The Accident That Connected Us: The Secret History of the Internet - Episode 2

00:00:00: Right now, without you doing a single thing data is traveling through your walls and somewhere on the floor of Pacific Ocean there's cable thinner than a garden hose keeping you connected to rest world.

00:00:12: Today we're talking about internet where it actually came from what almost wasn't And why first message ever sent over was just two letters.

00:00:22: I'm Alexandra.

00:00:23: Welcome to the Hidden Life of Things, everyday history.

00:00:26: for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered how did this actually get here?

00:00:31: Sit with me today!

00:00:33: Think about everything you've done on the internet today.

00:00:42: A message you sent, something you searched a video that loaded... ...a map your checked.

00:00:46: Now think of it as none of this exists in one place.

00:00:52: There's no building point to and say That is where the Internet lives.

00:00:56: No central switch No headquarters No off-button.

00:01:01: The Internet is by any reasonable measure most complex structure human beings have ever built.

00:01:07: It spans every continent, it runs under the ocean and travels through air.

00:01:12: The vast majority of people who use this planet have no idea how it works or very little.

00:01:22: Which is fine!

00:01:23: You don't need to know that a road is built on one but I think there's something genuinely wonderful when you actually look at them because they're not what you'd expect It didn't start with a vision of connecting humanity.

00:01:38: The year is nineteen sixty-nine, the Cold War very much on.

00:01:55: Soviet Union launched Sputnik just over a decade earlier and governments around world are in state of productive anxiety about science.

00:02:03: technology.

00:02:05: who's leading?

00:02:05: both In the United States, the Department of Defense has set up a research agency – ARPA.

00:02:12: The Advanced Research Projects Agency.

00:02:15: and they have a frustratingly simple problem.

00:02:18: They funded on number universities in research labs across country And each of those labs had computer A big expensive room sized computer.

00:02:28: Those computers are not talking to one another.

00:02:32: If a researcher at one university wanted to use a program that only existed on the computer somewhere else, they had one of two options.

00:02:40: One travel there or Two wait for someone who mailed them files in physical magnetic tape which took long time.

00:02:50: So ARPA funded a project to connect these machines.

00:02:53: Not share information the way we think of it today, not streaming or social media and email as you know.

00:03:00: just let researchers share access to each other's computers remotely.

00:03:04: that is the whole original vision modest practical a little unglamorous.

00:03:09: The network was called Arpanit And on October twenty ninth In nineteen sixty-nine, a student programmer named Charlie Klein at UCLA attempted to send the very first message over this network.

00:03:23: He was trying to log into her computer in the Stanford Research Institute –a few hundred miles away!

00:03:29: The procedure was just type three letters L O G and system on the under end is designed complete command itself adding I N to make login.

00:03:40: Klein typed L it arrived.

00:03:43: he typed O, it arrived.

00:03:46: He type G and this system crashed!

00:03:49: The first message ever sent over what would become the internet was L-O which is either A beautiful accident, low as in lo and behold or just a very own brand story about technology which is that it almost works.

00:04:05: And then immediately fails in the way technically still a milestone.

00:04:09: They fixed the crash within an hour.

00:04:11: The full login worked but LO is the message history remembers.

00:04:16: Through the nineteen seventies, ARPANET grew.

00:04:19: More universities joined and crucially international nodes began to appear.

00:04:23: Norway joined in nineteen seventy three becoming the first country outside of United States on network followed by the united kingdom.

00:04:32: The idea was escaping its original borders almost immediately.

00:04:36: The protocols they agreed upon rules that let different computers talk with each other were developed and refined by researchers across multiple institutions.

00:04:46: Two computer scientists named Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn designed something called TCPIP in nineteen seventy-four, building on earlier work by British and French researchers including Donald Davis at the UK's National Physical Laboratory who had independently developed a concept of packet switching.

00:05:06: The internet from its earliest days was an international collaboration, even when the headlines focused elsewhere.

00:05:12: And here's something worth pausing on because it shaped everything that came after!

00:05:20: Researchers, they weren't building a product.

00:05:23: The culture was genuinely open and collaborative.

00:05:26: You published your work.

00:05:27: other people improved it.

00:05:28: you built on each others contributions.

