The year is 1969.
It is late at night and a group of people at the Stanford 
Research Institute are gathered around a monitor.
Then the phone rings.
The voice on the other side asks if they can
see the letter L on the screen.
"Yes, we see the L."
This is how the first message is how the first message 
was communicated over the classical internet.
Only then it was called the ARPANET.
It consisted of four nodes at different universities,
and the first letter was send from UCLA.
There they tried to send a second letter.
"Can you see the O?", they asked.
The O is confirmed, but when they try to send
the third letter, the system crashes.
So at this point in time it was extremely
difficult to send messages over the internet.
The internet was also extremely small, but
as we all know - and it was probably hard
to imagine this in 1969 - the internet is
extremely large now.
And in fact we could probably not imagine
life anymore without the internet.
So here at QuTech, in 2020, we are aiming
to have a small four node network
which might become 
the first quantum internet on earth.
So the difference between a classical and
a quantum internet, is that a quantum internet
allows us to send qubits from one network
node to the other.
This allows us to create quantum entanglement
between any to points on earth.
And entanglement is actually pretty cool.
It has two properties: it is inherently private,
which enables secure communication,
and it allows complete coordination.
And this makes it extremely powerful for tasks
like clock synchronisation.
What I really want to do, is I really want to send qubits
from one place on earth to any other place on earth.
I really think it would be super cool if we can generate
entanglement between any two points on earth.
There is very many applications already known
for such entanglement.
It also would allow us, by the way, to give
a completely new tool to study physics.
So this is really my objective.
So a quantum internet is now at a very similar
stage than a classical internet was in the 1960's.
It was successful not just because of a small
group of technical people,
but because of a very large community 
that thought about how we can use the internet
to fundamentally change the way 
that we communicate today.
