The textbook version of how the internet came to be is clean. A few smart people in California connected some computers, email happened, and then we got cat videos. That version is wrong. Or rather, it is so sanitized that it misses what actually makes the story worth telling.
I spent this episode going deep on the real source material. DARPA archives, technical memos from the Internet Society, oral histories from the engineers who were actually in the room. And what came out is a story that is far more chaotic, far more human, and far more terrifying than the version you got in school.
The fear that started everything
The internet does not begin with a desire to share information. It begins with the end of the world.
Early 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis is fresh in everyone’s memory. The United States and the Soviet Union are sitting on arsenals that can flatten civilization several times over. And in the Pentagon, the generals have a very specific nightmare that has nothing to do with the bombs themselves. It is about what happens after the first bomb lands.
The question was simple: if the president picks up the phone to order a counter strike, does the phone actually work?
The entire US communications infrastructure at the time ran on the AT&T telephone network. Circuit switched. When you called someone, the system physically connected a series of copper wires and mechanical switches all the way across the continent. You were essentially renting a very long wire for the duration of your conversation.
The problem was the switching stations. All those wires funneled through major hubs in major cities. Chicago. St. Louis. Denver. Cities that happened to be top tier targets for Soviet missiles. Take out the switching station in St. Louis and you did not just lose St. Louis. You severed the connection between the entire East Coast and the West Coast.
Efficient for peacetime. Incredibly brittle for war.
Paul Baran and the fishnet
This brittleness is what brought Paul Baran into the picture, and this is a name that really should be on statues. Baran was an engineer at the RAND Corporation, the think tank tasked with thinking about the unthinkable. Around 1960, he started working on the survivability problem.
The result was massive. Eleven volumes of what became the On Distributed Communications memorandum. In those papers, he drew three network topologies that remain the most important diagrams in the history of computing.
Centralized: a bicycle wheel. All spokes connect to one hub. One bomb, game over.
Decentralized: a few bicycle wheels connected to each other. Better. But you can still isolate large chunks of the network by hitting the right nodes.
Distributed: a fishnet. No center. No hubs. Every node connected to several of its neighbors. A mesh.
And then Baran did something that separates the thinkers from the engineers. He did not just draw it. He proved it mathematically. He ran Monte Carlo simulations where he virtually destroyed nodes in his mesh. He simulated a nuclear attack on his own design.
The results were staggering. Even if you destroyed 50% of the nodes, literally wiped half the map off the face of the earth, the remaining nodes could still maintain significant connectivity. That is deeply counterintuitive. You would think losing half the network would kill the whole thing. But the beauty of redundancy is that if the direct route is gone, the message goes left, then down, then right, then up. As long as some path exists anywhere, the message gets through.
But this created a new problem. In the old system you had a dedicated wire. You knew the exact path. In a fishnet where the path changes constantly and cities might get nuked mid-sentence, how does the information know where to go?
Hot potato routing and the invention of packets
Baran realized you could not use analog voice anymore. You could not send a continuous stream. If the path breaks, the stream breaks. You have to digitize it. Chop it up. He proposed taking data and cutting it into tiny digital chunks of 1,024 bits each. He called them message blocks.
Then he introduced a concept he called hot potato routing. A guy working on apocalyptic nuclear survival strategy called it hot potato. And it is the perfect description. Imagine each node is a person. You hand them a message block. They do not store it. They do not think about it. They look at the address, look at their neighbors to see who is still alive and not busy, and they throw it to the best option immediately. Get it out of here.
If that neighbor gets destroyed a millisecond later, the next potato goes to a different neighbor. No central commander needed. The network heals itself, packet by packet, node by node.
Now here is where the story gets strange. While Baran is doing this work in Santa Monica, fueled by Cold War paranoia, a physicist named Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK is independently arriving at almost the exact same solution. But Davies was not thinking about bombs. He was thinking about efficiency.
Davies realized that the phone system was a terrible fit for computer data. Phone calls are continuous. Computers are bursty. You type a command, burst of data, then sit there thinking for twenty seconds. Silence. Then the computer replies. Burst. If you are renting an entire highway for that, you are driving one car down it every ten minutes.
Davies proposed chopping data into chunks and weaving different conversations together on the same wire. Like shuffling a deck of cards. And he gave us the word we still use: packets.
