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The Invention of the Internet

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: July 30, 2010

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first manmade satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been focusing on less frivolous things—and they were going to win the Cold War because of it.

Did you know? Today, almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly.

After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible.

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “galactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.

In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the ARPAnet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.

On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPA network anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.

The Network Grows

By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s.

In 1971, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and two years later it added networks at London’s University College and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”

By the end of the 1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”

The World Wide Web

Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Since then, the internet has changed in many ways. In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links.

That same year, Congress decided that the Web could be used for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. More recently, social networking sites like Facebook have become a popular way for people of all ages to stay connected.

HISTORY Vault: 101 Inventions That Changed the World

Take a closer look at the inventions that have transformed our lives far beyond our homes (the steam engine), our planet (the telescope) and our wildest dreams (the internet).

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The Evolution of the Internet: From Early Networks to Today‘s Global Phenomenon

by history tools
March 27, 2024

The internet has revolutionized communication, commerce, and countless aspects of modern life. But how did we get here? Tracking the origin and growth of the internet reveals a story filled with collaboration, innovation, and far-reaching impact.

Networking Breakthroughs Set the Foundation

Creating a functional computer network involved solving daunting technical barriers. In the early 1960s, scientists across disciplines began to map out solutions.

MIT professor Leonard Kleinrock developed the concept of packet switching, breaking data into blocks instead of one long message. This allowed more efficient transfers by routing packets individually.

In 1965, Welsh scientist Donald Davies coined the term "packet" for chopped up messages and built a packet switching network in the UK.

Soon after, the U.S. Defense Department‘s ARPA (later DARPA ) funded efforts to allow researchers to access computers remotely through a network. Under the leadership of Larry Roberts , the ARPANET project launched in 1969 with Kleinrock helping design the network.

The initial ARPANET linked computer science departments at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah using 50kbps modem lines. By 1971, it connected over 20 machines. This humble start sparked rapid advancement.

(Insert network size growth statistics over time)

Equally important work came from little-known genius Radia Perlman , who developed the spanning tree algorithm and other fundamental concepts that underlie reliable network bridge operations to this day.

The collaborative infrastructure took shape with established standards like Ethernet local area connections, Transmission Control and Internet Protocols ( TCP/IP ), and fiber optic cables capable of transmitting data securely at the speed of light across continents.

As LAN networks bridged together into larger WANs (wide area networks), they relied on an ever-expanding array of routers, servers and computers to transmit packets around the world.

Birth of the World Wide Web

Another visionary named Tim Berners-Lee pioneered the World Wide Web application in 1989. Working at CERN research center, Berners-Lee developed a brilliantly simple system using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Resource Locators (URLs).

This allowed seamless linking between documents and easy searching across connected machines. Combined with the first web browsers, the web provided intuitive access that sparked rapid growth in the 1990s.

(Insert internet user statistics over time)

Meanwhile, the internet backbone capacities exploded exponentially from early modem speeds thanks to fiber optic network lines spanning the globe. New cables with endless bandwidth capabilities became critical infrastructure for our increasingly digital-dependent world.

1990s: Internet Goes Mainstream

As internet speeds ramped up in the 1990s, commercialization and privatization opened the gates to mass adoption. AOL‘s easy on-ramp enticed millions of average household consumers to “get online.”

The launch of consumer browsers like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator unlocked the World Wide Web‘s potential for the public. In 1995, ambitious startups like Amazon and eBay recognized this potential early. Internet pure plays jumped in to lead the dot-com investor frenzy.

(Insert e-commerce adoption statistics over time)

Hundreds of internet companies launched sites for news, entertainment, chat rooms and early networked gaming. Portals like Yahoo became popular homepages to help navigate the messy early web.

Meanwhile, internet connections progressed rapidly from sluggish dial-up modem connections to always-on high bandwidth broadband, led by cable and phone company network upgrades.

As the 20th century closed, nearly 50% of U.S. households adopted internet access at home – a remarkable penetration rate for a technology introduced less than 30 years prior.

Dot-com Bubble Burst

The dizzying pace of the late 90s internet gold rush hit a harsh reality check when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001. Scores of companies failed as the market corrected itself from unrealistic valuations.

However, this shakeout produced important lasting companies like Google, which revolutionized search and internet advertising. Other healthy businesses like Amazon weathered the storm.

This period also saw infrastructure advances. WiFi hotspots for wireless connectivity took root. Creative tinkerers explored early Internet of Things applications allowing remote control of connected devices in homes and offices.

Web 2.0 and Beyond

In the early 2000s, sites promoting user-generated content democratized the internet. Blogging platforms let anyone share their expertise. Wikipedia users collectively built an expansive online encyclopedia.

The launch of social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook ushered in unprecedented direct interaction. User behaviours shifted radically as social feeds, messages and photos dominated online activity.

Video sharing sites like YouTube brought streaming entertainment to the masses. This kicked off the rise of influencer culture and citizen journalism documenting current events in real-time across the globe.

Smartphones accelerated adoption and usage with always-on mobile access. Apps became preferred direct internet gateways over browsers alone.

Over 60% of the world population now uses the internet regularly via an ever-expanding array of devices from phones to watches to refrigerators.

(Insert mobile/social network adoption statistics)

Ongoing Evolution

The past 20 years produced exponential advances across technologies intertwined with internet networks:

Digital content streaming
Video conferencing
Cloud computing
Artificial intelligence
Cryptocurrencies
Remote healthcare
Smart homes/cities

The modern internet connects the world in profound ways spotlighting both bright and dark aspects of humanity. It provides lifelines of communication and knowledge while enabling scams, isolation, and conflict.

Networked apps catalyzed monumental social change enabling uprisings like Arab Spring while exacerbating spread of misinformation and extremist recruitment.

Questions around ownership, privacy and objectivity loom large over big tech’s dominance. Calls for regulation fight to balance security, fairness and freedom. The digital divide still blocks billions in poorer nations from internet access, while most of the developed world enjoys broadband speeds moving from Mbps to Gbps.

As web pioneer Sir Tim Berners Lee pointed out on the 30 year anniversary of the public web, "It‘s not that technology has created a perfect world by any means. But we have ended up with a much more connected world." No one can predict what innovations still lie ahead as the internet continues reshaping civilization.

The TCP/IP Protocol Suite: The Fundamental Language of Internet Communication
The History of Cryptography
How RSA Encryption Works: A Complete Step-by-Step Explanation
Demystifying Metcalfe‘s Law: Why a Network‘s Value Scales Faster Than Its Size
What is a Replay Attack, and How Does it Work?
The Extreme Security of Air Gap Laptops: An Expert Guide
Introduction to Breadth-First Search
The Complete Guide to Graphical User Interfaces

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

11.2 The Evolution of the Internet

Learning objectives.

Define protocol and decentralization as they relate to the early Internet.
Identify technologies that made the Internet accessible.
Explain the causes and effects of the dot-com boom and crash.

From its early days as a military-only network to its current status as one of the developed world’s primary sources of information and communication, the Internet has come a long way in a short period of time. Yet there are a few elements that have stayed constant and that provide a coherent thread for examining the origins of the now-pervasive medium. The first is the persistence of the Internet—its Cold War beginnings necessarily influencing its design as a decentralized, indestructible communication network.

The second element is the development of rules of communication for computers that enable the machines to turn raw data into useful information. These rules, or protocols , have been developed through consensus by computer scientists to facilitate and control online communication and have shaped the way the Internet works. Facebook is a simple example of a protocol: Users can easily communicate with one another, but only through acceptance of protocols that include wall posts, comments, and messages. Facebook’s protocols make communication possible and control that communication.

These two elements connect the Internet’s origins to its present-day incarnation. Keeping them in mind as you read will help you comprehend the history of the Internet, from the Cold War to the Facebook era.

The History of the Internet

The near indestructibility of information on the Internet derives from a military principle used in secure voice transmission: decentralization . In the early 1970s, the RAND Corporation developed a technology (later called “packet switching”) that allowed users to send secure voice messages. In contrast to a system known as the hub-and-spoke model, where the telephone operator (the “hub”) would patch two people (the “spokes”) through directly, this new system allowed for a voice message to be sent through an entire network, or web, of carrier lines, without the need to travel through a central hub, allowing for many different possible paths to the destination.

During the Cold War, the U.S. military was concerned about a nuclear attack destroying the hub in its hub-and-spoke model; with this new web-like model, a secure voice transmission would be more likely to endure a large-scale attack. A web of data pathways would still be able to transmit secure voice “packets,” even if a few of the nodes—places where the web of connections intersected—were destroyed. Only through the destruction of all the nodes in the web could the data traveling along it be completely wiped out—an unlikely event in the case of a highly decentralized network.

This decentralized network could only function through common communication protocols. Just as we use certain protocols when communicating over a telephone—“hello,” “goodbye,” and “hold on for a minute” are three examples—any sort of machine-to-machine communication must also use protocols. These protocols constitute a shared language enabling computers to understand each other clearly and easily.

The Building Blocks of the Internet

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began research on protocols to allow computers to communicate over a distributed network . This work paralleled work done by the RAND Corporation, particularly in the realm of a web-based network model of communication. Instead of using electronic signals to send an unending stream of ones and zeros over a line (the equivalent of a direct voice connection), DARPA used this new packet-switching technology to send small bundles of data. This way, a message that would have been an unbroken stream of binary data—extremely vulnerable to errors and corruption—could be packaged as only a few hundred numbers.

Figure 11.2

Centralized versus distributed communication networks

Imagine a telephone conversation in which any static in the signal would make the message incomprehensible. Whereas humans can infer meaning from “Meet me [static] the restaurant at 8:30” (we replace the static with the word at ), computers do not necessarily have that logical linguistic capability. To a computer, this constant stream of data is incomplete—or “corrupted,” in technological terminology—and confusing. Considering the susceptibility of electronic communication to noise or other forms of disruption, it would seem like computer-to-computer transmission would be nearly impossible.

However, the packets in this packet-switching technology have something that allows the receiving computer to make sure the packet has arrived uncorrupted. Because of this new technology and the shared protocols that made computer-to-computer transmission possible, a single large message could be broken into many pieces and sent through an entire web of connections, speeding up transmission and making that transmission more secure.

One of the necessary parts of a network is a host. A host is a physical node that is directly connected to the Internet and “directs traffic” by routing packets of data to and from other computers connected to it. In a normal network, a specific computer is usually not directly connected to the Internet; it is connected through a host. A host in this case is identified by an Internet protocol, or IP, address (a concept that is explained in greater detail later). Each unique IP address refers to a single location on the global Internet, but that IP address can serve as a gateway for many different computers. For example, a college campus may have one global IP address for all of its students’ computers, and each student’s computer might then have its own local IP address on the school’s network. This nested structure allows billions of different global hosts, each with any number of computers connected within their internal networks. Think of a campus postal system: All students share the same global address (1000 College Drive, Anywhere, VT 08759, for example), but they each have an internal mailbox within that system.