00:05:31: There is an almost philosophical commitment to openness baked into the architecture from very beginning Which is partly why when it eventually grew into a global public network, It remained open.

00:05:42: Nobody owns the core infrastructure of the internet.

00:05:45: The way one company owns a telephone network?

00:05:48: Its shared commons!

00:05:51: Though the economics on top gets complicated very fast.

00:05:56: By the late nineteen eighties, Arpanet officially decommissioned in nineteen ninety had grown into a broader worldwide web of connected networks.

00:06:06: The internet lowercase and its modern sense existed but it was still extremely difficult to use.

00:06:13: you needed to know specific addresses You need to understand protocols.

00:06:17: It was not by any stretch for regular people And then one man sat down at a computer our physics lab in Switzerland and changed everything.

00:06:26: Here is a distinction I want to draw carefully because people mix these up all the time.

00:06:30: and honestly, why would you know that difference?

00:06:33: No one ever explains it.

00:06:35: The internet And the World Wide Web are not the same thing.

00:06:39: The Internet is hardware, cables routers servers physical and technical infrastructure that connects computers together.

00:06:49: it's their road network!

00:06:51: The World Wide web is software system of pages and documents sit on top internet link to each other traffic destinations signs runs on the internet completely separate invention.

00:07:07: The Internet early nineteen seventies, the World Wide Web Nineteen.

00:07:13: Eighty-Nine One person.

00:07:16: his name was Tim Berners Lee a British computer scientist working at CERN the particle physics laboratory near Geneva Switzerland where researchers from dozens of countries collaborate and His problem was genuinely mundane.

00:07:30: son had thousands of researches from all over the world.

00:07:33: Everyone had documents and databases, and the information kept getting lost.

00:07:38: People finished their contracts and left taking their knowledge with them!

00:07:41: There was no consistent way to find

00:07:43: anything.".

00:07:45: He wrote a proposal – his supervisor at CERN, A man named Mike Sandahl received it & wrote few words on cover page that have since become rather famous.

00:07:55: Those word said vague but exciting.

00:07:58: I love this note !

00:08:02: Vague but exciting is the endorsement every genuinely new idea deserves at the beginning.

00:08:08: The proposal sketched out three things, a way of writing documents with links inside them that could point to other documents which are what we now call hyperlinks A Way Of Identifying Where Any Document Lived On The Network What We Now Call URL And A Protocol For Requesting and Receiving Those Documents.

00:08:29: He called it the World Wide Web.

00:08:32: And then, and this is a decision that I think mattered more than the invention itself he and Sen chose to make it free.

00:08:39: In nineteen ninety-three they released technology into public domain no patent No license fee?

00:08:47: No royalties.

00:08:49: Anyone anywhere in world could build website or browser use it forever for nothing.

00:08:55: Berners-Lee was asked about this decision later.

00:08:57: He said simply that if the web had been patented, it would never have grown the way it did!

00:09:03: You can't have a Web that connects everything –if not everyone–can

00:09:06: participate.".

00:09:08: This decision made in Switzerland by British scientists at an international institution meant that the web belonged to the world rather than any company or country.

00:09:18: The number of websites went from one in nineteen ninety nine to a million by nineteen ninety seven, then a hundred million.

00:09:25: Today there are estimated to be somewhere between five and six-hundred billion indexed pages but that explosion created the new problem how do you find anything?

00:09:36: This is where the nineteen nineties get entertaining.

00:09:40: what followed was global race to organize web.

00:09:43: it's genuinely competitive on every continent.

00:09:46: The first major approach was essentially a directory.

00:09:49: Yahoo launched in nineteen ninety-four and was, at its core, human curated list.

00:09:54: You browse categories until you found what needed.

00:09:57: Meanwhile search engines that crawled and indexed the web automatically were being developed simultaneously by teams from multiple countries.

00:10:05: Europe had it's own contenders so did Asia.

00:10:08: Japanese internet culture in particular is developing their own rich ecosystem of web organization tools alongside Western ones.

00:10:15: The fundamental problem was scale.

00:10:18: The web growing faster than any human team could catalog, and faster then early algorithms could rank meaningfully.

00:10:26: Then in nineteen ninety-eight two PhD students at Stanford Larry Page and Sergei Brin launched a search engine with slightly silly name.

