Who Invented the Internet?

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people who invented the Internet. Here to tell the story is Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. And a special thanks to the Library of Congress for allowing us to use this remarkable storytelling. Let’s get started.

The two most important inventions of our time, the computer and the Internet, were invented, and with all due respect to Al Gore, you probably don’t know who invented them. But the reason we do not really know who invented the computer and who invented the Internet is they were invented by team of people who had the wonderful quality of wanting to share credit more than take credit for themselves. There were computers at various research universities, and so the government back then, very efficient, decided we need a network so people can share computer resources, and they figured out how to get all these great research universities to agree on what was originally called the ARPANET after the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. To make it all work, where each one of these computers could have equal power and share ideas, be nodes on a web-like network. They came up with that idea and then they just told the research universities, and you figure out the way to make it work the network work. So, being great research universities, the research professors did what they always do is they delegated it to their graduate students. So you had 30 graduate students who decided to figure out, how were we going to make the protocols work for the packets to go darting around this wonderful web and know how to reunite and know where they’re supposed to go, and know what to happen if one of the packets doesn’t make it. All these rules of the what became the Internet. And they wanted to do it in the most collaborative way. And you see that in every great team, even the Founding of America. I’m here competing with Joe Ellis in the next room over, and you know he’s doing that, but in his Founding Brothers he talks about, and David McCullough does it excellently. You needed a team. You needed smart people like Jefferson and Madison. You needed people of great rectitude like Washington. You needed passionate people like John Adams and his cousin Samuel, and you also needed somebody who could bring together a team like Ben Franklin. So when you say what does it take to be a great leader, part of this book is saying it’s not. Being a great leader is being a creator of a team of great leaders. So they got together and they had no votes, they had no chair, whatever. They just went from city to city: San Diego, Salt Lake. They went down to New Orleans once, and they would meet every few months, and the youngest one of them, Steve Crocker, would take notes. And Steve Crocker, he wanted to make sure that it didn’t seem like they were handing down rules from on high, because he wanted it to feel like a collaborative network. So he tried to come up with the name of what these rules would be. And he said he was showering in his girlfriend’s parents’ house. He late at night. He’d just shower is the only place he could go and get away from his future in-laws and think. And he came up with the notion of calling these things Requests for Comment. In other words, these want rules, these want regulations. These were not handed down manuals. They’d send them around and say Requests for Comments. So everybody felt they could be part of building the Internet. Now, that’s pretty cool that that’s how they created the Internet. Which is particularly cool to me is that still how the Internet’s being created. People are still doing the Requests for Comment process. I think they’re up to number 7,900 as they figure out how do we incorporate Bitcoin, how do we have small payments. All of these things are done collaboratively. Now, when I was at Time magazine, we wrote a story that said they did it that way so that it would survive a Russian nuclear attack, because if you do it with a central hub and central rules, you know, a missile takes out one of those hubs, the network goes down. But the Internet is built so that each and every note of the Internet has equal power to store and forward packets of information. So somebody takes out a packet, I mean a node, Internet just routes around it. And we said that was done to survive a nuclear attack. We got a letter from Steve Crocker, who I did not know at the time, who said, ‘No, that’s not why we did it.’ We were graduate students, we were gradually sands. We were avoiding the draft, we weren’t helping the Pentagon, and he wrote a letter to Time. Time was somewhat arrogant back then. If you saw Amy Willentz, who was preceding me and I was both at Time, I know, so we didn’t print the letter. So years later, I’m researching this, and as I said, I was in this neighborhood having coffee with Steve Crocker, and he reminded me of this. I said, ‘Oh, well, I remember that vaguely,’ and I called up the current editor of Time, and I said, ‘Go get me the files.’ I want to know who the better source was, because Time said they had a better source. Well, the better source was a guy named Steve Lukasich, and he actually ran ARPA, and he had said, ‘Yeah, yeah, the graduate. We didn’t tell the graduate students we were doing it to survive a Russian attack.’ But that’s the only way we could get money out of the colonels at the Pentagon. That’s why we’re doing. We just didn’t tell them. And so Lucas It said, ‘Tell Lukeasic. He was on the top. I was on the bottom, so he didn’t know what was happening.’ So I had my coffee with Crocker again. I told him that, and he strokes his chin and he says, ‘Tell Lukeasic. He was on the top. I was on the bottom, so he didn’t know what was happening.’ And that is the essence of the collaborative nature of the Internet. And the fingerprints of the founders of the Internet doing that way are there imprinted on the genetic code of the Internet, so it can’t be censored. It’s totally decentralized and distributed, and it allows collaboration from people who’ve never met each other, never seen each other.

In a terrific job by the editing and production by our own Greg Angler, and the storytelling, well, it’s Walter Isaacson, one of our best, and he’s the author of The Innovators. How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and the decentralized nature of the Internet is what made it happen. It allowed collaboration by people who never saw each other and didn’t even know each other. The story of who invented the Internet here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day, we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.