The early Internet was called ARPANET, after the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (which added “Defense” to its name and became DARPA in 1973), and consisted of just four hosts: UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Now there are over half a million hosts, and each of those hosts likely serves thousands of people (Central Intelligence Agency). Each host uses protocols to connect to an ever-growing network of computers. Because of this, the Internet does not exist in any one place in particular; rather, it is the name we give to the huge network of interconnected computers that collectively form the entity that we think of as the Internet. The Internet is not a physical structure; it is the protocols that make this communication possible.

Figure 11.3

A TCP gateway is like a post office because of the way that it directs information to the correct location.

One of the other core components of the Internet is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) gateway. Proposed in a 1974 paper, the TCP gateway acts “like a postal service (Cerf, et. al., 1974).” Without knowing a specific physical address, any computer on the network can ask for the owner of any IP address, and the TCP gateway will consult its directory of IP address listings to determine exactly which computer the requester is trying to contact. The development of this technology was an essential building block in the interlinking of networks, as computers could now communicate with each other without knowing the specific address of a recipient; the TCP gateway would figure it all out. In addition, the TCP gateway checks for errors and ensures that data reaches its destination uncorrupted. Today, this combination of TCP gateways and IP addresses is called TCP/IP and is essentially a worldwide phone book for every host on the Internet.

You’ve Got Mail: The Beginnings of the Electronic Mailbox

E-mail has, in one sense or another, been around for quite a while. Originally, electronic messages were recorded within a single mainframe computer system. Each person working on the computer would have a personal folder, so sending that person a message required nothing more than creating a new document in that person’s folder. It was just like leaving a note on someone’s desk (Peter, 2004), so that the person would see it when he or she logged onto the computer.

However, once networks began to develop, things became slightly more complicated. Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing the naming system we have today, using the @ symbol to denote the server (or host, from the previous section). In other words, [email protected] tells the host “gmail.com” (Google’s e-mail server) to drop the message into the folder belonging to “name.” Tomlinson is credited with writing the first network e-mail using his program SNDMSG in 1971. This invention of a simple standard for e-mail is often cited as one of the most important factors in the rapid spread of the Internet, and is still one of the most widely used Internet services.

The use of e-mail grew in large part because of later commercial developments, especially America Online, that made connecting to e-mail much easier than it had been at its inception. Internet service providers (ISPs) packaged e-mail accounts with Internet access, and almost all web browsers (such as Netscape, discussed later in the section) included a form of e-mail service. In addition to the ISPs, e-mail services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail provided free e-mail addresses paid for by small text ads at the bottom of every e-mail message sent. These free “webmail” services soon expanded to comprise a large part of the e-mail services that are available today. Far from the original maximum inbox sizes of a few megabytes, today’s e-mail services, like Google’s Gmail service, generally provide gigabytes of free storage space.

E-mail has revolutionized written communication. The speed and relatively inexpensive nature of e-mail makes it a prime competitor of postal services—including FedEx and UPS—that pride themselves on speed. Communicating via e-mail with someone on the other end of the world is just as quick and inexpensive as communicating with a next-door neighbor. However, the growth of Internet shopping and online companies such as Amazon.com has in many ways made the postal service and shipping companies more prominent—not necessarily for communication, but for delivery and remote business operations.

Hypertext: Web 1.0

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University and software engineer at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), had the idea of using a new kind of protocol to share documents and information throughout the local CERN network. Instead of transferring regular text-based documents, he created a new language called hypertext markup language (HTML). Hypertext was a new word for text that goes beyond the boundaries of a single document. Hypertext can include links to other documents (hyperlinks), text-style formatting, images, and a wide variety of other components. The basic idea is that documents can be constructed out of a variety of links and can be viewed just as if they are on the user’s computer.

This new language required a new communication protocol so that computers could interpret it, and Berners-Lee decided on the name hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Through HTTP, hypertext documents can be sent from computer to computer and can then be interpreted by a browser, which turns the HTML files into readable web pages. The browser that Berners-Lee created, called World Wide Web, was a combination browser-editor, allowing users to view other HTML documents and create their own (Berners-Lee, 2009).

Figure 11.4

Tim Berners-Lee’s first web browser was also a web page editor.

Modern browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, only allow for the viewing of web pages; other increasingly complicated tools are now marketed for creating web pages, although even the most complicated page can be written entirely from a program like Windows Notepad. The reason web pages can be created with the simplest tools is the adoption of certain protocols by the most common browsers. Because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and other browsers all interpret the same code in more or less the same way, creating web pages is as simple as learning how to speak the language of these browsers.

In 1991, the same year that Berners-Lee created his web browser, the Internet connection service Q-Link was renamed America Online, or AOL for short. This service would eventually grow to employ over 20,000 people, on the basis of making Internet access available (and, critically, simple) for anyone with a telephone line. Although the web in 1991 was not what it is today, AOL’s software allowed its users to create communities based on just about any subject, and it only required a dial-up modem—a device that connects any computer to the Internet via a telephone line—and the telephone line itself.

In addition, AOL incorporated two technologies—chat rooms and Instant Messenger—into a single program (along with a web browser). Chat rooms allowed many users to type live messages to a “room” full of people, while Instant Messenger allowed two users to communicate privately via text-based messages. The most important aspect of AOL was its encapsulation of all these once-disparate programs into a single user-friendly bundle. Although AOL was later disparaged for customer service issues like its users’ inability to deactivate their service, its role in bringing the Internet to mainstream users was instrumental (Zeller Jr., 2005).

In contrast to AOL’s proprietary services, the World Wide Web had to be viewed through a standalone web browser. The first of these browsers to make its mark was the program Mosaic, released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic was offered for free and grew very quickly in popularity due to features that now seem integral to the web. Things like bookmarks, which allow users to save the location of particular pages without having to remember them, and images, now an integral part of the web, were all inventions that made the web more usable for many people (National Center for Supercomputing Appliances).

Although the web browser Mosaic has not been updated since 1997, developers who worked on it went on to create Netscape Navigator, an extremely popular browser during the 1990s. AOL later bought the Netscape company, and the Navigator browser was discontinued in 2008, largely because Netscape Navigator had lost the market to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which came preloaded on Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system. However, Netscape had long been converting its Navigator software into an open-source program called Mozilla Firefox, which is now the second-most-used web browser on the Internet (detailed in Table 11.1 “Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)” ) (NetMarketshare). Firefox represents about a quarter of the market—not bad, considering its lack of advertising and Microsoft’s natural advantage of packaging Internet Explorer with the majority of personal computers.

Table 11.1 Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)

For Sale: The Web

As web browsers became more available as a less-moderated alternative to AOL’s proprietary service, the web became something like a free-for-all of startup companies. The web of this period, often referred to as Web 1.0, featured many specialty sites that used the Internet’s ability for global, instantaneous communication to create a new type of business. Another name for this free-for-all of the 1990s is the “dot-com boom.” During the boom, it seemed as if almost anyone could build a website and sell it for millions of dollars. However, the “dot-com crash” that occurred later that decade seemed to say otherwise. Quite a few of these Internet startup companies went bankrupt, taking their shareholders down with them. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, called this phenomenon “irrational exuberance (Greenspan, 1996),” in large part because investors did not necessarily know how to analyze these particular business plans, and companies that had never turned a profit could be sold for millions. The new business models of the Internet may have done well in the stock market, but they were not necessarily sustainable. In many ways, investors collectively failed to analyze the business prospects of these companies, and once they realized their mistakes (and the companies went bankrupt), much of the recent market growth evaporated. The invention of new technologies can bring with it the belief that old business tenets no longer apply, but this dangerous belief—the “irrational exuberance” Greenspan spoke of—is not necessarily conducive to long-term growth.

Some lucky dot-com businesses formed during the boom survived the crash and are still around today. For example, eBay, with its online auctions, turned what seemed like a dangerous practice (sending money to a stranger you met over the Internet) into a daily occurrence. A less-fortunate company, eToys.com , got off to a promising start—its stock quadrupled on the day it went public in 1999—but then filed for Chapter 11 “The Internet and Social Media” bankruptcy in 2001 (Barnes, 2001).

One of these startups, theGlobe.com , provided one of the earliest social networking services that exploded in popularity. When theGlobe.com went public, its stock shot from a target price of $9 to a close of $63.50 a share (Kawamoto, 1998). The site itself was started in 1995, building its business on advertising. As skepticism about the dot-com boom grew and advertisers became increasingly skittish about the value of online ads, theGlobe.com ceased to be profitable and shut its doors as a social networking site (The Globe, 2009). Although advertising is pervasive on the Internet today, the current model—largely based on the highly targeted Google AdSense service—did not come around until much later. In the earlier dot-com years, the same ad might be shown on thousands of different web pages, whereas now advertising is often specifically targeted to the content of an individual page.

However, that did not spell the end of social networking on the Internet. Social networking had been going on since at least the invention of Usenet in 1979 (detailed later in the chapter), but the recurring problem was always the same: profitability. This model of free access to user-generated content departed from almost anything previously seen in media, and revenue streams would have to be just as radical.

The Early Days of Social Media

The shared, generalized protocols of the Internet have allowed it to be easily adapted and extended into many different facets of our lives. The Internet shapes everything, from our day-to-day routine—the ability to read newspapers from around the world, for example—to the way research and collaboration are conducted. There are three important aspects of communication that the Internet has changed, and these have instigated profound changes in the way we connect with one another socially: the speed of information, the volume of information, and the “democratization” of publishing, or the ability of anyone to publish ideas on the web.

One of the Internet’s largest and most revolutionary changes has come about through social networking. Because of Twitter, we can now see what all our friends are doing in real time; because of blogs, we can consider the opinions of complete strangers who may never write in traditional print; and because of Facebook, we can find people we haven’t talked to for decades, all without making a single awkward telephone call.

Recent years have seen an explosion of new content and services; although the phrase “social media” now seems to be synonymous with websites like Facebook and Twitter, it is worthwhile to consider all the ways a social media platform affects the Internet experience.

How Did We Get Here? The Late 1970s, Early 1980s, and Usenet

Almost as soon as TCP stitched the various networks together, a former DARPA scientist named Larry Roberts founded the company Telnet, the first commercial packet-switching company. Two years later, in 1977, the invention of the dial-up modem (in combination with the wider availability of personal computers like the Apple II) made it possible for anyone around the world to access the Internet. With availability extended beyond purely academic and military circles, the Internet quickly became a staple for computer hobbyists.

One of the consequences of the spread of the Internet to hobbyists was the founding of Usenet. In 1979, University of North Carolina graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis connected three computers in a small network and used a series of programming scripts to post and receive messages. In a very short span of time, this system spread all over the burgeoning Internet. Much like an electronic version of community bulletin boards, anyone with a computer could post a topic or reply on Usenet.

The group was fundamentally and explicitly anarchic, as outlined by the posting “What is Usenet?” This document says, “Usenet is not a democracy…there is no person or group in charge of Usenet …Usenet cannot be a democracy, autocracy, or any other kind of ‘-acy (Moraes, et. al., 1998).’” Usenet was not used only for socializing, however, but also for collaboration. In some ways, the service allowed a new kind of collaboration that seemed like the start of a revolution: “I was able to join rec.kites and collectively people in Australia and New Zealand helped me solve a problem and get a circular two-line kite to fly,” one user told the United Kingdom’s Guardian (Jeffery, et. al., 2009).

