange.
So the government becomes in a jam or as it puts it in a log jam.
I mean, they let this happen.
They open the floodgates.
Right.
So they had to let other businesses connect to the internet, too.
They couldn't just only let mci connect to the internet so you can imagine the surprise when people suddenly start suddenly they're not in these little silos of services anymore like imagine
that you're using whatsapp and you get a whatsapp message in telegram or iMessage all of a sudden
they've got these separate apps and you're used to using whatsapp and all of a sudden someone who messages you on through telegram just comes into your
whatsapp you're like that's that's really weird that's basically what was happening
like all these independent protocols just opened up and pretty rapidly infrastructure started to
pop up to route people to the internet these were these became internet service providers
right because all of a sudden the public has access to the internet these were these became internet service providers right because all of
a sudden the public has access to the internet through these commercial services and these
things like mci mail or their competitors became the internet service providers that we know today
so you needed the person to be the at-home private citizen having their stuff connected into this
this now network of government and private
citizens right and universities and everything because they didn't know they couldn't get to
there before yeah so someone had to mci right really them to water mci was connected now to
the internet but they had to connect you into the internet because you had just been connected to mci
before um so this is a funny thing. People are technically, you know,
like on the internet now,
but in a very limited way.
Like they're just trading data.
They're not browsing the web.
And notice that I used web for the first time.
Things don't actually start heating up
for another 10 years.
There's just all this periods of time
between all of this stuff.
And now we get to the creation of the World Wide Web.
So what year are we in now?
1999.
Hey, Ellis and Adam here from the Waveform Podcast.
Despite the fact that we've been researching this story for almost a year,
both of us somehow missed David saying that the World Wide Web was invented in 1999.
The World Wide Web was actually
invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. So if you will, for the next three or so minutes, just
imagine David saying 1989 every time you hear 1999. Thanks. So now we get to the creation of
the World Wide Web. A man named Tim Berners-Lee at CERN came up with an idea.
You may have heard of this man.
So the internet's already running.
It's already connecting the world with very basic applications.
But isn't the point of the internet to share information and not just share, like, data and applications?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Are you going to say something?
I agree.
Okay.
Yeah, so that's happening, of course.
But, like, primarily in the sense that you are going to be something? I agree. Okay. Yeah, so that's happening, of course,
but primarily in the sense that you were going to be using individual web pages.
You're going to specific web addresses and websites, and you're consuming the information that was available on those websites.
That was all that was happening at the time.
So how do you research now?
What's the best way to jump around to different web pages on the internet
and find what you need?
Search.
Search engine.
What happens when you search on Google?
It crawls all of the internet.
And what does it show you?
And shows you a list of websites related to your search.
And what is that when you click on one of those things?
What is that called?
When you click a URL?
Yeah. Forwarding? Hyperlink. Hyperlink. Oh, you click on one of those things what is that called when you click a url yeah forwarding
hyperlink hyperlink oh you click the hyperlink hyperlink right hypertext yes yes hypertext
transfer protocol yeah we're getting there we're getting there we're getting boom boom
hypertext oh yeah so it's information that tosses you to other information it's like
the foundation of information discovery.
Like there's those Wikipedia games where they're like,
how do you get from this Wikipedia page to this Wikipedia page as fast as possible?
Fun fact, this is total tangent.
My friend made, back in high school, he made an app.
He called it Wikigolf.
And literally the entire point was like,
it would give you a par four and it would give you the two subjects.
And it was your job to get from one to the other.
That's awesome.
And we couldn't believe it didn't take off. I'm so good at that game. i like i don't want to brag we need to bring that back we do i can i'll take anyone on a studio video yeah
yeah we used to play that in in middle school all the time it was pretty fun yeah yeah i'll lose
yeah so hypertext was actually invented way before in 1999 um the coin the term was actually invented way before 1999. The term was actually coined in 1963,
but originally it was useful
for jumping around a single document, right?
Like quickly getting to the references page
or that kind of stuff.
But like, what if hypertext,
the thing that was actually very useful
for finding stuff on one document,
could link to other stuff on the entire internet?
