what did it take to be someone like Ada
Lovelace who discovered that calculating
was not simply equations but was
algorithms a set of instructions I think
that the main thing she had in a larger
sense was the ability to connect the
arts to the sciences you know what we do
here on this stage all the time the
humanities - engineering as you know her
father Lord Byron the poet was a Luddite
and I mean that literally cuz the only
speech he gives in the House of Lords is
defending the followers of Ned Ludd who
are smashing the mechanical looms and
England thinking it's gonna put Weaver's
out of work but ADA went on a trip to
the Midlands saw the mechanical looms
saw the way punchcards were instructing
the looms to do beautiful patterns and
she was friends with Babbage as you said
and he was making his calculating
machine doing numbers and she realized
that the punch cards can make it so as
she put it because he publishes which is
unusual for a woman in the 1830s to
publish a pet scientific paper on
Babbage's machine saying that because of
the punch cards and other things it can
do anything that can be notated in
symbols not just numbers but it can do
words they can do it can weave
tapestries as beautiful as the jacquard
loom she writes and it could even make
music something that would have caused
lord byron to flinch but know what she's
seeing there is exactly what john von
neumann sees Zingo the general-purpose
computer and Alan Turing sees it that
there is that symbols are agnostic they
don't they don't depend on violins they
don't depend on typewriters they don't
depend on the machines that make them
symbols have a life of their own and you
can manipulate them logically and then
the cool thing that comes along which is
not obviously a double comes along a
hundred years later is people like
Claude Shannon and others who take
boolean algebra which was you know
devised around the time of Ada Lovelace
and says ok we can use circuits to do
on/off switches that can do the logic
basically and that's when all of a
sudden machines seem to think one of the
things that ADA says at the end of her
notes on the analytical engine machines
will do everything they'll do music
setting the other and then she says but
they will never think they will never
originate thought they will never be an
imaginative it'll take the human
partnership with the machine to
originate thought and that's what Alan
Turing a hundred years later calls lady
Lovelace's objection and says how would
we know that and he comes y'all will see
them movie in about three or four weeks
I'm sure called the imitation game which
is about chewing doing it need devises
what he calls the imitation game we call
the Turing test where he says how would
we know a machine can't think what if
what if we can't tell a machine apart
from a human in its answers then there's
no reason to say the machines not
thinking what kind of a character is
touring and compare him to the people
who were more involved in the building
of the machines that could do what
touring imagined would be the test of
intelligence yeah
touring was very much of a theorist and
a mathematician and an a loner and
homosexual at a time when if you're in
the mi6 government service trying to
break the German Enigma codes in England
coming out of the Victorian era is not
that easy to be but he was also not
ashamed of being homosexual so it's a
very complicated thing but the main
thing is he comes up with the notion of
the universal computing machine
something that can do any form of law I
mean anything that any machine could do
you know a universal machine can do that
type of logic and so that becomes a
foundation for von Neumann and others
who turn it into an architecture for
computers but one of the things that
struck me just at that point in the book
although Steve Jobs had turned me on to
the idea earlier and it began to sink in
was it isn't just the visionary who does
something you have to have a team that
then starts to implement it and so
touring is this great logical
theoretician but because it's wartime
and they gotta break the German code
he's thrown in with Tommy flowers who
worked for the phone company in Britain
I knew how how vacuum tubes or valves as
they called them in England how vacuum
tubes work and you know their mechanics
and there's people who do cross people
get hired at
let's we parked by doing the Telegraph
crossword puzzle really well so you have
all sorts of interesting people working
on the teams so he goes to Bletchley
Park the secret you know facility they
have in England to break the German
wartime codes that machine there's an
Enigma machine which codes the German
messages fortunately I think the polish
intelligence originally captured one and
so they're able to slowly break how the
code is done but one of the amazing
things that touring does at Bletchley is
figure out along with Tommy flowers who
knew how to use vacuum tubes and work
for the phone company over there how you
would make something called Colossus
which is the first real electronic
operable computer and they use it to
break the German code so when we argue
about what is the first computer one