GeoCities: Yahoo! Pioneers

Fast-forward to 1995: The president and founder of Beverly Hills Internet, David Bohnett, announces that the name of his company is now “GeoCities.” GeoCities built its business by allowing users (“homesteaders”) to create web pages in “communities” for free, with the stipulation that the company placed a small advertising banner at the top of each page. Anyone could register a GeoCities site and subsequently build a web page about a topic. Almost all of the community names, like Broadway (live theater) and Athens (philosophy and education), were centered on specific topics (Archive, 1996).

This idea of centering communities on specific topics may have come from Usenet. In Usenet, the domain alt.rec.kites refers to a specific topic (kites) within a category (recreation) within a larger community (alternative topics). This hierarchical model allowed users to organize themselves across the vastness of the Internet, even on a large site like GeoCities. The difference with GeoCities was that it allowed users to do much more than post only text (the limitation of Usenet), while constraining them to a relatively small pool of resources. Although each GeoCities user had only a few megabytes of web space, standardized pictures—like mailbox icons and back buttons—were hosted on GeoCities’s main server. GeoCities was such a large part of the Internet, and these standard icons were so ubiquitous, that they have now become a veritable part of the Internet’s cultural history. The Web Elements category of the site Internet Archaeology is a good example of how pervasive GeoCities graphics became (Internet Archaeology, 2010).

GeoCities built its business on a freemium model, where basic services are free but subscribers pay extra for things like commercial pages or shopping carts. Other Internet businesses, like Skype and Flickr, use the same model to keep a vast user base while still profiting from frequent users. Since loss of online advertising revenue was seen as one of the main causes of the dot-com crash, many current web startups are turning toward this freemium model to diversify their income streams (Miller, 2009).

GeoCities’s model was so successful that the company Yahoo! bought it for $3.6 billion at its peak in 1999. At the time, GeoCities was the third-most-visited site on the web (behind Yahoo! and AOL), so it seemed like a sure bet. A decade later, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! closed GeoCities for good in every country except Japan.

Diversification of revenue has become one of the most crucial elements of Internet businesses; from The Wall Street Journal online to YouTube, almost every website is now looking for multiple income streams to support its services.

Key Takeaways

The two primary characteristics of the original Internet were decentralization and free, open protocols that anyone could use. As a result of its decentralized “web” model of organization, the Internet can store data in many different places at once. This makes it very useful for backing up data and very difficult to destroy data that might be unwanted. Protocols play an important role in this, because they allow some degree of control to exist without a central command structure.
Two of the most important technological developments were the personal computer (such as the Apple II) and the dial-up modem, which allowed anyone with a phone line to access the developing Internet. America Online also played an important role, making it very easy for practically anyone with a computer to use the Internet. Another development, the web browser, allowed for access to and creation of web pages all over the Internet.
With the advent of the web browser, it seemed as if anyone could make a website that people wanted to use. The problem was that these sites were driven largely by venture capital and grossly inflated initial public offerings of their stock. After failing to secure any real revenue stream, their stock plummeted, the market crashed, and many of these companies went out of business. In later years, companies tried to diversify their investments, particularly by using a “freemium” model of revenue, in which a company would both sell premium services and advertise, while offering a free pared-down service to casual users.

Websites have many different ways of paying for themselves, and this can say a lot about both the site and its audience. The business models of today’s websites may also directly reflect the lessons learned during the early days of the Internet. Start this exercise by reviewing a list of common ways that websites pay for themselves, how they arrived at these methods, and what it might say about them:

Advertising: The site probably has many casual viewers and may not necessarily be well established. If there are targeted ads (such as ads directed toward stay-at-home parents with children), then it is possible the site is successful with a small audience.
Subscription option: The site may be a news site that prides itself on accuracy of information or lack of bias, whose regular readers are willing to pay a premium for the guarantee of quality material. Alternately, the site may cater to a small demographic of Internet users by providing them with exclusive, subscription-only content.
Selling services: Online services, such as file hosting, or offline services and products are probably the clearest way to determine a site’s revenue stream. However, these commercial sites often are not prized for their unbiased information, and their bias can greatly affect the content on the site.

Choose a website that you visit often, and list which of these revenue streams the site might have. How might this affect the content on the site? Is there a visible effect, or does the site try to hide it? Consider how events during the early history of the Internet may have affected the way the site operates now. Write down a revenue stream that the site does not currently have and how the site designers might implement such a revenue stream.

Archive, While GeoCities is no longer in business, the Internet Archive maintains the site at http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php . Information taken from December 21, 1996.

Barnes, Cecily. “eToys files for Chapter 11,” CNET , March 7, 2001, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-253706.html .

Berners-Lee, Tim. “The WorldWideWeb Browser,” 2009, https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb .

Central Intelligence Agency, “Country Comparison: Internet Hosts,” World Factbook , https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2184rank.html .

Cerf, Vincton, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” December 1974, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675 .

Greenspan, Alan. “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society, ” (lecture, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, December 5, 1996), http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm .

Internet Archaeology, 2010, http://www.internetarchaeology.org/swebelements.htm .

Jeffery, Simon and others, “A People’s History of the Internet: From Arpanet in 1969 to Today,” Guardian (London), October 23, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet .

Kawamoto, Dawn. “ TheGlobe.com ’s IPO one for the books,” CNET , November 13, 1998, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-217913.html .

Miller, Claire Cain. “Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet,” New York Times , May 24, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/start-ups/25startup.html .

Moraes, Mark, Chip Salzenberg, and Gene Spafford, “What is Usenet?” December 28, 1999, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/ .

National Center for Supercomputing Appliances, “About NCSA Mosaic,” 2010, http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Projects/mosaic.html .

NetMarketShare, “Browser Market Share,” http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcal=1&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=132 .

Peter, Ian. “The History of Email,” The Internet History Project, 2004, http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html .

The Globe, theglobe.com, “About Us,” 2009, http://www.theglobe.com/ .

Zeller, Jr., Tom. “Canceling AOL? Just Offer Your Firstborn,” New York Times , August 29, 2005, all http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/technology/29link.html .

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The internet: History, evolution and how it works

The Internet is a massive computer network that has revolutionized communication and changed the world forever.

What is the internet?

Internet invention
How it works

How do websites work?

Speed and bandwidth

Additional resources

Bibliography.

The internet is a vast network that connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles (1,200,000 kilometres) of cable running under land and sea, according to the University of Colorado Boulder.

It is the world's fastest method of communication, making it possible to send data from London, U.K. to Sydney, Australia in just 250 milliseconds, for example. Constructing and maintaining the internet has been a monumental feat of ingenuity.

The internet is a giant computer network, linking billions of machines together by underground and underwater fibre-optic cables.These cables run connect continents and islands , everywhere except Antarctica

Each cable contains strands of glass that transmit data as pulses of light, according to the journal Science . Those strands are wrapped in layers of insulation and buried beneath the sea floor by ships carrying specialist ploughs. This helps to protect them from everything from corrosion to shark bites.

When you use it, your computer or device sends messages via these cables asking to access data stored on other machines. When accessing the internet, most people will be using the world wide web.

When was the internet invented?

It was originally created by the U.S. government during the Cold War . In 1958, President Eisenhower founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ARPA ) to give a boost to the country’s military technology, according to the Journal of Cyber Policy . Scientists and engineers developed a network of linked computers called ARPANET.

- The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects

- What is cyberwarfare?

- Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

ARPANET's original aim was to link two computers in different places, enabling them to share data. That dream became a reality in 1969, according to Historian Jeremy Norman . In the years that followed, the team linked dozens of computers together and, by the end of the 1980s, the network contained more than 30,000 machines, according to the U.K.'s Science and Media Museum .

How the onternet works

Most computers connect to the internet without the use of wires, using Wi-Fi , via a physical modem. It connects via a wire to a socket in the wall, which links to a box outside. That box connects via still more wires to a network of cables under the ground. Together, they convert radio waves to electrical signals to fibre optic pulses, and back again.

At every connection point in the underground network, there are junction boxes called routers. Their job is to work out the best way to pass data from your computer to the computer with which you’re trying to connect. According to the IEEE International Conference on Communications , they use your IP addresses to work out where the data should go. Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another, according to Frontier .

Each router is only connected to its local network. If a message arrives for a computer that the router doesn’t recognizse, it passes it on to a router higher up in the local network. They each maintain an address book called a routing table . According to the Internet Protocol Journal , it shows the paths through the network to all the local IP addresses.

The internet sends data around the world, across land and sea, as displayed on the Submarine Cable Map . The data passes between networks until it reaches the one closest to its destination. Then, it passes through local routers until it arrives at the computer with the matching IP address.

The internet relies upon the two connecting computers speaking the same digital language. To achieve this, there is a set of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), according to the web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare .

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside. The IP, explains how the address system works, whileTCP, how to package and send the data.

Click the numbers on the following interactive image to find out what happens when you type www.livescience.com into your browser:

Internet speed and bandwidth

When it comes to internet speed how much data you can download in one second: bandwidth. According to Tom’s Guide , to surf the web, check your email, and update your social media, 25 megabits per second is enough. But, if you want to watch 4K movies, live stream video, or play online multiplayer games, you might need speeds of up to 100-200 megabits per second.

Your download speed depends on one main factor: the quality of the underground cables that link you to the rest of the world. Fibre optic cables send data much faster than their copper counterparts, according to the cable testing company BASEC , and your home internet is limited by the infrastructure available in your area.

Jersey has the highest average bandwidth in the world, according to Cable.co.uk . The little British island off the coast of France boasts average download speeds of over 274 megabits per second. Turkmenistan has the lowest, with download speeds barely reaching 0.5 megabits per second.

You can read more about the history of the internet at the Internet Society website . To discover how the Internet has changed our daily lives, read this article by Computing Australia .

" Getting to the bottom of the internet’s carbon footprint ". University of Colorado Boulder, College of Media, Communication and Information (2021).
" The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology ". Journal of Cyber Policy (2016).
" The Internet: Past, Present, and Future ". Educational Technology (1997).
" Three-Way Handshake ". CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition) (2012).
" Content Routers: Fetching Data on Network Path ". IEEE International Conference on Communications (2011).
" Analyzing the Internet's BGP Routing Table ". The Internet Protocol Journal (2001).
" The Internet of Tomorrow ". Science (1999).

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Laura Mears is a biologist who left the confines of the lab for the rigours of an office desk as a keen science writer and a full-time software engineer. Laura has previously written for the magazines How It Works and T3 . Laura's main interests include science, technology and video games.

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A new theory of quantum gravity could explain the biggest puzzle in cosmology, study suggests

A short history of the internet

Published: 3 December 2020

Read about the history of the internet, from its 1950s origins to the World Wide Web’s explosion in popularity in the late 1990s and the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The origins of the internet

The origins of the internet are rooted in the USA of the 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and huge tensions existed between North America and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks. The US realised it needed a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.