Because at the time it was just like,
click here to go down to this part of the page. but what if you clicked here and it went to a website you
didn't even know about yeah like a table of contents for the entire internet fire very cool
yeah so at cern all these physicists are showing up with their own little networks and their own
little protocols and the scientists would need to access information from all these universities
around the world so if you connected hypertext to the internet suddenly you could just jump around the internet and find all this information so much
faster like imagine you're just trying to like do research and you know it's somewhere on the
internet but you have nowhere to look and you can't do search like there's no hypertext on
the internet that's annoying as heck yeah there's no dewey decimal system right for like knowing
everything yeah it's like how we used to remember people's phone numbers like you you have a limit to that right you can't remember
everybody's phone number yeah well maybe i don't know the brain's pretty cool um anyway tim
berners-lee creates the world wide web which most people don't know is actually different from the
internet like a lot of people say like the internet and the world wide web um but just like the
internet is a super network that
covers all networks the worldwide web is all the hyperlinks that connect to all the other hyperlinks
yeah it's a web of hyperlinks because they're it's like this interconnected thing right the
internet was already there which was a network to cover all networks but he only became a web when
they started linking connecting to one another so tim's like okay well
sick let's connect all of these sites together with hypertext so the next couple of months he
works and he builds a very early internet browser which he literally calls worldwide web which is
the first internet browser uh and then later he renamed it to nexus because he wanted to avoid
confusion with the worldwide web which was like the idea of all the hyperlinks connecting to each other
and the product world wide web
yeah
it wasn't the kind of browser you're probably familiar with today
that really started with Netscape and Mosaic
which came out a couple years later
classics yeah yeah it wasn't like a
GUI based interface but it was
basically a document reader that just allowed you to jump
around to other like documents
can I interject real quick you guys keep saying gui oh what graphical user interface which is just having
things to click on and having photos and i dig it yeah i'm team gui the first the first what is
pre-gui called text you text ui dos i feel like it's referred to as what is a text ui yeah okay
and you had to know all the commands and it was like in terminal or command.
Oh, okay.
Was it TUI?
I don't know if it had like an umbrella term, but I'm going to call it TUI.
A command line interface, CLI.
Okay, yeah, something like that.
Yeah.
So this picks up really, really freaking fast.
And like that, the browser wars are suddenly on in full force.
You've got all these browsers that are popping up that are trying to make the most market share possible and they all offer like different services and
all this different kind of stuff toolbars toolbars and that's generally where the history of the
internet podcasts books and other stories begin is 1999 with tim berners-lee um because pretty
soon after that the browser wars started you got mosaic which was
trying to make the web look like a magazine and netscape and aol there's so many podcasts that
cover this era and like really intense detail so i didn't want to like go over that again
um but that is the secret history of the internet how the internet got started um but what's next right that was the question i had
and it turns out vint is working on an a version of the web and the internet that he thinks is
going to be the future of the internet right now right now he's working on that now he's working
on that now he's working on a new thing now. We should probably hear about this. Do you have a guess for what you think it is?
Web 3.
You say Web 3.
It's not Web 3.
It's not Web 3.
Okay, that's good.
This is Internet Zaddy
we're talking about.
Okay, okay.
Web 4, baby.
Web 4.
Four-piece suits.
No, I don't know.
I imagine it's got to be
a way to connect
an even bigger set of things,
but I can't really think of it.
The mind.
The mind.
Oh, wow.
I don't know.
I don't know.
You're correct. What is it? An The mind. The mind. Oh, wow. I don't know. I don't know. You're correct.
What is it?
An interplanetary internet.
Oh, true.
The biggest set of things.
The biggest set of things.
That is the biggest set of things.
Yes.
That we know.
So, yeah.
The reason I wanted to like
cut off the history of the internet
and not do the browser wars and stuff.
There's so many podcasts,
so many books that cover that
in such intense detail.
I wanted to cover
the secret history of the internet which was what came before it and then
the interplanetary internet yeah right okay so now we're gonna take a left turn pretty hardcore
here let's go to mars very cool it will not take that long but it's very cool okay all right so
the first successful marsh mission was in 1976 with two Viking landers, right?
But at that point, for about 20 years, they couldn't do it again.
They couldn't land more stuff on Mars again for like 20 years.
Things were just crashing.
They weren't having any success.
And then miraculously, about 20 years later in 1997, there's this mission called Pathfinder and it finally works.
And it's driving around, it's taking photos, and it's transmitting data from Mars. Pretty cool. I think that we probably think of the more
modern Mars rovers right now, but we actually had them back in 1997. That was actually taking data
and sending it to us. Very cool. So Vint in 1997 flies out to JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
after that mission. And they start seriously talking about something they might need
25 years down the line right because they just set up the internet they were like well we should
get started on like everything that we do related to the internet takes like 15 years we should
start work on the next thing now so they're like well what if we had an interplanetary backbone
network right there's these backbone networks that were getting set up
by the National Science Foundation and stuff on the internet.