The wild part is that Baran and Davies, working in total secrecy from each other on different continents with completely different motivations, both settled on 1,024 bits as the optimal packet size. The physics of information transfer pushed them both to the exact same destination. It was not just invented. It was discovered.
From theory to refrigerators
Theory is cheap though. Building the thing required money, and it required a guy named JCR Licklider. Licklider was a psychologist, which matters. He was not just a hardware person. He was interested in how humans and machines interacted. In 1962 he took over the computer research program at ARPA, and he brought a philosophy that was alien to the military. He did not see computers as ballistic calculators. He saw them as communication devices.
In 1963 he wrote a memo to his colleagues with a title that still gives me chills: To the Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network. This man was dreaming of the cloud fifty years too early.
Licklider was the evangelist. He passed the torch to Bob Taylor, who got the project approved for the most mundane reason imaginable. Taylor had three terminals in his Pentagon office, each connected to a different mainframe at a different university. None of them talked to each other. He had to physically roll his chair between them.
He reportedly said: “Man, it is obvious what to do. If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go.”
That frustration sparked the ARPANET. Taylor hired Larry Roberts as chief architect, but Roberts immediately hit a wall. The universities he wanted to connect all ran different computers speaking different machine languages. And the universities were hostile to the idea. They did not want to give up their precious computing cycles to run experimental network software.
The solution came from Wesley Clark: do not ask the mainframes to run the network. Build a smaller, separate computer to handle the traffic. They called it the IMP, the Interface Message Processor.
ARPA sent out a request for quotation to 140 companies. IBM laughed at them. The giants of the industry thought packet switching was unstable. Only 12 bids came back. The winner was a small consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bolt, Beranek and Newman. BBN.
The IMP they built was a modified Honeywell DDP-516. A steel refrigerator you could probably drop off a moving truck and it would still boot up. Inside that steel fridge: 12 kilobytes of memory. The code that ran the entire early internet: 6,000 words of assembly language. No room for bloat.
And the best side note from this era: when BBN won the contract, Senator Ted Kennedy sent them a congratulatory telegram. He had misread Interface Message Processor as Interfaith Message Processor. Considering they were getting a Honeywell to talk to an IBM, it was basically a religious miracle.
Lo
October 29, 1969. Boelter Hall, UCLA, Room 3420. A windowless room filled with the hum of cooling fans. Charlie Klein, a 21 year old grad student, sits at a terminal. 350 miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, Bill Duvall sits at another. They are coordinating over a regular telephone.
Klein types L. “Did you get the L?” Duvall checks: “Got the L.”
Klein types O. “Got the O.”
Klein types G. The system crashes. Buffer overflow on the Stanford side.
The first message ever sent on the internet was “LO.” Like lo and behold. It was accidental poetry. The telegraph got “What hath God wrought.” The telephone got “Mr. Watson, come here.” Both scripted and rehearsed. The internet began with a crash and a fragment.
Feels honest, somehow. The internet is messy. It started messy.
They fixed the bug within an hour. By December they had four nodes running.
The constitution of cyberspace
The original ARPANET ran on a protocol called NCP. It was designed for a world where ARPANET was the only network and all the hardware was trusted. But by the early 70s, other networks started appearing. Satellite links. Radio networks in Hawaii. And none of them could talk to each other.
Enter Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. In 1974 they published a paper that still runs the world: A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. They laid out four ground rules that I think of as the constitution of cyberspace.
Each network stands on its own. You do not have to change your internal workings to connect. Just speak the common language at the gateway. Come as you are.
Best effort communication. The network does not guarantee delivery. If a packet drops, the network does not panic. The sender realizes it did not arrive and sends it again. Push the responsibility to the edges.
Stateless gateways. The routers do not remember anything about the conversation. They just look at the address and move the packet. This keeps them simple and fast.
No global control. No president of the internet. Decentralized governance to match the decentralized topology.
This philosophy gave birth to TCP/IP. IP is the envelope with the address. TCP is the certified mail receipt that puts packets in order and asks for missing ones to be resent. And then UDP, for when speed matters more than perfection. You would rather have a tiny audio glitch than a three second pause while your computer retrieves a lost millisecond of sound.
The big migration happened on January 1st, 1983. Flag Day. Every node on the ARPANET had to switch from NCP to TCP/IP or get cut off. The engineers were so proud they made buttons: “I survived the TCP/IP transition.”