At this time, computers were large, expensive machines exclusively used by military scientists and university staff.

These machines were powerful but limited in numbers, and researchers grew increasingly frustrated: they required access to the technology, but had to travel great distances to use it.

To solve this problem, researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant that users could simultaneously access a mainframe computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s actual power at their command.

The difficulty of using such systems led various scientists, engineers and organisations to research the possibility of a large-scale computer network.

Who invented the internet?

No one person invented the internet. When networking technology was first developed, a number of scientists and engineers brought their research together to create the ARPANET . Later, other inventors’ creations paved the way for the web as we know it today.

• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)

An engineer whose work overlapped with ARPA’s research. In 1959 he joined an American think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was asked to research how the US Air Force could keep control of its fleet if a nuclear attack ever happened. In 1964 Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point. If one point was destroyed, all surviving points would still be able to communicate with each other. He called this a distributed network.

• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)

Chief scientist at ARPA, responsible for developing computer networks. Paul Baran’s idea appealed to Roberts, and he began to work on the creation of a distributed network.

• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)

An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts.

• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)

A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.

• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)

American computer scientists who developed TCP/IP , the set of protocols that governs how data moves through a network. This helped the ARPANET evolve into the internet we use today. Vint Cerf is credited with the first written use of the word ‘internet’.

When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city. I helped to build the roads—the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B. —Vint Cerf, 2007

• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)

Inventors of DNS , the ‘phone book of the internet’.

• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)

Creator of the World Wide Web who developed many of the principles we still use today, such as HTML, HTTP, URLs and web browsers.

There was no “Eureka!” moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realisations from many sides. —Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web , 1999

• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)

Inventor of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser.

The first use of a computer network

In 1965, Lawrence Roberts made two separate computers in different places ‘talk’ to each other for the first time. This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets.

When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. He used a computer at UCLA to send a message to a computer at Stanford. Kleinrock tried to type ‘login’ but the system crashed after the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ had appeared on the Stanford monitor.

A second attempt proved successful and more messages were exchanged between the two sites. The ARPANET was born.

The life and death of the ARPANET

President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, bringing together some of the best scientific minds in the country. Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again. Among ARPA’s projects was a remit to test the feasibility of a large-scale computer network.

Lawrence Roberts was responsible for developing computer networks at ARPA, working with scientist Leonard Kleinrock. Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. When the first packet-switching network was developed in 1969, Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another site, and the ARPA Network—or ARPANET—was born.

Once ARPANET was up and running, it quickly expanded. By 1973, 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK.

As ARPANET grew, a set of rules for handling data packets needed to be put in place. In 1974, computer scientists Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented a new method called transmission-control protocol, popularly known as TCP/IP , which essentially allowed computers to speak the same language.

After the introduction of TCP/IP, ARPANET quickly grew to become a global interconnected network of networks, or ‘Internet’.

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.

What is packet switching?

‘Packet switching’ is a method of splitting and sending data. A computer file is effectively broken up into thousands of small segments called ‘packets’—each typically around 1500 bytes—distributed across a network, and then reordered back into a single file at their destination. The packet switching method is very reliable and allows data to be sent securely, even over damaged networks; it also uses bandwidth very efficiently and doesn’t need a single dedicated link, like a telephone call does.

The world’s first packet-switching computer network was produced in 1969. Computers at four American universities were connected using separate minicomputers known as ‘Interface Message Processors’ or ‘IMPs’. The IMPs acted as gateways for the packets and have since evolved into what we now call ‘routers’.

Packet switching is the basis on which the internet still works today.

What is TCP/IP?

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network.

After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data. In 1974 two American computer scientists, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a new method that involved sending data packets in a digital envelope or ‘datagram’. The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.

Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol (TCP). TCP allowed computers to speak the same language, and it helped the ARPANET to grow into a global interconnected network of networks, an example of ‘internetworking’—internet for short.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and, when combined with TCP, helps internet traffic find its destination. Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the internet’s equivalent of a phone book, and converts hard-to-remember IP addresses into simple names.

In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks (LANs). An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses.

This problem was solved by the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983. DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web.

The beginnings of email

Email was a rapid—but unintended—consequence of the growth of ARPANET. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. He introduced the idea that the destination of a message should be indicated using the @ symbol, which was first used to distinguish between the individual user’s name and that of their computer (i.e. user@computer). When DNS was introduced, this was extended to [email protected] .

Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. One of the first big mailing lists was ‘SF-LOVERS’ for science fiction fans.

The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

Early home computers

From the 1970s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. The uptake of home computers was not necessarily driven by users’ needs or a computer’s functionality; early machines could actually do relatively little. The appeal to the consumer was the idea of becoming part of the ‘Information Revolution’. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

More information about collection object

The growth of the internet, 1985–95.

The invention of DNS, the common use of TCP/IP and the popularity of email caused an explosion of activity on the internet. Between 1986 and 1987, the network grew from 2,000 hosts to 30,000. People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files. However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted.

The internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in 1989 when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee proposed a new way of structuring and linking all the information available on CERN’s computer network that made it quick and easy to access. His concept for a ‘web of information’ would ultimately become the World Wide Web.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

By 1995 the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users.

How is the World Wide Web different from the internet?

The terms ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘internet’ are often confused. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of a ‘web of information’ in 1989. It relied on ‘hyperlinks’ to connect documents together. Written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a hyperlink can point to any other HTML page or file that sits on top of the internet.

In 1990, Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) system. HTTP is the language computers use to communicate HTML documents over the internet, and the URI, also known as a URL, provides a unique address where the pages can be easily found.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’.

Birthplace of the Web (the computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the World Wide Web)

On 6 August 1991 the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. Berners-Lee’s vision of a free, global and shared information space began to take shape.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee (1998)

The introduction of web browsers

Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. He called this ‘browser’ the ‘WorldWideWeb’. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced NeXT machines . A simplified version that could run on any computer was created by Nicola Pellow, a maths student who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, an American student in Illinois, launched a new browser called Mosaic. Created at the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was easy to download and install, worked on many different computers and provided simple point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window.

Mosaic’s simplicity opened the web up to a new audience, and caused an explosion of activity on the internet, with the number of websites growing from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996.

In 1994 Andreesen formed Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By 1995, Navigator had around 10 million global users.

Early ecommerce and the ‘dotcom bubble’

The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between 1998 and 2000. This became known as the ‘dotcom bubble’.

The claim was that world industry was experiencing a ‘new economic paradigm’, the likes of which had never been experienced before. Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return.

We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. —Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, Wired , July 1997

Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.com, which spent its way through $200 million, only to collapse within six months of its website going live.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce.

The first digital photos, from Victorian technology to the internet

Read about the first experiments in digital image technology—which took place longer ago than you might think.

Investigate the development of calculating, computing and data processing technology.

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Internet50 Highlights

On October 29, 1969 at UCLA, Professor Lenonard Kleinrock and his team sent the first message over a network of computers that would evolve into the internet. The world’s leading technology experts and visionaries gathered at UCLA on October 29, 2019 to honor the significance of this moment and discuss the current state and future aspirations of our connected world.

*Internet50 content is owned by UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering .

President Eisenhower Created the Advanced Research Project Agency

Speaker 1: Today, a new moon is in the sky. A 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

Leonard Kleinrock: In 1957, Sputnik went up. It caused a great distress for this country. We were now behind the Soviets in technology. President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Project Agency.

Steven Lukasik: ARPA was created in 1958. The guiding principle was ARPA did things that no one else was doing. And therefore, it better do it.

Bob Taylor: And their first research programs were space programs because Sputnik had been a space program.

Steven Lukasik: The ARPA director got cross-wired with the President over whether ARPA should be the launcher of all satellites for the United States. People had thought we better not let too much of the space technology stay in Defense. So NASA was established.

Bob Taylor: And these space programs were transferred from ARPA to NASA which left ARPA with room to start research in other areas. And computer research was one of the areas they opened up.

Steve Crocker: ARPA as an agency is divided up into offices. Each office has a director and a handful of program managers and that was it. So an extremely lightweight, nearly flat structure. The Information Processing Techniques Office was where all of this funding for advanced computer science was coming from.

J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider: The thing that makes the computer communication network special is that it puts the workers, that would be the team members who are geographically distributed, in touch not only with one another but with the information base with which they work all the time.

Charles Herzfeld: Licklider came and gave a seminar at the Pentagon, even talked about the new way of computing. By that time, everybody had seen the ORD batch process. You give a program your problem, this goes away in programs and finally comes back with a stack of paper in which it is alleged that the answer is hidden. That’s a miserable way to do research, but Licklider said, “This is all wrong, you need direct interaction by the individual scientists and the real machine and you don’t have to be in the same institution at the same place. You can do it all by some magic distant medium which we call the net.”

Bob Taylor: A year or two later when ARPA had created this computer research program, they invited Lick to come and be its first director.

Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider basically became the head of the computer side of this research effort.

Charles Herzfeld: I think Licklider is the smartest man I’ve ever met.

Alan Kay: Because he wasn’t a technologist, because he hooked up to this big idea, he was a big… He was big. Lick was big. He had a vision as to what a network might do, give people connectivity and they’ll do some wonderful things. He had no idea how to do it.

Why Did You Pick October 29th, 1969?

JOHN MARKOFF: He left UC Berkeley after taking all of their computer science courses. So Charlie, why don’t we start with you? How did you end up running software for this machine?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Well, I had gone to UCLA as an undergrad and I’d already learned to do some programming from my dad so I ended up…

JOHN MARKOFF: Go ahead.

CHARLIE KLEIN: So I ended up having to take a programming class and went to the department chair and said, “Do I really need to take this?” And he said, “No, you don’t need to. Why don’t you work on my research project?” So I was working for Gerry Estrin on the research, and then, Len got this project to work on the ARPANET. And most of us switched over to Len’s project and I was working on trying to keep our computer system working and working on the operating system and then when the IMP came, I had to write some software to make it work.

JOHN MARKOFF: And you were building an operating system, mostly though, right? For something called the Sigma 7.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Right. Right.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay. And how did you end up being on campus at 10:30 tonight, 50 years ago?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I enjoyed programming.

CHARLIE KLEIN: I sort of described it as when you got a programming working, it’s like moving up the next level in a video game. You got a little excitement. So I would often stay late at night, sometimes I stayed all night and programmed all night, then went to my classes in the morning.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, so the first connection that you had with Menlo Park was not seen as a big deal by you?

CHARLIE KLEIN: Not to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: And why did you pick October 29th 1969 to do it on?

CHARLIE KLEIN: I’m not sure there was any specific reason for that date, we were ready to try it, Bill was ready to try it and we started trying it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, how did you come to be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: How did I come to the…

JOHN MARKOFF: To be on the other end of that communication?

BILL DUVALL: Well, basically, I was working with, at SRI with Doug Engelbart and his group, and that’s where a lot of the paradigm that we see today on the internet came from the idea of using a computer, which up to that point, had been used for basically databases for bank and for numerical processing. The idea of using it as a page-oriented, with a mouse, information system, and in fact, that’s where the mouse… He invented the mouse as part of that whole effort. But part of the concept was that there would be basically a lot of workstations… He called them knowledge centers, basically, and these would all have these types of terminals and they’d be connected via network. And so, when the idea of the… And it was being funded by ARPA, so when the idea of a network came along, it was a very natural step to say, “We’ll be one of their first nodes.”

JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

CHARLIE KLEIN: Yeah. [laughter]

JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

When the Idea of a Network – We’ll Be One of their First Nodes

08:11 JOHN MARKOFF: You and Charlie hadn’t physically met?

08:13 BILL DUVALL: No, in fact, we never physically met for… Until I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, so.

08:19 CHARLEY KLINE: Yeah. [laughter]

08:20 JOHN MARKOFF: But you did regularly talk on the phone?

08:22 BILL DUVALL: We did talk on the phone. The whole… When the IMP was delivered, which was, I think the beginning of October at SRI, along with the IMP came a deadline and the deadline was October 31st to basically have a login from one computer to another over the ARPANET at that point. And so, we worked furiously to try and get all the software ready do that, and in order to get… We knew that everything was… There were a lot of things that we were putting together. It was a complicated system, a lot of pieces, and so we decided to start testing early and that’s why… It was October 29th, to see if we could beat the deadline, and so we scheduled a test for 29th, it was at 10 o’clock at night because there were other people that used the system during the day and we knew that it was fragile to say the least, this was pre-alpha stuff.

09:16 JOHN MARKOFF: But also, this wasn’t your primary job at the Augmentation Research Center, this was something you were sort of called into the last moment to do?

09:23 BILL DUVALL: That’s right, yeah. There was… A person had been contracted to do the interface and when the IMP was delivered, doing a review of the state of software was obvious that it wasn’t gonna get there and at that time, I was the only person in the group that both understood the protocols and could work in the SDS 940 Time-Sharing System. So I sort of, I was volunteered, let’s put it that way.

09:49 JOHN MARKOFF: So, this is the “Watson come here quick” moment of the internet and nobody really knew that that was the case for maybe a decade or two, is that right?

Request for Comment and the Basic Plan for the ARPANET

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, so then, let’s talk a little bit about how this came to be. Steve, there was this process called Request for Comment and I think that that… If you could explain that and how that came to be, ’cause that was really where the architecture for the system came from.

Steve Crocker: The basic plan for the ARPANET had been laid out by the adults, we were the kids. And so, the IMP was designed by Bolt Beranek and Newman, and the long lines, the telephones that were procured from AT&T. And then what seemed, in a way, an after thought, was okay, “I gotta get some software running on the host to talk to each other.” There was a meeting called at Santa Barbara, UCSB and Elmer Shapiro from the SRI group chaired the meeting, Vint and I drove up, we were… Did you make the choice to send us up there? Somebody said we should go…

Leonard Kleinrock: I wanted to go the cheapest way, you kept busting my budget.

STEVE CROCKER: That came later, the trip to Santa Barbara was cheap, the expenses grew after that. So, Vint and I… This was August ’68, so this was more than a year before the time that we’re talking about. The contract for the IMPs had not yet been let but it was in process, we met counterparts from the other groups. Bill, were you at that meeting? Jeff Rulifson was there, I remember.

Bill Duvall: Yeah, I was there. That was Jeff Rulifson, [12:31] ____ Elmer Shapiro and…

STEVE CROCKER: And it was a pretty interesting meeting in that there was not much of an agenda, we all came with… To find out what was going on and it was sort of like a cocktail party engagement, where you instantly click with certain people, that you can tell you’re on the same wavelength. And we could see that this communication was going to be more interesting than just logging into a remote machine, or sending a file, those were obvious… We obviously wanted to be able to do that, but we could see a bigger picture and we kind of self-organized after that and decided that we would keep talking, and in the process to keep talking, we said, “Well, we should visit each other’s laboratories,” which is were Len’s comment about busting his travel budget came from. And we understood the irony right at the very instant that we said that, that this network was supposed to make it possible to collaborate at a distance, without having to travel. And the first thing we did was lay out a whole travel schedule, so we could visit each other’s laboratories.

STEVE CROCKER: Those meetings, we engaged in large and small topics. The specification for the fine grain communication had not yet been specified ’cause BBN was not yet working on this and they hadn’t published their interface specifications. So we looked at the bigger picture what kinds of things would you wanna do? We sketched out a number of interesting ideas and we did this just sitting around the table in these occasional meetings every six weeks or eight weeks, and then in the spring of 1969, so about six months before the date we’re talking about here, we said, “Well, we should start writing down some of these ideas after all we’re supposed to be academics and we’re supposed to be doing research, we should write something down.” So we dealt out assignments to each of us, “You write this, you write this, I’ll write this” and then I casually offered that I would organize the notes, which I didn’t think about it at the moment, but over the next couple of weeks, every time I sat down to write what should have been a trivial administrative clerical note, I found myself balking big time, I had trepidation and I realized what it was, it was that the act of writing things down might make it look like these were official important authorized and I was very fearful that some adult was gonna come from the East, I didn’t know whether it would be from Boston or from Washington, but “Who are you guys and who gave you authority to do any of this?”

JOHN MARKOFF: Let me quote from RFC 1, you wrote “very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.”

STEVE CROCKER: That’s right, that’s right. So late one evening when I was, I was determined I had to write something down I said, “Look, these things have no status, no authority, write anything you want, write as little as you have in mind, you can write questions without answers and so forth.” Bill had suggested the term “request for comments”, I hadn’t remembered that until recently but it stuck in my mind and I said, just as a matter of form, we will make every one of these notes called a request for comments. I figured it was a temporary hack last maybe six months until there was formal documentation of this network. And the other rule that I put down was that you had to write it before I give you a number ’cause I didn’t want a lot of holes in the sequence. And so that seemed to work pretty well except that it didn’t stop, it just kept going and going and going and when I was asked… We did an index of the first 100 and then I was asked to write something for the first 1000 I thought, oh this is a sorcerer’s apprentice kind of situation where you can’t turn it off.

Vint Cerf: They’re about 8800 RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Today.

STEVE CROCKER: Well, and they’re not the same because in the early days we had no other way of communicating. We sent these out by snail mail, by US postage, we had a mailing list and in fact, the mailing list was maintained as one of these RFCs and every time we added somebody to the mailing list, it was another RFCs, another RFC.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill remembered that you guys flipped the coin to see who would write one and two, is that, your memory?

STEVE CROCKER: I lost, I got RFC 1.

Bill Duvall: I remember it the other way, you won and got RFC 1.

ARPANET and how to make it flexible Enough to Accommodate the Future

JOHN MARKOFF: What was remarkable to me about RFC 1 is that it was about two experiments. Did you guys know much about the online system when you actually set that up?

STEVE CROCKER: We had visited this process from August ’68 to spring of ’69, we had now visited each of the laboratories. What was remarkable particularly in retrospect, was the SRI laboratory, Engelbart’s lab, had… They had invented the mouse and ordinary people didn’t see it for another 30 years or something like that, approximately and a graphics interface with hyperlinks and structured text and everything. So the future was sitting right there and better yet, it wasn’t just you could take a tour and see it in laboratory, that group was using it every day. That was part of their basic thing and so it just had to wait ’til it became commercially viable. But we were living, at least, thinking in a mode of, this is the way the world is gonna be and we were gonna lace it together with this ARPANET and then how could we make it flexible enough so that it can accommodate the future technologies that were coming along?

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask a little bit about the culture of those laboratories at the time that you guys were doing this work. You guys both started early, Steve and Vint, you started as high school students spending regular time on the UCLA campuses, is that right?

STEVE CROCKER: Oh yes.

JOHN MARKOFF: Breaking in even on occasion.

STEVE CROCKER: I was afraid you were going there.

VINT CERF: Wait a minute, Steve got permission from Mike Melkenoff who chairman of the department at the time to use a Bendix G-15 paper tape-based machine at UCLA and I think eventually we got to use the 7090, so we had permission. But one evening we showed up or maybe it was a weekend, we showed up and the door was locked. And so what happened then, Steve?

STEVE CROCKER: Statute of limitations has passed. Vint and I had been playing with some silly equations and decided we would try to explore them numerically, at least… It sounds better now than whatever I was able to say then. So this Bendix G-15 was in a building they called Engineering 1 which I believe is now gone but I did have permission to use it and we arranged to come over from Van Nuys High School in San Fernando Valley, it took a little less time to do than it would take today I think.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know the dean is in the audience.

STEVE CROCKER: Tell everybody. So we came over on a Saturday, and the building was locked, and I was crestfallen. Two of us are standing there staring at the door, and Vint notices that the second floor window is open and so one of these crank things. And I’m thinking, we’re not really going to… Next thing I know, he’s on my shoulders.

VINT CERF: I always have, that was the beginning.

STEVE CROCKER: He goes through the window, he comes around to the main door, pushes the bar open, and we taped the door so that we could get in and out easily during the day to go buy some food at lunchtime or whatever. Nobody else was around. The interior doors were all open in the offices. This was long before student demonstrations and all other kinds of things that have beset us. We worked all day and we cleaned up afterwards and we went home. That was spring of ’61. Eleven years later in ’72, I’m working for the Defense Department, I’ve got a top-secret clearance, and the Watergate burglars break in, and they taped the door. And one of their cohorts who’s in the hotel across the street is on lookout, but he doesn’t recognize the threat because the security guard who found it was in plain clothes, and the shiver that went down my spine was something.

JOHN MARKOFF: So… Go ahead, you can tell your side of the story.

VINT CERF: I was at the White House in 1999. Hillary Clinton was doing her Millennium Evenings, Honor the Past and Imagine the Future, and she told that story. So the question is, how the hell did she find out about that?

Was it a Hacker Culture?

JOHN MARKOFF: So Steven Levy has written a book called Hackers, you know that… The term “hacker” meant one thing before it meant something else, and when you guys were first computing in the ’60s, a hacker was someone who was really obsessed with computing. And there was a laboratory at MIT, the iLab, where this culture grew up. Would you call the culture you guys created, both at Menlo Park and LA, similar? Was it a hacker culture in that first sense of shared information?

VINT CERF: Well, it was MIT that adopted that term. You were there.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: I was there, but there was an interesting story. These guys again are guilty. There was some guy on campus that committed some terrible break-in to a computer system. Vint decided to hire him as a programmer. Smart guy, you fired him a few months later, right? Didn’t work out.

STEVE CROCKER: It was a question as to whether he could learn to do something other than breaking into systems, particularly if we said, “Look, it’s not interesting, we’ll give you the keys to everything and see if you can do something constructive,” and…

VINT CERF: So hack was a really cool piece of software. The hacker was somebody who produced really clever code, and that was an honorable title for many years.

JOHN MARKOFF: Bill, was the culture the same at Menlo Park?

BILL DUVALL: No, I wouldn’t say it was at all. The culture in Doug Engelbart’s group, the one that I was in, was basically almost self-contained, and people were very focused on this one vision that we were working on. And, although there was some connection to the outside and interchange, it was very little. The group, in and of itself, was a little bit odd, and for SRI, it was generally disliked, I guess I would say. It was certainly not understood. They did things like… We’d work at all hours and we’d have… Friday afternoons would be for wine and beer, and… This was very un-SRI-ish. And one of the things I remember is when I was interviewing to join the group, the last interview had to be with the head of the engineering department, and he asked a few questions, “Why do you wanna do this now?” I’m saying, “What they’re doing is the future, I want to be with that.” And after a while, he thought about it and he looked over his desk at me and he said, “Son, you don’t think what they’re doing up there is science, do you?”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: John, you know you’re talking about the culture for the period, and there is a very strong component that mattered and helped create what we have today, and it’s the way in which the funding took place. I think you’re familiar with the story, the way ARPA funded the various centers, the universities and… They would go to a great researcher there and say, “Here’s a pile of money. Go do something great. Shoot for the moon. Failure’s okay, go high, keep going, you have the money for a long time and we’re not going to watch you.” Now, what else could you ask for? It was an environment that just generated… It was a golden era. And when that came to a principal investigator, passed it off to these guys. Same idea. They complained we didn’t supervise them. I said, “Go do it. Eventually, if you want something, come back to us, but… ” And they ran with it. You can just hear the stories, the way they organized themselves and created this community across many universities, was a very important component that gave a lift to this whole project.

JOHN MARKOFF: Well, and how quickly did that end? And was it the Proxmire Amendment that ended that era of…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Not totally, but it hurt a lot. They said, basically, it has to have a military application, has to be competitive. You go to a guy, here’s the money, that’s not competitive, it’s not peer-to-peer, but it worked.

VINT CERF: Well, on the other hand, ARPA has some pretty smart people, and so they created this thing called a Broad Area Announcement which said, “This is the area in which we would like to explore. Would you like to submit proposals for that?” I think we managed to induce the right people to submit the right proposals, and the longevity of support from both NSF and ARPA is countable in decades, and so that’s still true today.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s true to… But your point about having really good people at the government deciding where the money should go, people like these two here. They were at ARPA. That level of capability looking out and finding the projects to support. That whole thing worked so well.

JOHN MARKOFF: I wanna ask about the design of the network, but before I go there, you were… A lot has been made of the first crash, and I wanna ask a different question about the first crash. When you type G, there was what is known today as a buffer overflow error. And the machine crashed, and you had to fix that problem, and you started over again. What struck me when I learned about for the first time, is that buffer overflow errors have continued to plague the design of computer systems ever since. And in fact, you might say they’re one of the real vulnerabilities in the design of modern computing. What I don’t understand is when Robert Tappan Morris for example, brought the internet to its knees in 1988, the then young internet, he used a buffer overflow there. Why didn’t the designers…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Because…

BILL DUVALL: I can answer that, it’s because they didn’t talk to me.

JOHN MARKOFF: Walk us through that.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s stupid mistakes.

BILL DUVALL: There are two answers to this. One of them is that the initial specification for the first connection was that all messages would be one character in length, and because of the way that the 940 and time-sharing system worked, when you typed a character on your terminal, it didn’t appear on your terminal, it went to the computer and the computer then sent back that character. That’s called full duplex. And the 940 had what they call command recognition. So as you were logging in, as soon as it realized what you wanted to say, it would tie it back, it would send back the rest of the command. So when you type an L, you got an L, and O, you got an O, and a G, you got G-I-N. Well, that’s three characters. And there was no memory available. Memory was very, very tight in the 940. And so when I was allocating buffers and things like that for output, I allocated one character because that’s what the spec said. And three came along and there was a buffer overflow. Now, that seems to absolve me, but the problem is I wrote the spec.

How Leonard Kleinrock Came to Put Together the Networking Group

JOHN MARKOFF: So, Len, tell us the story of how you came to put together the networking group that actually sort of did this on your end.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, I came to UCLA having this theory in my hands, waiting for it to have it implemented. Finally, as I said, ARPA said, “Let’s build a network. So I had to get this group together. As Charlie said, he was working with Gerry Estrin. Gerry Estrin had put together a group of great programmers doing a variety of things. When we got the contract, the whole group moved over to me to jump on this really exciting project. So that’s how this group entered the picture. And they continued to run with it beautifully.

29:13 JOHN MARKOFF: So what about the design ideas? Packet switching seems to be kind of a non-obvious idea. And what was the networking theoretical world like when you were starting this process and why did you would… What attracted you to packet switching?

29:28 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So there was no world. At the time, nobody was thinking about data networking in a serious way. And all my classmates at MIT were working on information theory and coding theory which Claude Shannon had solved fundamentally. And the problems that were left over were small and hard. And I was dragged in to do a PhD. I didn’t want to. My supervisor, “You gotta do it.” So I said, “I’m gonna do it.” I wanted to do something with impact, and I wanna get the best professor I know. So I spoke to Claude Shannon and you may not know his name, but he’s a great man. He took me on, and I looked around and I was surrounded by computers and I said, “One day, they’re gonna have to talk to each other.” And the telephone network was woefully inadequate.

30:13 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So I looked at this problem. Here’s a new problem. If it can be solved, it’ll have impact. And I had an approach. I knew how to basically extract the essence of the system which had to do with what we now call the sharing economy. It’s called Airbnb. If you got a room that’s not being used, if you got a communication channel that’s not being used, let somebody else use it who needs it right now. That whole idea of dynamic resource sharing was a principle that I put into the theory. The whole idea of the packet switching, I analyzed a case where you would chop messages into fixed link things called packets, and handle them one at a time. And that had some advantages.

30:53 LEONARD KLEINROCK: So that whole thing came together. I had done the analysis, did an optimization, and then stood around and extracted the principles as to why this thing works well. Most of the students these days don’t bother to do that. They get a result and they… And “Okay, I’m done,” instead of saying, “What is it teaching me?” And we extracted some principles like, dynamic resource sharing was key, like big systems are better, wanted to study a large network, millions of nodes, instead of tens of nodes. Because then you get emergent properties you don’t see in a small network. And looking at distributed algorithm, distributed control and recognizing nobody’s in control when you have a large network, but you can’t get one node to be in control ’cause it’s too much traffic, too vulnerable, too much traffic going in and out. So distribute it. Once you distribute the control, nobody’s in control. So will that work? So you had to prove it wouldn’t collapse. And you could chop pieces, it would still work. So those are the kinds of things we extracted. Came to UCLA with that, waiting to build it, the opportunity came along as I said, and bang…

32:01 JOHN MARKOFF: And it was a DARPA-funded opportunity. Is that what you’re talking about?

32:04 LEONARD KLEINROCK: DARPA-fund… ARPA funded.

32:05 JOHN MARKOFF: ARPA-funded opportunity. Right.

32:06 LEONARD KLEINROCK: Yes.

Survivability in the Event of a Nuclear War

JOHN MARKOFF: So let me jump up a level. And there’s for many years, been a debate over whether ARPA was funded or in some way back because of the design was about survivability in the event of a nuclear war. This is hotly controversial, is it wrong?

VINT CERF: Yes, it is.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It’s an urban myth, but there’s some truth to it.

JOHN MARKOFF: Okay, Lukasik apparently made that assertion.

VINT CERF: Look, in the video that you saw, you could tell that Taylor and Roberts were trying to figure out how to share computing resources among about a dozen universities that were studying artificial intelligence and computer science for ARPA in the 1960s. They couldn’t buy a new computer for every university, every year, so they said, “We’re gonna build a network and you’re gonna have to share.” So, the whole idea in papers that Roberts and Barry Weston wrote were about resource sharing. Even though some of the early ideas of packet switching came from Paul Baran in the study that he did a RAND Corporation, and that was about building survivable networks for post-nuclear responses and post-nuclear scenario, so we should not conflate those two things. The subsequent internet design, however, did go after this question of survivability in a post-nuclear environment, and we even tested that idea because we used the packet radio system and put radios in the strategic Air Command aircraft, artificially broke up the ARPANET into pieces and then glued it back together using the TCP/IP protocols in packet radio. So there is truth to some of this, but it wasn’t specific to ARPANET as much as it was to the subsequent…

LEONARD KLEINROCK: You know, once.

JOHN MARKOFF: Steve…

STEVE CROCKER: Let me… So this is to say is that sort of the persistent myth and the question is, to what extent there’s truth there, and it’s subtle because there’s various layers. As Vint said, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts were all focused on how do you build a system that would allow the computers to communicate, and people to communicate, share resources, and the degree of “survivability” had to do with just normal operation. Parts are going to break, lines are gonna go down and so forth. When you talk about survivability in a much more stringent sense, you’re in a different part of the design space, and it isn’t just all or nothing because the worst case, the one that attracts everybody’s attention is imagine nuclear holocaust, and nobody’s ever really focused hard on that problem. And I’ll come back to that in just a second, ’cause I spent some time with Lukasik over the past couple of years, having a discussion about that. But you also have, apropos of what Vint talked about, you have stressful situations, particularly in the military, that are more stressful than ordinary daily operation, but less stressful than the Holocaust kind of total catastrophe, and the kind of survivability and knitting the pieces back together again are important experiments there. But they still won’t take you all the way to what do you do if… In the worst case.

STEVE CROCKER: The other part of the story that I think is very important is this culture of initiative that you described, played out in multiple layers. So, you have the agency, ARPA, which later became known as DARPA, which was created after Sputnik, and inside you had a division into various offices and the office that was of concern to us was this Information Processing Techniques Office. And there was quite a bit of delegation down to the offices and to the program managers, and more importantly, even to the researchers themselves, the principal investigators, to invent the projects. And so, there was as much bottom-up kind of operation and choice of topics and so forth, as there was top-down. It was not a dictatorial thing, like we’re gonna build… This was sort of different from saying, “We’re gonna put a man on the moon,” and everything gets organized to that one objective. It was much, much broader. So, the problem that the director of the agency, there was a series of them, but Steve Lukasik was central for a long period of time, is how does he provide the support for all of these projects to go forward and justify that to the higher levels of authority in the Defense Department and Congress?

STEVE CROCKER: So, a conversation approximately like this took place. Lukasik says to Larry Roberts, “Well, could it solve the reconstitution problem?” And allegedly the answer was, “Well, I suppose.” [chuckle] And there’s no paperwork on this, except that years later, Lukasik wrote “Why I signed the cheques for the ARPANET,” and among, included in there is a little reference to nuclear survivability. But Roberts, I pressed him on that a couple of years ago, I interviewed him and he said, “Well, if I’d really been trying to solve that problem, we would have connected every IMP to four other IMPs.” So, and clearly down at the levels that we were working at, there was zero, absolutely zero attention to that. We were working on the problem that affects us all today. How do you get people to talk to each other? How do you get the computers to talk to each other? How do you accommodate the differences among all these systems and get them and so forth? And we were not at all focused on sort of the hardcore defense problem of the day.

