Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins of the Internet

Notes

• names, main players
  • Beranek
  • Newman
  • Bob Taylor
  • Charlie Herzfeld
  • Eisenhower
  • Licklider changed how people thought about computers
  • Roberts
  • Paul Baran and Donald Davies invented. packet-switching
  • McCulloch
  • RAND, AT&T
  • Engelbart
  • Bolt and Beranek
  • Heart, Crowther, Kahn, Ornstein
  • Heart and Kahn reported to Elkind
  • Walden
  • Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf
  • Jerry Estrin
  • Kleinrock
  • Pogran, Vittal, D. Crocker, Henderson
  • McCarthy, Minsky, Reid
• places
  • Potomac River
  • Pentagon, ARPA
  • MIT in Cambridge
  • Boston
  • University of California in Berkeley
  • Santa Monica, California, strategic air command
  • Ann Arbor
  • BBN
    • Weiner room served as a regulsr gathering place for the IMP guys
      • small team, close offices, frequent contact
  • Lincoln lab
• scenes
  • Computer research community
  • telecommunications circles
• timeline
  • February 1966
  • October 1957
  • 1942
  • 1967
  • 1947
  • 1977

Chapters

• The Fastest Million dollars

  • iirc, Taylor convinced his boss Herzfeld to invest one million into a small test network of five computer nodes. They must have known and trusted each other very well. Surprisingly, he only needed to have a single conversation 9
  • the problem of choosing computers
    • tinygrad solves the problem of choosing GPUs preventing rentseeking

• a block here, some stones there

  • Larry’s route
  • network topology
    • Question:: How to lay out the network most cost-effectively
      • > there’s a ‘network of good moves’ in chess, and in music, and in reply game. the skilled player knows how to operate in the ‘hot’ parts of the network, which allows them to use shockingly little effort and resources when ‘on the field’ pic.twitter.com/fe7DkFWZIR 🐦 by Visakan Veerasamy on January 1st, 2025
  • Baran worked on the problem how to build communication structures could survive an attack and continue to function as a cohesive entity when other pieced were destroyed
  • neural nets recreate themselves over via new pathways in the brain
    • understanding the brain by programming neural nets
  • How much redundancy in the network would be needed for survivability?
  • network design
    • centralized
    • decentralized
    • distributed
  • fracturing messages
    • idea borrowed from freight movers
      • The Box - How the Shipping Container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger
    • self-learning policy at each node
    • switching nodes contain routing table that is being updated eith information about neigh oring nodes, distances, delays - adaptive or dynamic routing
    • acting as transport coordinator and dispatcher
    • how to reach other nodes in the network, what is the best route to take
    • algorithms were possible allowing a short message to contain all the information it needs to find its own way through the network
    • Baran faced lots of resistance
  • Davies
    • time-sharing systems
  • https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/7419/are-ai-algorithms-capable-of-self-repair
    • This can be particularly useful in cases where say there is a burnout in a processor cell processing some information about the environment. The other processing nodes have to take care to compensate or fully take-over the functions of the damaged cell.

• head down in the bits

  • Who but a few government bureaucrats or computer scientists would ever use a computer network? It wasn’t as if computing had a mass market like the television networks or the phone company
  • encountering skeptics, dealing with objections

• funding, money

  • $19 Million

• I am impressed by the number of people working together to make the internet happen facing lots of resistance along the way.