contender if you're thinking it's got to
be electronic it's got to work and now
it's got to do logical sequences it's
probably ought to be digital Colossus
breaking the code that was done on that
machine by Turing and a whole team there
at Bletchley Park and especially Tommy
flowers and some others all right so
what is the team in the United States
that invents the computer and there were
many teams around the world but what is
the team that you focus on and what was
the tension between throwing out the
rulebook and and really sticking to some
sort of very linear tradition in the
military hierarchy yeah well actually
there's two places you could say the
computer was invented in the United
States we biographers know that we
distort history a little bit we give a
little too much credit to the lone
inventor who in the basement of the
garage comes up with a light bulb moment
in innovation occurs and if you're a
romantic historian or if you're Jane
smiley the novelist or somebody like
that you pick out John Vincent at an ass
off with Iowa State University makes a
circuit a electronic logical circuit and
is able to invent the first electronic
circuit board now he's a loner and
it's kind of romantic everyone graduates
ooh but no team around him so he can't
really get it working he can't get the
punch card burner to work and when he
goes into the Navy they don't even know
what this contraption is he's been
building and they dismantle it and throw
it away you have another team that's
just the opposite led by John Mauchly
Don MOC Lee was one of these people who
loves being at places like this he loved
wood panelled Explorers clubs and
carnegie institutes and Smithsonian's
and science festivals and Historical
Society he was part of that British
American cadre of people who loves
sharing science he goes all over the
places he wants to build a computer and
he's like a bumblebee he picks up pollen
in places and cross pollinating so he
goes to the 1939 World's Fair and sees
what they're doing he goes to Dartmouth
with us Bell Labs has a stibitz machine
he goes to Harvard and MIT with an EVA
Bush had done a non digital and analog
machine so he picks up all these things
and he finally here's this guy in Iowa
State he actually runs into him in
Philadelphia and for four days he drives
to Iowa State with his kid just so he
can see the computer so then he comes
back to Penn and unlike out of Nasaf he
builds a team and that's what I was
talking about earlier you know the
building of the team is the important
thing
he gets presper eckert who is a great
engineer he gets you know mechanics
people with grease under their
fingernails
he has 70 people there building this
room so I think and he gets about 70
women PhDs in math who are doing the
calculations he picks six of them to
secretly get training at aberdeen
proving proving ground to reprogram the
computer they understand the innards of
the computer when john von neumann comes
from Los Alamos and needs to have the
machine not do ballistic missile
trajectories but to do a test of a
hydrogen type bomb the it's a women who
we program
what is it intuitively about this team
of women that that understands
programming and these sets of
instructions and how interchangeable
they are any thoughts on that
yeah I mean women have unfortunately
been written out of the history of
computing a little bit more than they
should have been
and these women are not as well-known as
they should be but more women got PhDs
in math in the 1930s then in the 50s of
the sixties it was before women had been
told by our friends that they didn't
know how to do math or something and so
women were great mathematicians and they
also were more collaborative I don't
mean to get into a gender thing about it
but but they all work together and so
they did open source of COBOL all these
programming language hopper base hoppers
working what they asked for directions
right right I'm trying very hard not to
step in in landlines but you're allowed
to but here's another one which is boys
with their toys you think the hardware
is the cool thing you know they're like
me they like soldering things and they
they think the hardware is the big thing
and figuring out how to program it you
know that's menial the women can do that
they don't realize that after a while
ENIAC and univac and Honeywell and
Sperry Rand and whatever types of
computers are those could be
interchangeable it's the actual
programming language that's going to be
the real value you don't particularly
care which piece of hardware are using
so the women did the programming back
then both lieutenant grace hopper at
Harvard doing it with Howard Aiken on
the mark 1 and then the 6 women of Eenie
act led by Jean Jennings and Jennings
and hopper are fascinating yeah they
really are you know one of the things
I'll give a thing about Jennings that
struck me Jean Jennings is from Atlantis
Grove Missouri a town of like 108 she's
one of seven kids or eight kids or
whatever poor farm family who really
loved education so she decides she wants
to be a mathematician she couldn't
decide between journalism and math and
she made the right choice became a
mathematician and went to Northwest
Missouri State College for $78 a year
and so she became and then on the last
month there she sees an ad that says
come to Philadelphia we need women
mathematicians to work in a niak if she
is yep so legal to run that ad today we
need it actually said well it says women
wanted you know because it was making
fun of the men wanted sort of thing but
it was 44 men were for so she gets on
the train at midnight from melanthius
Grove and arrives in Philadelphia 40
hours later has the job but I did look
up Northwest Missouri say it's now
$14,000 a year we're gonna lose a
generation of people who could go to
college for $78 a year and become the
Pioneer program of her generation so
these women not Rosie the riveters but
Rosie the coders begin to develop enough
programs that the thought begins to
converge now that the machines are
interchangeable that the software can
evolve to more sophisticated
capabilities and that the pure hardware
is not necessarily the measure of what
these things can do it's a it's a it's a
partnership between more sophisticated
software and more capacity hardware
right because at first these machines
are built for special purposes Colossus
which is the one that Tommy flowers and
Alan Turing work on at Bletchley Park
it's there just to break the German code
likewise the ENIAC which you saw back
there the women programming it that was
mainly done for ballistic missile
artillery tails but they discover oh the
war is ending and we needed to do atom
bomb testing sooner and you know sonic
waves and everything else so it's the
first one that's really reprogrammable
and then john von neumann comes along
and says we can store the programs in
the memory of the machine and that's
when you really get a real computer so I
think of a niak is the first real
computer because it's programmable it's
general-purpose and it's really cool
typically you know we all collaborate we
all take ideas from running another
Steve Jobs goes a Xerox PARC
Bill Gates buys you know looks at the
first Macintosh everybody's taking each
other's ideas and then of course Apple
sues Microsoft well not surprisingly
there was like 15 years of a lawsuit
because after ENIAC is built it becomes
univac in its commercial form univac
becomes UNICEF Sperry ran they start
enforcing the
patents on it at which point Honeywell
wants to break the patents and he goes
in finds at an ass off who's retired he
says yeah that guy came and visited me
he took my ideas so for 15 years you
have a lawsuit over who deserves the
patents in the end the court ruled
against the ENIAC people but didn't
award the patent to anybody which is
probably correct because it was a
collaborative thing we have a trustee
Gordon Bell very famous figure in
computer history who caused that lawsuit
the dis invention of the computer
exactly you know with all due respect to
the lawyers in the room it's best not to
leave the whole notion of historical
invention to copyright lawsuits there's
a wonderful one of course where Jack
Kilby and at Texas Instruments and Bob
Noyce and going more who are pictured in
your Lobby here they almost
simultaneously do the microchip and
that's a huge lawsuit for many years but
noise and kilby were both such decent
people they always gave each other the
credit and before the lawyers could
settle that I mean that suit went on and
on and on on appeal finally noise and
the Texas Instruments cut together and
said shook hands and said let's cross
license each other patents let's get the
lawyers out of this all right so let's
move on you you mentioned the
semiconductor earlier and I want to talk
now about the transistor and the
integrated circuit but I want to talk
about it to draw a contrast the way that
you explain the way teams and
collaboration happen mm-hm and by
contrasting two very different
approaches one is the Shockley approach
and his team you know working on the
transistor on the one hand and then
noise and more in the integrated circuit
on the other talk a bit about Shockley
the genius inventor but the really admit
obviously of course you all know about a
genius but also paranoid and eventually
racists so he's at Bell Labs which is by
far the coolest place for collaboration
in the 1930s and 40s and throughout the
mid to late 40s they have to
figure out how to do many things one it
which is amplify a phone signal so you
can make a call from San Francisco to
New York and they need a solid state
amplifier you can't do it with vacuum
tubes and so Shockley is leading the
solid state team at Bell Labs
I love Bell Labs because it's the
ultimate of you know a place-based
collaboration where in the hallways
there you have this guy Claude Shannon
and I talked about it figures out
information there you have John Bardeen
who's a quantum theorists you have
Shockley is a great physicist but
they're sharing a workspace or Bardeen
is and a bench with Walter Brattain
who's an experimentalist he knows how to
take a piece of silicon which as you
know is a semiconductor that you can
dump with impurities and make it conduct
better or worse and therefore be an
on/off switch therefore be a solid-state
amplifier and the they understand the
surface state to which understands which
means understanding both quantum theory
but also material science like what's
happening to those you know electrons
dancing in the surface state of a piece
of silicon and so they're doing all
these things
Bardeen and Brattain almost do a
call-and-response like there's a
librettist in a you know a composer at a
bench doing a song as they figure out
ways to make the various materials
they're using into better semiconductors
and even using a paperclip to jam
through the surface state they're
working under Shockley they finally do
it Shockley has contributed many of the
theories but he's been a bit hands-off
but unlike the heroes of this book he
doesn't like giving credit as much as he
likes taking credit so even I mean he's
furious when they are put on the
application for the they're put on the
application for the patent for it and he
insists that he be in all the press
releases
he even insists I'm not sure you can see
it that in the publicity photos he be he
in it he he gets to be in it and just as
they were taking this photo at Bell Labs
for the publicity shot they were all
standing up he sits down and grabs but
Bratton's
microscope as if it's his and makes
himself the center and both Bardeen and
Brattain said they hated this photograph
from then on they don't speak to each
other for a while Shockley gets eased
out of Bell Labs because he's such a
pain to work for the only time they
really speak is when they win the Nobel
Prize and they all meet in the hotel
room that evening and they're both in
the same you know restaurant they
forgive each other but Shockley comes
out here very nearby start Shockley
semiconductor and it's just as paranoid
and hard at building team so none of the
people at Bell Labs will come work with
them but he calls Bob Noyce he calls
Gordon Moore because he's heard of these
young engineers gathers them to work at
Shockley semiconductor but after a while
they just can't stand working for
Shockley and the pictures you have
downstairs in the lobby of noise Moore
and others in those notebooks a
Fairchild Semiconductor or because Bob
Noyce and Gordon Moore decided the way
to run a company is not this
authoritarian bossy you know glory
hogging way that that Shockley has been
doing it and they start Intel where they
have a room almost like this not too far
from here just a big room nobody has a
corner office and Noyes puts a beat up
desk right in the center of the room
along with Moore and others and there's
no hierarchy in its invents not only the
microchip but what they invent is the
Silicon Valley culture of that sort of
open non authoritarian non hierarchical
company we had Gordon here for the 50th
anniversary driving up Woodside and just
sitting there and listening to it is
fantastic yeah someone asked him about
what it was like to work for Shockley
and he said yeah it's true he was a
difficult guy to work for but he seemed
to be a pretty good judge of talent
hahahaha that's probably the only
egotistical thing Gordon Moore said and
he probably didn't mean it to be
egotistical but he was right I don't
think he was talking about himself
finally but or intending to but it
certainly got the same laugh as
everybody yeah gave us tonight so let's
launch ahead to really when the
convergence becomes complete because
suddenly with solid-state electronics
and the ability to kind of home engineer
enough computer capability to begin to
program on your own suddenly we're in
the realm of gates and jobs and the
Apple gang well you talked about I think
you know I was listening from the back
the sort of that cultural brew in the
early 1970s and you know you have
everybody from the hippies to the
anti-war protestors to the hobbyists and
hackers and electronics geeks and stuff
like that so what happens and around in
the early 1970s is a hobbyist comes
first
ed Roberts creates the Altair which does
almost absolutely nothing it just has a
few lights at blinks and a few switches
you can do it but since it all comes
back to good product launches he gets
himself on the cover of popular
electronics and and sends the Altair on
the road to the homebrew Computer Club
which is where all these you know
hackers and geeks and I'll come in
together in the early 70s now a couple
things happen it's on the cover of
popular electronics and this guy Bill
Gates is a sophomore at Harvard has
convinced this friend of his Paul Allen
to drop out of school and move to Boston
for no apparent reason because he's you
know okay and Paul Allen in that out of
town newsstand right in Harvard Square
sees pop it says the Altair grabs a copy
pay 75 cents and runs to courier house
where Bill Gates is living and plops it
down and says this is happening without
us and Gates just starts rocking is a
used to do or still does probably and
says oh my god and it's exam period it
blows off all four of his exams and they
just sit there on a Defense Department
paid for computer at the Aiken computer
lab where Grace Hopper
and they code basic so early seventies
is this the machine that gates takes
home to or something like it that he
takes home to begin to develop yeah so
they develop this is it I mean the
original Altair and gates sits there at
Harvard and they do basic since gates
can't even shave yet
I mean he's you know he's like looks
like a Cub Scout I they send Paul who
actually has sideburns at that point to
fly to Albuquerque to make the sale of
basic for the Altair and so that's where
the Coburg didn't have that problem no
no no but what happens is I say they
take the Altair on the road they bring
it to the homebrew Computer Club dot
Steve Dom PA who's you know one of these
hippie geeks says okay I can make it do
fool on the hill but they also watch it
do basic and there's a tape you know
software paid you know tape to doing
basic and they copy it and they make you
know seventy copies and give it away for
free
stealing in to use Bill Gates's word his
software program because this is where
you get the tension between software
wanting to be free and that open-source
thing versus for the first time somebody
says because the women who did COBOL
didn't do this he says Paul Allen and
Bill Gates doing business as micro -
soft and they wanted to be able to have
a copyright on it or and intellectual
property versus open-source right and
you have his famous letter to the
homebrew Computer Club so what you're
doing is theft but also at that meeting
I mean this is like huge it's a great
movie scene if you might wants to make a
movie of this book because sitting there
is Steve Wozniak who thinks personal
computers are stupid he was building
terminals and connect the main friend
but then he looks at this and he looks
at the specs for the Intel 8088 which is
what allowed this to happen he says I
can make something better I can make it
that connects to a monitor so he does
and he does the specs for it and he
brings it to the next meeting of the
homebrew can play with a TV that's
carried by his friend from down the
street Steve Jobs and
woz hands out for free to every because
you know he's kind of a communal he'd
read the whole earth catalogue once too
often and he's like giving away the
Apple the design it's not named yet and
finally Steve Jobs after the second or
third meeting says wait a minute we can
go to my parent's garage and make these
things and we can sell them and make
money and that's how Apple is born so
out of that prototype Josh again Apple
Computer and I like that that retro look
is really nice I think that's young
Steve Jobs is designed since pre Johnny
I was yeah retro we didn't have the
whiteness of the iPod back then and but
we did by the time he does the Apple 2
he doesn't mean we didn't beautiful and
the story of I've really is the story of
beginning to think about computers not
as detached objects that are independent
of humans but as things that can
integrate even physically with humans
and the story of the mouse is the story
of the ways in which computers suddenly
began to integrate physically with the
with the the poetry of the human become
intimate right connected to us and in
the book I create two strands of thought
what I call the Ada Lovelace strand
which is computers and humans will
become partners we will work together in
an intimacy she says a symbiosis like
that the other strand is the Alan Turing
strand which is will have artificial
intelligence machine learning and
they'll end up creating a singularity
and work without us and you know have
that sort of thing well you know people
give in you'll have people on the stage
talking about the singularity you know a
decade you can have people doing it well
we haven't gotten anywhere near there
yet
but we keep getting leaps and bounds is
this making the computer more intimate
creating the Mouse Ada Lovelace would
love that this symbiosis is putting it
on our wrists putting into an hourglass
just the guy somebody here I was will
get you know help me figure out Google
glass today from the Google's side here
and it's like oh we may have a toy for
you later
okay I hope it go an old pong game
because I'm well we have that we
definitely have that it's right but
anyway I decided me without overdoing it
I think the intimacy that you've talking
about really makes it and that's that's
the first match Doug Engelbart's mouse
Doug Engelbart is another unsung hero
who's in this book a lot he people like
him and Alan Kay who do the graphical
unit user interface at Xerox PARC
learn to make there's old Alan Kay learn
to make it so that these computers are
friends convivial they used words like
that as opposed to singular and they do
it by reversing the math in a sense what
made space war was the computer output
going to the screen in mathematical dots
what they did was that same signal can
come off a ball rolling around with a
sensor you send out it a computer didn't
care what it is it says oh I I get it
and can turn that into directionality on
a screen and boom you you can go both
directions and what you have in Alan Kay
and others do it too there's a whole lot
of things come together that you don't
think of that important but they connect
the art to the technology you do that
with something called bit mapping which
means every you know when you and I were
growing up and talking about our caper
others and stuff there were those
horrible phosphorus green letters on
dark out window and what the computer
would do to say pallor does it generate
a letter in order generate a V and to be
up there what Alan Kay Doug Engelbart
and others figured out is that every
pixel on the screen can be turned on and
off or for that matter any color if you
have enough computing power by this
point Gordon Morris told us it will
double every 18 months or so so they
create but the mouse bit mapping
graphical user interfaces and Steve Jobs
who has dropped out of college and
everything else the one course he really
loves and he takes even though he's not
actually enrolled in college is
calligraphy so the first thing he does
when he sees bit mapping he says I can
make it do beautiful fonts everybody
else is saying who cares about beauty
beautiful fonts Steve's great insight
was Beauty matters and far
is a hard problem yeah making fonts is a
hard problem and if you can solve fonts
you can basically create any kind of
graphical representation the amazing
thing that is almost the exuberant of
the personal computer is when he unveils
the Macintosh he's taken from Xerox PARC
the notional graphic and he pulls the
bag out from over it and it starts
writing
hello I'm Macintosh in script like that
and people gasp it's cool and it's part
of this sort of convergence of our
animation sense that we will suspend
disbelief once it does that that's a
human talking to us
that's a creature that's a being that's
not a machine so much convivial its
commit a personal it's personal if you
have to look at another trajectory of
the digital age it gets more everything
gets more and more personal you put it
in your pocket by the end or you put it
on your wrist and you talked about to
the video games which are very common
time you know you're doing space war and
they're doing the same time that
Licklider JCR Licklider is another
amazing character is doing an air
defense system and so they have to have
really fast interactive computing so
that notion that it's fun it's
interactive it's very graphical and it
responds to you comes up from everything
from the consoles that the air defense
jockeys had to use at the sage system
and they're doing at MIT you know and so
the people at MIT and the tech model
railway Club are also saying okay and we
can make space war out of it and it all
comes together and Steve Jobs worked the
night shift at a toy yeah nolan bushnell
Alcorn is the engineer of that Steve
Jobs come in comes in and he had just
dropped out of college and gone to India
and found his guru so he comes back and
he eats only vegetables but no grain no
meat fruits and vegetables for Terran
diet and he tells el Alcorn if you have
this diet you don't have to use
deodorant and Alcorn told me that was a
mistake in theory so I'll put him on the
night shift so
so he and was working at the night shift
and they one of the first things they do
is a single-player version of pong
called breakout and I asked Steve what
did you learn from video games besides
the beauty and the pixel L that so I
think he said you really have to keep it
simple ah space war when they first do
it at Atari they take the space war game
from MIT and write it has you know in
gravity there's no space you have to
usually there's like eight instructions
in that game there was just one
instruction which was a void missing
ball for high-score which is a slightly
garbled sentence but a stone freshmen
figured out after midnight you know you
don't need a manual yeah yeah let's
shift to the internet part of the
innovation of the internet itself comes
from figuring out how to take data and
transmit it and in the same way that bit
mapping is the key insight to creating
graphics that are both flexible and also
beautiful packet transmission is the key
insight to transmitting data because
these sort of initial notion would be
the mail where you oh you take the
message you put it into a box and then
you send the box and of course messages
are gonna be different sizes and all the
boxes will be different sizes and
there's all sorts of complexity
associated with that just work at ups
and you understand the problems there
but packet delivery was really something
amazing and had a difficult sell in the
beginning absolutely and packet
switching breaks it into just a small
little things puts a you know a very
small finite block puts a header on it
breaks up the entire message as if you
took a whole long letter and put it in
250 postcards and let them each follow a
different route with instructions on how
to reassemble package delivery is like
will you stand up please yes
yeah all right stand right up here on
the stage oh all right so let's say
we're going to send him through the
internet right what we would do is
basically we'd saw his hand
and a piece of his arm and his shoulder
and his head and his foot and maybe the
other arm all into little packets and on
those packets would be the name of him
right and the place that it connects to
those two things plus whatever it is
that's in your hand arms shoulder head
that we've hacked off and so all the
pieces would come apart right
they'd zoom through data I mean your
hand would take a different route than
your foot your head would take a your
your head might go a little slower
possibly and and then you'd be
reassembled very very quickly and the
instructions for reassembly is contained
within each individual packet yes and
that has a very important philosophical
thing first of all you can write or you
could be teleported to wherever you're
going now
don't try that it yeah I'd be a couple
of things that that that does you talk
about UPS or FedEx or for that matter
the phone company which keeps a circuit
open the entire time you're having a
conversation so that means they're
central hubs which means it can be
controlled by authority it means you
know somebody can decide what goes
through that hub a comcast can be in
charge of pack whatever it may be but a
packet switch every single node has just
as much ability to store and forward a
packet and therefore if some node gets
knocked out if somebody does something
tries a sense of things the internet
routes around it this has two functions
one is that Paul Baran who is one of the
founders of packet switching out at RAND
Corporation in others Donald Davies in
England and a few others he's doing it
to help survive a nuclear attack
if the Russians hit our communication
system he wants America to be able to
retaliate which is actually a good thing
because it prevents us from wanting to
do a first strike it makes us less here
to distribute the data it means that you
have to have no centralized hub that
they can attack and if they hit 50
different places or still you know those
little packets will scurry around the
spider's web and route around it so
that's the reason he does it he explains
a day the Bell System and AT&T over and
over again they
won't work they finally bring him for
four days of seminars where they bring
90 experts explaining to him why instead
of having a dedicated circuit packet
switching won't work and if they say do
you understand this now and he goes no
and he's right they're wrong which is
why the bail system never built the
Internet but the really cool thing is
the people who did end up building it
the ARPANET this is because it starts
off as a Defense Department project or
the research centers that the Defense
Department is funding and being research
centers they delegate it to their
graduate students to figure out how to
do the protocols the graduate students
are all graduate students indefinitely
because they're avoiding the Vietnam War
and so they're staying in graduate
school as long as they can they aren't
trying to help the Pentagon survive a
nuclear attack they want to build a
system that can't be censored can't be
controlled can't have a top-down
Authority so they create this
decentralized distributed system of the
internet the cool thing is I have a
section in the book on was it to help
survive a nuclear attack and have some
people say no and so there's guys Steve
Lucas who was high up in the Pentagon
and finding this he finally says to
Steve Crocker is one of the young
graduate since you don't really know
because you were on the bottom and I was
on top so I know why it was developed
and Crocker said no you don't really
know you were on the top I was on the
bottom so you have no clue which is the
perfect specification right and now that
DNA that the finger for the sort of ends
of the genetic code is in bred the
notion of we're out around authority and
that distributed system architecture
also creates the other huge advantage
that a packet switching system delivers
and that is scalability
infinite scalability without scalability
everybody can be a node on the Internet
right there are a few people who object
to allowing their computers to be used
to basically be hijacked in little sort
of bit packages for this distributed
system can you describe that yeah you
know
I think wood you may be referring to is
I wrestled with the fact that the people
who invented the personal computer and
first had at the hobbyist hackers the
phone freaker's they really wanted
something personal Alan cave in at Xerox
PARC you could take it out to the wood
it was a personal creativity device so
the personal computer arising in the 70s
is arising at the same time as the
ARPANET and then the ARPANET there's
other networks that come along so they
have to internetwork them which is while
we get the phrase internet but they're
separate because the people using the
internet you know want to sort of share
each other's computers and the people
who are creating the person if you don't
want to go off in the woods and you know
do whatever they do with computers Wow
it takes a while in fact I didn't get
this at first I was gonna do this as a
history the internet and it was gates
when I interviewed and who said no you
don't get it in the 70s is where all of
a sudden the networking and the personal
computer come together in modems online
services and that is like the steam
engine coming together with mechanical
processes to create the Industrial
Revolution
it's that combustible combination that
creates a digital revolution
