Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

---

This is the campus of University

of California in Los Angeles.

Today, no one of the students is aware

that this is ground zero of

one of the biggest revolutions

we as humans are experiencing.

One of the science buildings here

is considered the

birthplace of the internet.

This picture of some of

the scientists involved

was taken at this very moment.

The corridors here look repulsive

and yet this one leads

to some sort of a shrine

reconstructed years later

when its importance had sunk in.

Let's enter this very special place.

We are now entering a sacred location.

It's the location where the internet began.

It's a holy place.

And we've just come back to 1969

when the critical events

of the origin began.

That machine over there is the first piece

of the internet equipment ever installed.

It's a mini computer,

which we now call a packet switch.

This is a...

military hardened machine.

You can't break it.

And it was meant to sustain itself,

unattended, for years at a time.

This particular machine

is so ugly on the inside,

it is beautiful.

It has a unique odor.

A delicious old odor

from all the old parts.

It consists of modems,

CPU logic units, memory,

power supply... all the things you need

to make an efficient computer work.

This machine served as the first

node of the internet for decades.

And it was from here

that the first message was sent.

A revolution began.

And the only record we have

of what happened that day

is in this log.

On October 29th, 1969 at 10:30 at night

we enter that we "talked

to Stanford Research Institute

host to host" computer to computer.

It's very much like when on Columbus' ship,

the fellow up on top who

first spotted land,

he noticed it was and he

basically made an entry

saying "we spotted land".

That document and this document have

at least the same equivalent importance.

Now what was that first message?

Many people don't know it.

All we wanted to do

was log in from our computer

to a computer 400 miles to the north,

up in Stanford Research Institute.

To log in you have to type "LOG"

and that machine is smart

enough to type the "IN".

Now to make sure this

was happening properly,

we had our programmer and the programmer

up north connected by a telephone handset

just to make sure it was going correctly.

So Charlie typed the L and he said

"You get the L?" Bill said,

"Yup, I got the L."

He typed the O. "Get the O?"

"Yup, I got the O".

He typed the G. "Get the G?"

Crash! The SRI computer crashed.

So the first message ever

on the internet was "Lo"

as in "Lo and Behold".

We couldn't have asked for a more succinct,

more powerful, more prophetic message

than "Lo".

Well, I've been involved with the internet

really since the very beginning.

Um, there are a number of things that

would characterize that involvement.

One was I started out being the, essentially

the system designer of the ARPANET,

the very first packet net.

I joined DARPA in the early 1970s and

started two other networking programs:

one a ground base packet radio net

like today's cellular

phones and a satellite net

on Intel's Dot4 based on packets.

And the internet was about

connecting them all together

and the essential elements there

were the protocols that

would make that possible

and the technology that would be needed

inside the net to enable these

different nets to work together.

Vint Cerf, here in 1973,

and Bob Kahn collaborating together

created the fundamental

protocol for the internet.

For this they received

some of the highest honors

our society can bestow.

Imagine, if you will,

sitting down to your morning coffee,

turning on your home computer

to read the day's newspaper.

Well, it's not as far

fetched as it may seem.

Seventeen stories up in his

fashionable North Beach apartment,

Richard Halloran is calling a local number

that will connect him with

a computer in Columbus, Ohio.

Meanwhile, across town in this

less than fashionable

cubby hole at The San Francisco Examiner

these editors are programming

today's copy of the paper

into that same Ohio computer.

When the telephone connection

between these two terminals

is made, the newest form of

electronic journalism

lights up Mr. Halloran's television

with just about everything

The Examiner prints in its regular edition.

Of the estimated two to three thousand

home computer owners in the Bay Area,

The Chronicle reports

over 500 have responded

by sending back coupons.

This report,

considering the numbers

of internet users today,

sounds already like pre-history.

No one at that time had a clue

about the explosion of

information technology.

Today if you would burn CDs

of the worldwide data

flow for one single day

and stack them up to a pile,

this pile would reach up to Mars and back.

The internet is already

permeating everything.

Even on the International Space Station

a phone call from one module to the next

goes via the internet.

But how do we keep it running?

How do we guard it?

I still have a copy of the phone directory

from the late 1970s of everybody

who was on the internet and it

was a document about that thick

and it had the name, address,

and telephone number of

every single person.

Actually it had it twice because it had it

once sorted by their email address

and once sorted by their actual name.

So if you had a problem with anybody, you

could look them up, you could find them.

You could find who the actual person was

associated with that email address.

And still today I thumb through that

and a surprising fraction

of the people I actually knew.

For example, there were two

other Danny's on the internet,

and I knew them both. I

still know them both.

Of course now you can't even comprehend

the idea of a directory

that contains the name of everybody.

Today, we couldn't know exactly,

the directory might be some 72 miles thick.

The capacity on the ith channel

should be the traffic on the ith channel

over the speed of the ith channel

plus how much is left over,

that's how much capacity is left over,

and you split it

according to the square root

of the traffic on that channel

over the summation of the

square root over all channels.

The way the internet works,

there's no fixed route

that a message takes.

In the early days of the protocol there was

a kind of a bug and one of the computers

actually had a hardware failure

that made it believe that

it could get a message to some place

in negative time.

So, of course, every

message in the internet

did better by sending it through that

computer because it subtracted the time

net required to send the message.

And so all the messages in the internet

started getting sent through that computer,

which of course got slower

and slower and slower.

So the internet kind of

started to grind to a halt.

The mean response time

now will look like this.

It will be equal to the average path length

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes