How the World Got Wired · Packets
Convergence
The American researcher who heard about Baran in that mountain conference room was named Larry Roberts. He worked for ARPA. He had just been hired to actually build the network J.C.R. Licklider had imagined. He had been struggling. He knew he needed to connect ARPA’s computers, but he didn’t quite know how the messages would actually travel between them.
When Roberts heard about packet switching, something clicked. He went home from the conference and sent for Baran’s eleven volumes. He read them. He read Davies’s papers. And he saw, in those two independent piles of work, exactly the design he had been looking for.
The network ARPA built — the one that became the internet — would use packet switching. The technique invented by an American engineer trying to survive a nuclear war, and an English engineer trying to make computing affordable, and given its name by the Englishman, would become the way every piece of information in the world eventually traveled.
Including, sixty years later, a ten-second video of a sunset in Da Nang.
This is the part of this chapter I want you to hold onto, even if you forget everything else.
When you watch your grandmother’s video, it doesn’t arrive on your phone in one piece. It arrives in thousands of pieces — packets — each with its own little label, each having taken its own little path through the world. Some of them probably went one way. Some of them probably went a different way. A few of them probably got lost, and your phone quietly asked for them to be re-sent, and you never noticed. The whole video came back together on your screen in less than a second, out of a thousand tiny independent journeys.
The reason it works that way is that, in 1960, somebody was trying to figure out how messages could survive an atomic bomb.
The reason the world is what it is, very often, is not the reason you would guess.
In the next chapter, we’ll meet the people who actually plugged Baran’s ideas and Davies’s ideas into Licklider’s dream, and built the first real network. The first message ever sent on it was supposed to be the word login.
The computer crashed after two letters.
That’s Chapter 4.
Questions to talk about
No answer key. These are for arguing over, with someone who read the same chapter.
- The internet was originally designed as a survival mechanism for nuclear war. Does knowing that change how you think about it?
- Baran's answer was to give up on any central point that had to survive. Why is 'no important middle' such a powerful design idea?
- 'The reason the world is what it is, very often, is not the reason you would guess.' Find another example from your own knowledge.
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