00:10:35: Their key insight is elegant Instead of just counting how many times the Search Team appeared on page measure other pages linked to it.

00:10:44: If many pages link to something, it's probably genuinely useful.

00:10:48: Academic citation logic applied to the web!

00:10:52: The results were noticeably better than anything else available – word spread fast and within a few years.

00:10:58: Google had won the search race so decisively that their company name became a verb one of very rare brands in any language.

00:11:10: We're right now in this moment living through another shift, a significant one.

00:11:15: For thirty years the dominant way humans accessed information on the internet was to search query.

00:11:20: You have question you type keywords and get list of links.

00:11:24: click around.

00:11:25: That model is being disrupted by AI.

00:11:30: Instead of returning links to you to read yourself, AI systems can read thousands of documents and give a synthesized answer directly.

00:11:37: Whether this is straightforwardly better or not is genuinely open.

00:11:41: It's faster but often more useful.

00:11:43: But it also removes the layer of judgement The moment where YOU look at multiple sources and decide what you believe.

00:11:51: When a system summarizes ten articles for you, You're trusting its synthesis in the way that you weren't when you read those articles yourself.

00:11:58: That's worth thinking about wherever you are In whatever language to search.

00:12:04: But let me say something About The Bigger Picture Because I think we're so inside this moment.

00:12:10: We sometimes forget how Extraordinary it looks from outside of It.

00:12:14: For almost all human history access To information was rationed By class.

00:12:20: You needed money for books, for tutors and university.

00:12:24: By geography.

00:12:25: If the library was far away or if it burned down that knowledge were simply gone.

00:12:30: by language... ...by power….

00:12:33: …by who controlled means of writing things down and preserving what is written.

00:12:38: The Library of Alexandria –the legendary ancient library–is held up as a symbol of accumulated human knowledge.

00:12:44: At its peak, it may have held hundreds of thousands of scrolls.

00:12:48: Scholars traveled from across the ancient world to access it.

00:12:52: when it declined over centuries It was considered a civilizational loss.

00:12:56: Every person listening to this who has a smartphone and data connection whether in Lagos or Lima Seoul or Stockholm village or a capital city Has accessed more of humanity's accumulated knowledge than any king Any emperor any scholar of any previous era more than Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci or Newton.

00:13:19: Let that sit for a second and here is the thing I want to leave you with something i find genuinely mind-bending when I let myself think about it properly.

00:13:29: For billions years this planet turned into silence.

00:13:32: Information existed in the structure of rocks, and DNA of living things.

00:13:36: In light bouncing off mountains & seas but it couldn't travel between minds.

00:13:41: I thought that occurred when one person died with this person A discovery made at a place stayed there The universe was full knowing.

00:13:51: none could speak to any other part.

00:13:53: And then almost incomprehensibly thin sliver cosmic time billion.

00:14:03: We laced the entire surface of this planet together, we made it so that a question asked in a village in Ghana and A Question Asked In An Apartment In Seoul And A Question Asped By A Child In Sao Paulo Can All Reach The Same Answer In The Same Second?

00:14:19: The Universe Has Been Around For Thirteen Point Eight Billion Years!

00:14:23: The World Wide Web Is Thirty-Five Years

00:14:25: Old?!

00:14:27: We Are by Any Cosmic Measure Just Getting Started.

00:14:31: So the next time your phone loads a page in a fraction of second or you ask a question and an answer simply appears as if from nowhere, remember what actually happened.

00:14:41: A pulse of laser light travels through glass fiber under an ocean.

00:14:45: Dozens of machines pass back out data between them in less than it takes to blink.

00:14:49: A system built by researchers on multiple continents who weren't trying to get rich, made free by a man that could have been billionaire and chose not-to be held together by protocols written fifty years ago.

00:15:01: nobody has needed.

00:15:03: It's something better than magic!

00:15:06: It is the work of human beings From California to Cambridge from Geneva to Oslo Who decided against all commercial logic.

00:15:17: History isn't only in museums, sometimes it's in your pocket quietly doing something extraordinary.

00:15:23: Stay curious.

00:15:24: I'm Alexandra and i'll talk to you next week.