What if we had an interplanetary backbone network?
They're originally just going to use TCPIP
for the interplanetary backbone network.
But because of the delays, because the distance between planets,
it would be way, the delay would be way too high, right?
Yeah, so what's the stat now?
So if we want to send a command
to the Curiosity rover on Mars,
we're a certain number of light minutes away from Mars.
Right.
And so that latency is gigantic.
Yeah, so from Earth to Mars,
when they're closest together,
when Earth and Mars are the closest possible together,
they're 35 million miles together,
which means that it'll take three and a half minutes to get a signal at the speed of light
from earth to mars and when earth and mars are the furthest apart they're 235 million miles apart
so that's like a 40 minute round trip yeah tcp not exactly built to handle round trips that
take 40 minutes because remember if you're dropping packets right now,
speed of light on Earth, you just resend the packet,
you notice no change.
But imagine it takes 40 minutes to get some data over there
and you drop some packets.
The ping is crazy on Mars.
Insane!
It's crazy on Mars.
Yeah.
And then you have to take relativity into account
and like all this stuff and time and all that stuff's weird.
Okay.
We talked about that in the uh
james webb's face telescope episode little plug go listen to that if you haven't listened to it
already uh yeah so it's not built for 40 minute round trips that's definitely not going to work
and there's also the fact that the planets are rotating so you've only got a small period of
time when you can transmit data from the planet to a node in space
because the nodes in space the like satellites that are rotating around the earth and stuff
go behind the earth and then they can't send the data anymore right big problems um so they decided
they basically needed to make a mesh network that stores information that can be sent um they were
going to need a whole new suite of protocols
that took relativity and the speed of light into account.
Yeah, so they start getting heavy on this math stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they started working on this new protocol suite.
And they're working on this.
And then suddenly, in 2004,
there's another successful Mars mission.
And the original idea was to just send data directly
from those rovers to these huge satellite dishes that were scattered at very strategic points around Earth.
There was one in Canberra, Australia, one in Madrid, Spain, and one in Goldstone, California.
So these are like as separately apart as you can make them.
And they're like 70 meters wide.
They're massive satellite dishes because you're sending data through Mars you've got like you know the information is going like this you
got to have the biggest bucket as possible to collect as much data as you can just so we're
on the same page 70 meters that's about 220 feet is that true you're welcome did you do that just
now yeah it's like 3.1 feet per meter that's easy european 229 feet sorry just for those
united states weirdos anyway imagine a 230 feet satellite dish yeah it's huge that's huge yeah
yeah anyway they try to do this um and the data rate is about 28 kilobits per second
not fast that's very slow it feels like the internet in this building.
Anyway, yeah, it's really slow.
And the researchers did not love that.
So while the data is transmitting, well, they start trying to do this, right? They're sending data from the Mars rovers.
They're transmitting the data.
And the radios on the rovers start overheating.
That's really bad.
Because you don't want to burn out the radios on Mars rovers that are like insanely expensive and took forever to get there.
Like if you imagine you just send these rovers over and they just start transmitting data and they just burn up like they just that's no fun.
Yeah, they overheat.
So at this point, they came up with a new thing called store and forward, which is different from packet switching.
So we talked about packet switching before where you're just sending all this data through the path of least resistance,
you drop a packet, you send it again, it's fine. Store and forward is a little bit different,
where instead of just sending like a steady stream of data and like taking a bunch of different
routes, you send all of the data directly to one node, and you make sure that all of that data gets
to one node before it goes somewhere else. But's it becomes a mesh networking system so instead of the rover sending
all of the data through space and hitting these satellite dishes to try to get all the information
there you're actually sending it to like these different satellites in strategic points in space
i was okay so when you say mesh network, we are literally talking about several satellites strategically positioned between Earth and Mars that will relay data to each other on the way to Mars to minimize packet loss.
And I don't know what that does to speed, but I imagine that's faster because if you create a network and all of these different satellites are closer together, there's this thing
called the inverse square law where the power of data being sent through space.
Like goes down over time.
Okay.
So if you, you can send a lot more data, if the things are
closer together, effectively.