The basements and the blizzards
While DARPA and the universities were building the official internet, something else was happening in basements and bedrooms. The great blizzard of 1978 in Chicago. Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, members of a local computer club, were totally snowed in. So they wired a computer to a phone line and wrote software that let people leave messages for each other digitally. The Computerized Bulletin Board System. The first message board.
Throughout the 80s, thousands of BBSs popped up. But they were local. Long distance calls were expensive. Then Tom Jennings came along with FidoNet, the “poor man’s internet.” The BBSs would call each other at 4 AM when phone rates dropped to rock bottom, blast out all the mail in a compressed file, grab the incoming, and hang up. A message from LA to New York might take three days to hop across the country. But it was nearly free.
And it created a unique culture. You could not have instant flame wars because your insult would not arrive until tomorrow. A slower, more thoughtful social network. FidoNet grew to 40,000 nodes and millions of users. No government funding. No central control. People desperate to communicate will build the infrastructure themselves.
Scaling crises, sharks, and napkins
As the internet grew, it started breaking.
First crisis: the phone book. In the beginning there was a single text file called hosts.txt kept at SRI. It listed every computer on the internet and its IP address. If you added a machine, you had to call SRI during business hours and ask them to update the file. By 1983 this was obviously absurd. Paul Mockapetris invented DNS, the distributed domain name system. Delegated authority. You manage your own house, the system just knows how to find your front door.
Second crisis: routing. The Border Gateway Protocol was literally designed on two napkins at an IETF meeting in Austin, Texas in 1989. Two engineers from Cisco and IBM sketching out how the global internet would work over lunch. And BGP runs on blind trust. If a network says “I know the way to Google,” the other networks just believe it. Which is how Pakistan accidentally took YouTube offline for the entire planet in 2008 through a simple configuration error that propagated globally via BGP.
And then there are the sharks. The first transatlantic fiber cable went in 1988. It kept having faults. When they pulled the cable up from the ocean floor, they found teeth marks. Sharks have organs called ampullae of Lorenzini that detect tiny electrical twitches of fish muscles. The copper conductor running alongside the fiber to power the repeaters was generating electromagnetic fields. The sharks confused the internet with a dying fish and attacked. Google eventually had to wrap their transpacific cables in Kevlar.
We built the most advanced communication system in human history and nature tried to eat it.
The internet also nearly drowned itself. In October 1986, the connection between Lawrence Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, two sites 400 yards apart, dropped from 32 kilobits per second to 40 bits per second. You could tap Morse code faster. A vicious feedback loop: the network gets busy, a packet gets delayed, the sender assumes it is lost and sends a duplicate, doubling the traffic, making congestion worse, causing more duplicates. The internet shouting over itself, drowning in its own echoes.
Van Jacobson fixed it by applying fluid dynamics. Packets are like water in a pipe. You can not force more in than the pipe can hold. His slow start and congestion avoidance algorithms for TCP taught computers to calm down and wait for acknowledgment before sending more.
The dumb pipe that enabled everything
If I had to distill this entire history into one lesson, it comes back to the end-to-end principle. The idea that the network should be dumb. A simple pipe. The intelligence lives at the edges, in your laptop, in the server.
This is the only reason the web exists. Tim Berners-Lee did not have to ask permission to invent the World Wide Web. He did not have to ask the phone company to upgrade their switches to support hypertext. He just wrote software for the endpoints. The network carried it without knowing what it was.
Permissionless innovation. If we had built a smart network optimized purely for voice, the way AT&T originally wanted, we would never have gotten Netflix or Zoom or Bitcoin. The network would have rejected them as improper traffic. The dumb network allowed for brilliant ideas.
The uncomfortable ending
But here is the thing that keeps me up at night. We started with a mission to build a network that could survive nuclear war. A distributed, decentralized mesh. Technically, we succeeded. The protocols are decentralized.
But look at the layer above. Most of the internet’s traffic flows through a tiny handful of companies. If Amazon Web Services goes down, half the internet breaks. We built a system that is technically distributed but commercially centralized. We replaced the AT&T switching hubs with massive data centers in northern Virginia.
The house of cards problem. We might have just rebuilt it with better branding.
We solved the engineering problem. We have not solved the human tendency to centralize power. And that tension, between the decentralized dream and the centralized reality, is not over. It is just beginning.
This is Episode Notes from Coordinated with Fredrik. If this kind of thing interests you, subscribe and stick around.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frahlg.substack.com
