video

Series Introduction

8 Aug, 2022 Series Introduction by Karl Auerbach Today, in 2022, the Internet is everywhere. Thirty years ago there was no World Wide Web. Sixty years ago there was no Internet. This series looks at the first half of those sixty years, 1965 through 1995. Those decades saw the opening of telephone circuits to public uses; the rise of packet switching; the creation of TCP and IP; the invention of Ethernet; the convergence of academic and research networks; the deployment of network exchange points; and the maturation of routing and naming protocols.

Phil Karn on the reboot of the 1978 International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3)/ (International Cometary Explorer)

20 Jul, 2014

Commentary by Karl Auerbach

This is an outtake from on our interview with Phil Karn.

The attempt to re-acquire the ISEE-3 satellite is both timely and representative of the “let’s try it” spirit that energized the creation of much of what became the internet.

Severe Tire Damage, The Internet's First Live Band

20 Jul, 2014

Commentary by Karl Auerbach

From the perspective of 2014 it is hard to imagine that there was a day when the internet carried no music, no video.

Yet there was such a time. And someone, or some group, had to be the first.

Series Trailer

1 Nov, 2012

All video seriels need a trailer, right? Here’s the one we published in November 2012..

Commentary by Karl Auerbach

This video begins with the famous “Daisy” advertisement used by Johnson against Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. That ad reflected the end-of-the-world feeling of the cold war era. It was from that feeling that the internet was born: that our military needed a network that could survive and operate during a nuclear war.

There seems to be a movement today that tries to deny that genesis of the internet. Yet I have first hand experience of the truth of that point of view - during the early 1970’s I worked (at System Development Corporation, SDC) on networks for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and other parts of the US Department of Defense. We worked with the express goal of making a network that could survive the vaporization of elements of that network in nuclear blasts.

There were, of course, other motivating factors - not the least of which was that packet switching seemed to be an interesting technology. But the money for development came from the US military establishment.

The video then moves into a sequence of science fiction images. Besides being fun this is intended to be an ironic comment on a paternalistic notion that has become part of internet institutions - that technology and technologists are above politics and are thus the best governors of modern society. This was the message of films such as Things To Come.

Then there is a progression of computing machines - from mechanical calculators up through the giant Q7 SAGE computers.

It was the desire to share the largest of those SAGE computers, the Q32 (which lived at System Development Corporation, but before my time there), that created one of the motivations to create the ARPAnet.

The video then goes through the growth of the internet, from the seed of the ARPAnet at UCLA up through the current day.