I feel like I have a baseball analogy that Ellis might appreciate.
It's like a cutoff throw from the outfield,
right? Rather than throwing from center field to home base and letting it just like dribble in
really slow, you hit someone else on the way in and then they throw it again. Right. So you had
multiple points on the way. Imagine if you had like seven cutoff throws. You could throw a much
bigger object than a baseball. No, that's kind of, it's exactly it's exactly it's like it's like picture instead of an outfielder
trying to throw someone out at home you give them nine baseballs and they have to throw over and
over again at each base one baseball to each base it's like the percentage of those that are actually
going to hit is very low okay but if you write little numbers on the baseball you know you can
reorder them into the correct thing whereas this space internet thing is much more like waiting for the perfect
moment and then throwing make a giant baseball make it have everything throw it catch it yeah
yeah because so much so much of normal packet switching tcpip stuff is just blasting out
information and assuming you can send it again
well no and then putting it back together again at the other end right whereas this is much more
about like wait for it wait for it now yeah okay yeah that's interesting that sounds like a lot of
expensive hardware too it's called store and store and forward networking right so at this point
they've been working on this new protocol software and they're like wait so they stopped sending the data from the mars rovers because they're
burning up and there's like hmm there are expand radios on the rovers but there's also expand radios
on the orbiters that are orbiting mars that they were using to you to create a map of the surface
of mars to know where they wanted the rovers to land.
So you've got satellites
that are orbiting Mars and you've also
got the actual
orbiter on Mars. And they both have this
specific type of radio. So what
if you could upload these new protocols
that Vint had been working
on for the last number of years, because again
he got started on this a while ago,
and see if you can use this store and forward method
instead of the packet switch TCP IP direct transmission.
Right?
So they push these new protocols to the orbiters
and to the rovers.
They basically update the software
to be a completely different protocol.
And now, when the orbiters circle overhead of the rovers on mars the rovers now
push all of their image data their sound data whatever data they collected to these orbiters
at 128 kilobits per second instead of 28 kilobits per second they're not burning up burning up
because of their proximity they're way faster and this kind of kicks off this whole push for this new interplanetary internet system because
imagine we have different strategic orbiters or satellites placed different at different parts
of the solar system if you have all these nodes that are closer to each other you can just start
ping-ponging information yeah between
these different orbiters wow that's why i have so many questions about just like the possibility i
mean we talk about like having a whole bunch of things in orbit around earth and how that's kind
of a lot of debris and possibly interference for observation of space because now there's just
stuff in the way i'm sure those are all things being considered.
Definitely.
Yeah.
But I mean, the cool thing is like
in the James Webb Space Telescope episode,
we talked about Lagrange point two,
which is a very special metastable point
where the James Webb Space Telescope
is being pulled at the same velocity in all directions,
which makes it basically super stable.
And every planet has five different Lagrange points, right?
And I asked Vint, can we put one of these nodes like at a Lagrange point because then you could just place different
satellites instead of orbiting a planet you can basically have them stationary in space
relative to the earth yeah yeah or whatever you know because the earth is moving around the sun
and then the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy right galaxy is moving so it's it's all relative it's all relative but
yes but stable relative to earth right and hopeful because mars is going to keep spinning
separately from earth and so we probably just have a ton of stuff but relative to earth at least you
have this satellite that is super far away from earth but is way closer than mars is to earth at
any given time if you can place enough of these of these network nodes throughout the galaxy is that so cool this is
pretty wild yeah solar system solar system eventually maybe the galaxy yeah we'll start
with our solar system we'll work on i just like the idea that you have like little nest nest
wi-fi's just floating in space like transmitting data. This reminds me of a MrBeast video
I want to pitch to a word
to see if you can get a Wi-Fi access
from the East Coast to the West Coast
by just planting mesh network points
all the way across the country.
I'm pretty sure it would lose so much power.
It would just probably die.
All we need is 128 kilobit per second.
If you can even get one bit,
that would be pretty awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah, so one thing
that vince really excited about is the amount of commercial interest that's been pouring into
this stuff even in just the last three years since like commercial interests have finally caught up
and kind of over like surpassed government interests when it comes to space exploration
with things like starlink spacex you know all these companies now want to throw these orbiters
into space.
So it's going to be cheaper and easier to maybe get SpaceX or somebody to be like,
throw up an orbiter at Lagrange Point 2
so you can create this interplanetary backbone network.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess they're all slightly more unique missions now
because planting things on the way to Mars
seems like a bunch of spots we haven't
been to in space before.