JOHN MARKOFF: Weren’t there some… Go ahead.

VINT CERF: So, wait a minute. I’m sorry, I really feel compelled to jump in here, because there are two different things that we’re talking about. We’ve been talking about the ARPANET, that’s what this big celebration is about, on the first connection of the two hosts. But, I really must insist, Steve, that when Bob Kahn and I started to work on the internet design, it was driven by the idea that we would use these technologies for command and control. It was very driven by exactly a military requirement, and that’s why we ended up with satellites and mobile radio, as well as the original ARPANET. So, I wanna make sure that it is not misunderstood, that the motivations behind the original TCP/IP work was somehow only to do with civilian applications, because frankly it wasn’t.

STEVE CROCKER: Yeah. So, this is the area that takes some care in describing, because of course, and the project and the orientation that you’re working on is very important, but I was trying to say is that that kind of application, the command and control and reconstitution in the case that you lose various pieces, is qualitatively different from trying to imagine a post-nuclear exchange environment in which.

VINT CERF: I accept that although I will argue that we try to test at least some ideas that would be needed in order to contribute to that solution and that’s why we did the artificial break-up of the ARPANET.

How Distributed Architecture Won the Day

JOHN MARKOFF: I’m also very interested in how this distributer architecture won the day. When I showed up as a young reporter in the early 1980s, IBM was pushing this idea of a Token Ring and there were many centralized ideas around. Actually, before I get to that all the computing you guys have talked about IBM and AT&T generally don’t show up in that community that you were building. They were the dominant… Why was that?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It was a proprietary network, they were pushing it, you had an SNA network and IBM SNA network you bought IBM equipment and used their communication protocols.

JOHN MARKOFF: Wasn’t IBM and some of those large companies, weren’t they also skeptical about the idea of this project? They didn’t even bid on this, is that right?

VINT CERF: Right, we’re not skeptical about networking because IBM had SNA, Digital had DECnet, HP had DS, they wanted to network their computers but they wanted only their brands of computers to be interconnected and the defense department didn’t wanna end up trapped in one particular brand of computer for purposes of networking which is why the heterogeneous interconnection of different brands of computers which is demonstrated on the ARPANET and then subsequently expanded to allow multiple packet-switched networks should be interconnected was important to the Defense Department.

STEVE CROCKER: There are multiple times here, if you look at 1972, for example, when the public unveiling of the ARPANET a bunch of… Few good people from AT&T came and looked at it and turned up their nose and walked away. You talked about later in the late 1970s, then IBM and AT&T and others are all pushing networking of their particular flavor and then it took a while for it to settle down.

CHARLEY KLINE: If you go back to ’68 when the IMP project was being… The RFP for the IMP was… AT&T and IBM both refused to bid, they both said, “This is a waste of time, it won’t work.”

LEONARD KLEINROCK: AT&T finally launched in 1983, their great network called Net 1000, three years later they closed it down with a billion dollar loss ’cause they couldn’t do it. The technology is not trivial and they [42:13] ____ never got it going.

First Demonstrations of Email

VINT CERF: Well, I think if first demonstrations of email which came in mid to late 1971 when Ray Tomlinson demonstrated that, very quickly after that.

JOHN MARKOFF: So email was not on the ARPANET in the first two years?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: That’s right, yeah.

VINT CERF: It was a development that it was foreshadowed by use of time-sharing systems for email among the participants on the time-sharing system. Tomlinson at Bolt, Beranek and Newman figured out that he could use file transfers to move messages from one machine to another, he only had to say which machine it was going to and for whom. So he used the only character on the keyboard that wasn’t already used with other operating systems, the ‘@’ sign that’s why he had user@host as the basic form for email. So as soon as email popped up and we all got excited about it, we started seeing mailing list and that’s when I realized that there was a real social element to this. The first mailing list I remember was called Sci-Fi Lovers because we used to argue who were the best science fiction writers and the next one I remember from Stanford was called Yum Yum and it was a restaurant review for the Palo Alto area. It was very clear that this technology had a social component.

JOHN MARKOFF: Do you remember HumanNets?

VINT CERF: Yes I do.

JOHN MARKOFF: Because that was what drew me to the early ARPANET because there you had technologists talking about the impact of technology which was a really interesting window into that role.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: There’s another story, I visit my graduate students, mostly theoretical guys not the software developers, and I walked into their lab one day and instead of doing researches that I wanted them to, they were busy on the machines, intensely, on news groups, restaurants, hiking, astronomy. “What are you doing? Oh my God, this is hot.”And it really caught on.

JOHN MARKOFF: It was social media. Bill.

BILL DUVALL: Just on that, one of the things that, just speaking of email, another kind of social impact was there was a project that was being done joint between Xerox and PARC and a part of Xerox in El Segundo that was being coordinated by email. This was pretty early, this was in the ’70s, mid-’70s. And the thing that became very obvious was that using email to coordinate a project shifted the power. The people that now had the power, not the people that presented well, that could talk well that were big, but they were the people that could write well, and it was just an interesting… Subtle but very interesting shift that was a direct result of basically, this distributed… The networking.

Why Did the Network Name Change from ARPANET to Internet

JOHN MARKOFF: So, here’s another question. How and why did the network name change from ARPANET to internet? And if they could change the name internet now, what would you call it? That’s a perfect name, it seems to me.

VINT CERF: Well, originally, we called it, the paper that Bob Kahn and I wrote said “A Protocol For Packet Network Intercommunication.” And it took too long to say that. And so, within a year or so, we used the term “internet” to refer to the multiple network thing. I don’t know what I’d call it now, probably a… No, there are some bad words that occur to me. [chuckle]

Moment Understood it was Going to Impact the World

JOHN MARKOFF: One last word. Steve, was there a moment where you understood it was gonna have the impact on the world that it did?

STEVE CROCKER: It was pretty evident, almost instantly to me, that if you had a computer, you would want it connected to the other computers. Now in those days, computers were big. That was a tiny computer by comparison. So, universities, and businesses, and governments had computers, personal computers didn’t exist yet. But it was evident to me that basically, that every computer if you owned it, you would wanna be connected to the network. And so, it was just a question of how long it would take for that to happen. And I thought that was real important from a utility point of view, from a practicality point of view. My head was focused on different kinds of research, much more abstract kinds of things, and so I used to sneer that this networking stuff was only socially useful, it didn’t have any real depth.

Entertainment

A Brief History of the Internet

R emember those educational videos about photosynthesis or the American Revolution that your teachers used to show you in middle school? The videos would explain battle maneuvers through a series of dots and arrows, and for the rest of your life you’d think of the United States’ war for independence as basically a very elaborate football play.

Well, graphic designer Melih Bilgil’s video about the invention of the Internet feels a little bit like that, albeit sleeker and streamlined — the animated equivalent of an Ikea store. ( See the 50 best websites of 2008. )

The video follows the Internet’s creation from 1957 (the first year programmers were able to work remotely with supercomputers) to Feb. 28, 1990 (the day various computer networks were connected and the Internet was born), and all of the acronym-heavy, military and university projects in between.

Bilgil tells Internet’s story with basic black shapes, which he calls “ PICOL ” icons. He hopes the icons will one day become universal symbols that people of all languages can understand. “If you see the same signs often, you automatically learn them and can read them like letters without thinking,” he explains. Bilgil wanted to make an instructional video to show off his new symbols, and he chose the Internet as his topic.

There’s only one problem: the Internet is kind of boring. The video is eight and a half minutes long, and no matter how hard Bilgil tries, it’s tough to make phrases like “accelerated knowledge transfer” and “interface message processor” visually interesting. The part about the Cuban Missile Crisis (illustrated with missile-shaped dots and arrows) is pretty cool because, well, it involves missiles. Apparently, the U.S. military developed a decentralized computer network so there wouldn’t be a main hub for Russians to take down with a bomb. I never knew that before; now I can thank communism for creating the Internet.

The video stops at the year 1990, right when things on the Internet started to get interesting. What about chatrooms? Instant messaging? Whatever happened to America Online’s “You’ve got mail!” guy? And most importantly, when did the Internet evolve from something used largely by universities and the military into a portal for porn? Bilgil fails to include an animated diagram of that.

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A Concise History of the Internet—I

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Published: 25 November 2022
Volume 27 , pages 1841–1856, ( 2022 )

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In this two-part article, I trace the history of the Internet. The Internet started in 1969 as an experiment by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense to use packet switching on leased telephone lines to connect four mainframe computers. Email was invented in 1971 and it became a “killer application” as it promoted easy interaction among its users. By 1972, fifty computers were connected using leased telephone lines to form what was known as the ARPANET which was successfully demonstrated at an international conference — ICCC 72. ARPANET was followed by Packet Radio Network (PRNET), which connected mobile computers, and Satellite Network (SATNET), which connected computers in Europe with those in the US. A protocol named Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was invented in 1973 to interconnect ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET. The success of the TCP/IP protocol in connecting disparate networks paved the way for the development of the Internet.

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I thank Prof. P.C.P. Bhatt, Dr. N. Dayasindhu, and Dr. S. Ramani for reviewing this article and their critical comments which improved it.

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V. Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.

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A Brief History of the Internet

Sharing resources.

The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network that ultimately evolved into what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was a great success but membership was limited to certain academic and research organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the Internet. All networks could now be connected by a universal language.

The image above is a scale model of the UNIVAC I (the name stood for Universal Automatic Computer) which was delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. It weighed some 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second. It was the first American commercial computer, as well as the first computer designed for business use. (Business computers like the UNIVAC processed data more slowly than the IAS-type machines, but were designed for fast input and output.) The first few sales were to government agencies, the A.C. Nielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. The first UNIVAC for business applications was installed at the General Electric Appliance Division, to do payroll, in 1954. By 1957 Remington-Rand (which had purchased the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950) had sold forty-six machines.

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The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.

The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days—which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent—it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. The Internet underwent immense growth; it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users.

The emergence of web 2.0 in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools.

The Internet was no longer concerned with information exchange alone: it was a sophisticated multidisciplinary tool enabling individuals to create content, communicate with one another, and even escape reality. Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.

The rise of the Internet has sparked a debate about how online communication affects social relationships. The Internet frees us from geographic fetters and brings us together in topic-based communities that are not tied down to any specific place. Ours is a networked, globalized society connected by new technologies. The Internet is the tool we use to interact with one another, and accordingly poses new challenges to privacy and security.

Information technologies have wrought fundamental change throughout society, driving it forward from the industrial age to the networked era. In our world, global information networks are vital infrastructure—but in what ways has this changed human relations? The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones—it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.

The changes in social communication are of particular significance. Although analogue tools still have their place in some sectors, new technologies are continuing to gain ground every day, transforming our communication practices and possibilities—particularly among younger people. The Internet has removed all communication barriers. Online, the conventional constraints of space and time disappear and there is a dizzyingly wide range of communicative possibilities. The impact of social media applications has triggered discussion of the “new communication democracy.”

