Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

This is the campus of the 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're 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's 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 "L-O-G"

and that machine is smart enough to type the "I-N".

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?"

And Bill said, "Yep, I got the L."

He typed the "O". "You get the O?" "Yep, I got the O."

He typed the "G". "You 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".

I've been involved with the internet, really,

since the very beginning.

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-based packet radio net, like today's cellular phones,

and a satellite net on Intelsat 4, based on packets.

The internet was about connecting them all together.

And, uh, 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.

17 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 addition.

Of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 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 were to 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, you know, it's a surprising fraction of the people I actually knew.

For example, there were two other Dannys 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... 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 that 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...

required to send the message and so all the messages in the internet

started getting sent through that computer, which got 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

times the summation of the square root

of the traffic on the j channel

over the sum of all traffics...

summed over all channels... squared...

over Mu C, one minus n bar Rho.

Whatever that equation means, it tells you what the minimum response time will be

for a network once it's optimized.

The computer was claiming that it could deliver the message

before you even sent it.

So, if you had a Post Office like that, of course you would use it. Right?

This was a simplified, but exact model, at the time.

Now we have other aspects of it,

but it's basically the underlying principles of the network.

And one of the things we found, surprisingly,

was that the larger the network is, the far more efficient it becomes.

Like a gambling casino

that certainly makes money if you have millions of gamblers at the slot machines?

Very much so. You've articulated what we call "the law of large numbers".

The law of large numbers says that a large population of unpredictable players -

or messages - collectively behaves in a very predictable fashion.

A fashion we can write down exactly.

And, therefore, we can predict the performance of a network when it's large.

The underlying technology has scaled by a factor of a million

in computational speed, in bandwidth of communications, in storage capacity

and it may go for another decade to a factor of a billion or even a trillion.

Nothing in the history of mankind has ever worked

as a technological contribution over that span of... of growth.

Back to the very early times,

times of speculative concepts of a connected world.

In the early '60s, many years before the first Apple personal computer,

a young thinker, Ted Nelson,

had his own ideas about creating a computer network.

The web, as we know it, took a different route,

but Nelson's ideas are still dormant.

It was an experience of water and interconnection.

I was with my grandparents in a rowboat in Chicago.

So I must have been five years old and I was trailing my hand in the water.

And I thought about how the water was moving around my fingers,

opening on one side and closing on the other.

And that changing system of relationships, where everything was kind of similar,

kind of similar, kind of the same and yet different,

that was so difficult to visualize and express.

And just generalizing that to the entire universe,

that the world is a system of ever-changing relationships

and structures,

struck me as...

a vast truth, which it is.

And... So, interconnection and expressing that interconnection

has been the center of all my thinking.

And all my computer work has been about expressing and representing

and showing interconnection among writings, especially.

And writing is the process of reducing

a tapestry of interconnection to a narrow sequence.

And this is, in a sense, illicit. This is...

This is a wrongful compression of what should spread out.

In today's computers, they betrayed that,

because there is no system for a decent cut and paste.

They changed the meanings of the words "cut" and "paste"

and pretended it was the same thing.

So a guy named Larry Tessler, whom I consider to be a good friend,

nevertheless, changed those words.

I consider that a crime against humanity,

and he doesn't understand why, because humanity has no decent writing tools.

In any case, this is the problem of interconnection and representation

and sequentialization, all...

similar to the issue of water.