Digits

It's been the case throughout the history of the Internet.

We've constantly been surprised.

Whoa.

When we look at the Internet, and where it came from,

and where it's arrived today and where it's headed.

I think it's quite clear that the engineers

didn't really realize

just how much this was going to change things.

People thought we were crazy.

Er yeah, Internet thing's never gonna be

as important as the telephone or the television.

In this series, we'll journey through the past, present,

and future of that revolution we call the Internet.

We'll go inside the hidden places, practices,

and people who make it hum.

And ask, why do we all love it so much?

This is the Internet.

Really, right here.

We usually think of it as invisible

up somewhere in the cloud.

But this is where the invisible becomes visible.

Where the intangible becomes concrete.

I'm Derek Muller and I'm in Internet exchange point.

One of hundreds of places around the world where computers,

networks all link up to form the global Internet.

What's happening in here is that countless routers

and switches are receiving data from one network

and they're passing it over to another network

via real physical cables.

So it's a network of networks.

All interconnected which is why we call it the Internet.

And here you can actually reach out and physically touch it.

Everything we've ever recorded, or for that matter,

ever written, texted or Tumblr'ed passes through

these global Internet exchange points.

It is a cosmic journey, the likes of which neither Newton,

Tesla, nor Einstein could ever have fathomed.

All of it traveling at the speed of light.

I spend most of my working life here on the Internet.

Now I know that may sound a little bit nerdy

but I actually really enjoy it.

I create and host an online science channel

called Veritasium, meaning the element of truth.

It is my dream job because I'm passionate about science

and now I can investigate topics I've always wondered about.

Isn't that cool?

And bring my world of science

to a massive international audience.

Whoooooa!

I capitalize on the reach of the web.

For example, after uploading this video called the

Surprising Applications of the Magnus Effect.

Whoooooa look at it go!

It has now been viewed by more than 50 million people

from around the world.

Not bad for a film about a fluid dynamical effect.

As a species, we have an in-built need

to connect with others.

To communicate and share our stories.

To create community, in essence.

And the Internet empowers us to do that

in ways we never before imagined.

In 1969 the same year that a man stepped on the moon,

Leonard Kleinrock headed up a team of computer scientists

later hailed as the fathers of the Internet.

And it all started in a room like this one.

The interesting thing is that if none of us had been born

we'd still have an Internet today.

It was in the air.

It was going to happen.

The inspiration to create a brand new network came

from a branch of the Defense department called ARPA.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Well, you know ARPA was formed as a response

to the 1957 Sputnik launch by the Russians.

The Soviets had caught us with our pants down.

We were behind in technology.

At the time computers were very large, very expensive,

and separated by great distances.

So a single user wishing to use multiple programs

would have to travel to different locations.

Computers need to talk to each other and there was no way

in which they were able to do so efficiently at the time.

Here was the problem.

If you were trying to send files or messages over a network,

you'd have to put them in one at a time.

So each message had to wait its turn.

And if one of the messages were really big,

it would take a long time to go through.

The solution Leonard Kleinrock

and his fellow Internet pioneers came up with

still lies at the heart of the Internet today.

It's called packet switching.

In which all the messages are cut up into pieces

of the same size called packets.

Then the packets can travel separately through the network

making the best use of every available space.

So packets from small messages, well they can squeeze into

the gaps between packets from large messages,

avoiding the long wait.

And once those packets have reached their destination,

they can be reassembled into their original messages.

To do all that chopping and reassembling,

a special device would connect computers to the network.

This is the very first piece of Internet equipment ever.

This is where the Internet began.

It's the Interface Message Processor.

It's made out of a military hardened machine.

For the Department of Defense.

Inside you notice it is so ugly it's beautiful.

It's my friend, has a unique odor,

and it's really old equipment but this is where

the entire Internet began right here.

The year is 1969.

Richard Nixon is inaugurated as our 37th president,

and more than a million people gathered at Woodstock

to celebrate sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.

And on October 29th, Kleinrock's team at UCLA

logged into a computer at the Stanford Research Institute.

Now to make sure this worked,

'cause this was the first time these two host computers

were gonna talk to each other,

to let somebody log into remotely.

We had a telephone connection.

Just to be sure.

Now to log in, you have to type L-O-G.

So, Charlie types the L and he says to Bill, you get the L?

Bill says got the L.

Got the O, you get the O?

Got the O.

Got the G?

Crash, the system went down.

The first message ever on the Internet was lo.

As in, lo and behold.

Samuel Morse had a good message on the telegraph that

look he said what hath God wrought?

He prepared a message.

He had the press and the media there.

Alexander Graham Bell, telephone.

Come here Watson, I need you.

Neil Armstrong, giant leap for mankind.

But it turns out that the message we sent was about

as short, as prophetic, as powerful as you can imagine.

Lo.

By accident.

Our vision in those early days was

machine to machine or person to machine.

What I missed totally was that this was not about

computers talking to each other.

It was about people communicating with each other.

By the end of 1969 there were just a few computers

connected to the ARPANET.

But the network grew steadily during the 1970s.

But as they multiplied it became more difficult for them

to integrate into a worldwide system

and the desire for access to each other's data was enormous.

Back in the 1970s there was no single global Internet

as we know it today.

Instead there were lots of different networks,

like the government's big ARPANET and satellite networks

and little community operations.

But they all had their own different format

and they connected to each other in different ways.

So in short, if you weren't already on a network,

there was no way to get to it.

It was like the biblical tower of Babylon.

We needed a common language.

A standard set of protocols that would allow

all these networks to talk to each other.

The Internet got the common language it needed

thanks to two pioneering scientists

and this nondescript delivery van.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn worked for years

to solve the problem of connectivity.

Bob showed up in my office at Stanford in '73 and says,

we have a problem.

My reaction is what do you mean, we?

He says, well I'm trying to get these nets to interconnect

and I don't know how we should do that.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn outfitted this vehicle

with high end computer hardware and radio transmission gear.

And then they drove it through the streets of the Bay Area.

On November 22, 1977 the team at this console

was able to transmit a message to Los Angeles.

400 miles to the south.

But they used three networks to do it.

The two men developed a way for all

the computer networks to communicate.

It's been described as the handshake

that introduces computers to each other.

They also came up with a new word for what they were doing.

Bob Kahn and I wrote this first paper describing

a protocol for packet network intercommunication.

And so internetworking was the term that was used.

But it was so clumsy.

Bob Kahn called the project internetting

and eventually we started to refer to the object

that we were building as the Internet.

Computers were still large,

roughly the size of industrial refrigeration units.