Wednesday, June 29, 2005

I love the Internet

(This is a Patriot’s Journey post. Others joining in are Alex, Scott, JimK, and Moorewatch. If you wish to join in, feel free.)

Way back when, before other countries started getting into the act, the Internet got its start when Al Gore was sitting in his office one afternoon in… no, wait, wait, let’s tell the REAL truth.

It was actually a bunch of guys at DARPA that would have been called “nerds” a few decades later, who had managed to get a whole shitload of transistors and thousands of miles of wires to help plan the defense of the United States. They realized that if the Russians had any spies worth their title, the location of their NORAD mountain base would have been discovered pretty quickly, which means that they would lose its services if it ever took a serious hit. (Or hits, since enough explosive can destroy anything.)

At the same time, another set of nerds at Bell Laboratories had thoughts along the same lines, and started looking for ways to re-route necessary communications around areas that had been “taken off the net”. (I mean, who knows how important Aunt Millie’s apple pie recipe would be during post-apocalyptic negotiations?) This computer-aided switching and decentralized routing struck a chord in the first set of nerds and they decided to see if two computers could communicate information.

From those American geniuses comes the baseline of the whole concept, and similar access by a whole new generation of those who gleefully seized on this new technology to investigate the possibilities.

But it wasn’t until Al Gore really DID enter the picture, opening the DARPANet up to civilian use, that the Internet really took off. First as localized BBSs (and I ran one for a short while, back when 56K modems were brand-new), and then they started interconnecting all over the country, as colleges started linking up, and companies started seeing the possibilities.

Computers started speeding up and servers started storing massive quantities of data, as the massive number of people started swarming the web, it has grown to the point where even a schlub like me gets more than a hundred visitors a day.

America, what a country!