I just spent a good chunk of my morning engrossed in Vanity Fairs BRILLIANT walk through Web History 101. It’s a “Web Exclusive” with intimate podcasts and articles.
(The Founding Fathers: Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Larry Roberts)
The story of the internet is not that old when you think of it. In fact, these prestigious men right here helped make this gift you see as you’re reading my blog right now. The irony behind the whole thing is that the Internet was developed out of the necessity to communicate during War. This humble small crew ended up creating the glue that is holding the planet together now — artistically, politically, superficially, financially, etc, etc. etc. The feature “How The Web Was Won” covers the entire trajectory beginning with the germ of an idea to the bumpy road that lied ahead.
The seed: Soviet missiles aimed at the USA. It was the Cold War. Telephone lines and shortwave-radios weren’t good enough. Scientists began to foresee a connected world exchanging information. AT&T fought the idea. They laughed at the notion of “packet-switching”. Why would they care? There was no money in it. The only way to network was through old-school mainframe computers, and the personal computer had not been invented yet. Thank God they slept on it, because onwards came the term “World Wide Web”, the entrepreneurs, the years of fighting for independence from commercial and governmental controls.
Speaking of… Gore was obviously not a creator of the internet but it is very vital for all of us to know that the story doesn’t stop at the creation. While he was a Tennessee senator in the 1980′s, Gore was crazy defending the idea “networking” (free from the governments hands). In 1991, Congress passed the “Gore Act” — which was the High-Performance Computing Act defending the web as a privatized, commercialized place. But back to the building blocks. These were some great quotes found in the article…
(Al Gore)
“I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know? Technology reaches a certain ripeness and the pieces are available and the need is there and the economics look good—it’s going to get invented by somebody.”
–Paul Baran, an electrical engineer, conceived one of the Internet’s building blocks, “packet switching”
Click here for Paul Baran’s podcast
“When I had this idea about building a network—this was in 1966—it was kind of an ‘Aha’ idea, a ‘Eureka!’ idea. I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s (arpa’s director) office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes.”
– Bob Taylor left NASA to become 3rd Director of arpa’s (Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) computer-science division.
“We looked for a name for several weeks and couldn’t come up with anything good, and I didn’t want yet another one of these stupid things that doesn’t tell you anything. In the end Tim said, Why don’t we temporarily call it the World Wide Web? It just says what it is.”
– Robert Cailliau, who along with British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, introduced the World Wide Web, via CERN (one of the world’s largest physics laboratories based in Geneva)
“You just happen to be at the right place at the right time. Once we went public, everyone—everyone—had a new idea. We basically created the late-90s boom in technology stocks, and it became out of control, as you know.”
– Jim Clark, Entrepreneur/Silicon Graphics founder who partnered with Andreessen to create Netscape Communications.
Click here for Bob Metcalfe’s podcast
“At the beginning there was a different attitude than today. Now everyone is concerned about making money, or reputation. It was different then. We all wanted to help one another. There was no competition, really, on most things. It was a total open flow of information. There were no games. There are so many others who did equally good work, and their names are just forgotten. We were all a bunch of young whippersnappers.”
– Paul Baran
Photographs by Christian Witkin