But yeah, that is a really fascinating idea.
I think I remember having this conversation maybe with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'm not sure,
but about how the internet on Mars right now could be completely different from the internet
on Earth because we're accessing all these servers on Earth.
We talk to the satellites.
We're all using earth internet yeah and then on mars
it's just it could just be a brand new internet right so obviously vint has been thinking about
this much longer than i have because he's thinking about how to connect the two to the point where
maybe a live stream from uh somebody twitch streaming on earth could be live streamed to
mars actually kind of work yeah maybe yeah
wild i like the idea that vint was like i'm in the the hall of fame for the internet but that's
not good enough i want to be in the inner in the intergalactic so like we we were doing this like
interview with him we're trying to be all like you know respectful and polite and proper and we
end the interview we stop recording and we were just like, wait a second.
How did you also know space stuff?
We were just asked him.
You're like this internet god.
You're a computer.
You're on the cutting edge of computer science.
How did you also know how rocket
ships work? And just casually, he was like,
oh yeah, right after high school, I
did some engineering work for NASA.
JBL. Yeah. Just casually yeah also helps should i share this i've got a fun fact uh-huh so um
we didn't really know where to put this in the episode but it's too fun a fact like not to
mention and that's that um john postel the iana the guy we focused on last episode. In the DNS episode.
Exactly.
Vince Cerf, the main guy of this episode.
And Steve Crocker, the first internet guy that we, you know, all three huge foundational people in the internet all went to high school together.
Yeah.
What high school?
Van Nuys High School about 10 minutes away from where I grew up.
Vince Cerf and I have the same cell phone area code.
That's pretty intense.
Yeah.
They literally all went to high school together.
They all separated and didn't really know each other.
And then they did graduate work together and built the ARPANET together.
Wow.
Isn't that crazy?
That school's Hall of Fame goes so hard.
It goes hard.
That's sick.
It does go hard.
Yeah.
So there you have it.
That's the secret history of the internet and the upcoming potential interplanetary future of the internet, which is quite cool.
I'm excited for Mars internet.
I hope Mars internet is...
This guy is still scoring goals, man.
He's still putting up satellites and thinking about things.
I hope Mars internet is pretty fire.
Yeah. So before we depart, well,. I hope Mars Internet is pretty fire. Yeah, yeah.
So before we depart, well, first I want to have a little conversation.
Did you guys learn anything new that you didn't really know before?
I knew all of that.
Yeah.
There's just no shot.
No, I learned a lot, yeah.
Yeah.
That was surprising.
I learned that if I ever meet Vint Cerf at a bar, I will buy him a beer and thank him for the Internet.
Whenever I tell people, like, oh, yeah, I've got an episode coming up we interviewed this guy named vince surf they're always like
you talked to vince surf like he is like an internet god to a lot of people twice
yeah twice twice yeah twice and the second time we called him and he was like good to see you
again david and i was like start bawling your eyes yeah so that's the secret history of the
internet but i have one more thing uh that
i want to do with adam and ellis right now to sign off i just have one message that i want to tell
you guys and also all the viewers that are watching and listening right now oh i have buttons oh i
didn't get them i'm buttoning it wow wow wow wow nice for audio listeners
they've all coordinated
shirts that say
IP on everything
that's spelled I-P-E-E
no
for the audio listeners
this is the shirt that Vint wore to the internet
task force
I assume there's a striptease coming.
Thanks for watching.
That was it.
Yeah, sure.
That was the striptease.
And yeah, that was a good learning experience.
The secret history of how we accidentally made an internet
and we'll soon have intergalactic internet,
which will be awesome.
Yeah, it's kind of all folded into a lot of the other episodes
that we've done.
Go watch the I Can and the Seven Keys of the Internet.
All about the DNS, which we skimmed over here.
We talked about the new space race,
which is about sort of the satellites that are throwing into orbit.
The James Webb Space Telescope episode,
which is called How the James Webb Space Telescope Sees into the Past
or something like that.
We got a lot of cool space and internet and light and data episodes.
So go check those out.
Leave your requests for other crazy long form stuff you want us to tackle in the comments below.
Because I will be reading those and we'll get some fun ideas from that.
And we'll make David go crazy over them.
And we'll have some shirts made, of course.
And maybe I'll order pizza.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.