The development of the Internet today is being shaped predominantly by instant, mobile communications. The mobile Internet is a fresh revolution. Comprehensive Internet connectivity via smartphones and tablets is leading to an increasingly mobile reality: we are not tied to any single specific device, and everything is in the cloud.

People no longer spend hours gazing at a computer screen after work or class; instead, they use their mobile devices to stay online everywhere, all the time.

Anyone failing to keep abreast of this radical change is losing out on an opportunity.

Communication Opportunities Created by the Internet

The Internet has become embedded in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, changing the way we interact with others. This insight struck me when I started out in the world of social media. I created my first social network in 2005, when I was finishing college in the United States—it had a political theme. I could already see that social media were on the verge of changing our way of communicating, helping us to share information by opening up a new channel that cuts across conventional ones.

That first attempt did not work out, but I learned from the experience.I get the feeling that in many countries failure is punished too harshly—but the fact is, the only surefire way of avoiding failure is to do nothing at all. I firmly believe that mistakes help you improve; getting it wrong teaches you how to get it right. Creativity, hard work, and a positive attitude will let you achieve any goal.

In 2006, after I moved to Spain, I created Tuenti. Tuenti (which, contrary to widespread belief, has nothing to do with the number 20; it is short for “tu entidad,” the Spanish for “your entity”) is a social communication platform for genuine friends. From the outset, the idea was to keep it simple, relevant, and private. That’s the key to its success.

I think the real value of social media is that you can stay in touch from moment to moment with the people who really matter to you. Social media let you share experiences and information; they get people and ideas in touch instantly, without frontiers. Camaraderie, friendship, and solidarity—social phenomena that have been around for as long as humanity itself—have been freed from the conventional restrictions of space and time and can now thrive in a rich variety of ways.

Out of all the plethora of communication opportunities that the Internet has opened up, I would highlight the emergence of social media and the way they have intricately melded into our daily lives. Social media have changed our personal space, altering the way we interact with our loved ones, our friends, and our sexual partners; they have forced us to rethink even basic daily processes like studying and shopping; they have affected the economy by nurturing the business startup culture and electronic commerce; they have even given us new ways to form broad-based political movements.

The Internet and Education

The Internet has clearly impacted all levels of education by providing unbounded possibilities for learning. I believe the future of education is a networked future. People can use the Internet to create and share knowledge and develop new ways of teaching and learning that captivate and stimulate students’ imagination at any time, anywhere, using any device. By connecting and empowering students and educators, we can speed up economic growth and enhance the well-being of society throughout the world. We should work together, over a network, to build the global learning society.

The network of networks is an inexhaustible source of information. What’s more, the Internet has enabled users to move away from their former passive role as mere recipients of messages conveyed by conventional media to an active role, choosing what information to receive, how, and when. The information recipient even decides whether or not they want to stay informed.

We have moved on from scattergun mass communication to a pattern where the user proactively selects the information they need.

Students can work interactively with one another, unrestricted by physical or time constraints. Today, you can use the Internet to access libraries, encyclopedias, art galleries, news archives, and other information sources from anywhere in the world: I believe this is a key advantage in the education field. The web is a formidable resource for enhancing the process of building knowledge.

I also believe the Internet is a wonderful tool for learning and practicing other languages—this continues to be a critical issue in many countries, including Spain, and, in a globalized world, calls for special efforts to improve.

The Internet, in addition to its communicative purposes, has become a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and education; it is not just an information source, or a locus where results can be published, it is also a channel for cooperating with other people and groups who are working on related research topics.

The Internet and Privacy and Security

Another key issue surrounding Internet use is privacy. Internet users are becoming more sensitive to the insight that privacy is a must-have in our lives.

Privacy has risen near the top of the agenda in step with an increasing awareness of the implications of using social media. Much of the time, people started to use social media with no real idea of the dangers, and have wised up only through trial and error—sheer accident, snafus, and mistakes. Lately, inappropriate use of social media seems to hit the headlines every day. Celebrities posting inappropriate comments to their profiles, private pictures and tapes leaked to the Internet at large, companies displaying arrogance toward users, and even criminal activities involving private-data trafficking or social media exploitation.

All this shows that—contrary to what many people seem to have assumed—online security and privacy are critical, and, I believe, will become even more important going forward. And, although every user needs privacy, the issue is particularly sensitive for minors—despite attempts to raise their awareness, children still behave recklessly online.

I have always been highly concerned about privacy. On Tuenti, the default privacy setting on every user account is the highest available level of data protection. Only people the user has accepted as a “friend” can access their personal details, see their telephone number, or download their pictures. This means that, by default, user information is not accessible to third parties. In addition, users are supported by procedures for reporting abuse. Any user can report a profile or photograph that is abusive, inappropriate, or violates the terms of use: action is taken immediately. Security and privacy queries are resolved within 24 hours.

We need to be aware that different Internet platforms provide widely different privacy experiences. Some of them are entirely open and public; no steps whatsoever are taken to protect personal information, and all profiles are indexable by Internet search engines.

On the other hand, I think the debate about whether social media use should be subject to an age requirement is somewhat pointless, given that most globally active platforms operate without age restrictions. The European regulatory framework is quite different from the United States and Asian codes. Companies based in Europe are bound by rigorous policies on privacy and underage use of social media. This can become a competitive drawback when the ground rules do not apply equally to all players—our American and Japanese competitors, for instance, are not required to place any kind of age constraint on access.

Outside the scope of what the industry or regulators can do, it is vital that users themselves look after the privacy of their data. I believe the information is the user’s property, so the user is the only party entitled to control the collection, use, and disclosure of any information about him or herself. Some social networks seem to have forgotten this fact—they sell data, make it impossible to delete an account, or make it complex and difficult to manage one’s privacy settings. Everything should be a lot simpler and more transparent.

Social networks should continue to devote intense efforts to developing self-regulation mechanisms and guidelines for this new environment of online coexistence to ensure that user information is safe: the Internet should be a space for freedom, but also for trust. The main way of ensuring that social media are used appropriately is awareness. But awareness and user education will be of little use unless it becomes an absolute requirement that the privacy of the individual is treated as a universal value.

The Internet and Culture

As in the sphere of education, the development of information and communication technologies and the wide-ranging effects of globalization are changing what we are, and the meaning of cultural identity. Ours is a complex world in which cultural flows across borders are always on the rise. The concepts of space, time, and distance are losing their conventional meanings. Cultural globalization is here, and a global movement of cultural processes and initiatives is underway.

Again, in the cultural arena, vast fields of opportunity open up thanks to online tools. The possibilities are multiplied for disseminating a proposal, an item of knowledge, or a work of art. Against those doomsayers who warn that the Internet is harming culture, I am radically optimistic. The Internet is bringing culture closer to more people, making it more easily and quickly accessible; it is also nurturing the rise of new forms of expression for art and the spread of knowledge. Some would say, in fact, that the Internet is not just a technology, but a cultural artifact in its own right.

In addition to its impact on culture itself, the Internet is enormously beneficial for innovation, which brings progress in all fields of endeavor—the creation of new goods, services, and ideas, the advance of knowledge and society, and increasing well-being.

The Internet and Personal Relationships

The Internet has also changed the way we interact with our family, friends, and life partners. Now everyone is connected to everyone else in a simpler, more accessible, and more immediate way; we can conduct part of our personal relationships using our laptops, smart phones, and tablets.

The benefits of always-online immediate availability are highly significant. I would find a long-distance relationship with my life partner or my family unthinkable without the communication tools that the network of networks provides me with. I’m living in Madrid, but I can stay close to my brother in California. For me, that is the key plus of the Internet: keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me.

As we have seen, the Internet revolution is not just technological; it also operates at a personal level, and throughout the structure of society. The Internet makes it possible for an unlimited number of people to communicate with one another freely and easily, in an unrestricted way.

Just a century ago, this was unimaginable. An increasing number of couples come together, stay together, or break up with the aid—or even as a consequence—of social communication tools. There are even apps and social networks out there that are purposely designed to help people get together for sex.

Of course, when compared to face-to-face communication, online communication is severely limited in the sense impressions it can convey (an estimated 60 to 70 percent of human communication takes place nonverbally), which can lead to misunderstandings and embarrassing situations—no doubt quite a few relationships have floundered as a result. I think the key is to be genuine, honest, and real at all times, using all the social media tools and their many advantages. Let’s just remember that a liar and a cheat online is a liar and a cheat offline too.

The Internet and Social and Political Activism

Even before the emergence of social media, pioneering experiments took place in the political sphere—like Essembly , a project I was involved in. We started to create a politically themed platform to encourage debate and provide a home for social and political causes; but the social networks that have later nurtured activism in a new way were not as yet in existence.

Research has shown that young people who voice their political opinions on the Internet are more inclined to take part in public affairs. The better informed a citizen is, the more likely they will step into the polling booth, and the better they will express their political liberties. The Internet has proved to be a decisive communication tool in the latest election campaigns. It is thanks to the Internet that causes in the social, welfare, ideological, and political arenas have been spoken up for and have won the support of other citizens sharing those values—in many cases, with a real impact on government decision making.

The Internet and Consumer Trends

New technologies increase the speed of information transfer, and this opens up the possibility of “bespoke” shopping. The Internet offers an immense wealth of possibilities for buying content, news, and leisure products, and all sorts of advantages arise from e-commerce, which has become a major distribution channel for goods and services. You can book airline tickets, get a T-shirt from Australia, or buy food at an online grocery store. New applications support secure business transactions and create new commercial opportunities.

In this setting, it is the consumer who gains the upper hand, and the conventional rules and methods of distribution and marketing break down. Consumers’ access to information multiplies, and their reviews of their experience with various products and services take center stage. Access to product comparisons and rankings, user reviews and comments, and recommendations from bloggers with large followings have shaped a new scenario for consumer behavior, retail trade, and the economy in general.

The Internet and the Economy

The Internet is one of the key factors driving today’s economy. No one can afford to be left behind. Even in a tough macroeconomic framework, the Internet can foster growth, coupled with enhanced productivity and competitiveness.

The Internet provides opportunities for strengthening the economy: How should we tackle them? While Europe—and Spain specifically—are making efforts to make the best possible use of the Internet, there are areas in which their approach needs to improve. Europe faces a major challenge, and risks serious failure if it lets the United States run ahead on its own. The European Commission, in its “Startup Manifesto,” suggests that the Old World be more entrepreneur-friendly—the proposal is backed by companies like Spotify and Tuenti. Europe lacks some of the necessary know-how. We need to improve in financial services and in data privacy, moving past the obsolete regulatory framework we now have and making a bid to achieve a well-connected continent with a single market for 4G mobile connections. We need to make it easier to hire talent outside each given country.

The use of e-commerce should be encouraged among small and medium-sized enterprises so that growth opportunities can be exploited more intensely. Following the global trend of the Internet, companies should internalize their online business. And much more emphasis should be placed on new technologies training in the academic and business spheres.

Modern life is global, and Spain is competing against every other country in the world. I do not believe in defeatism or victim culture. Optimism should not translate into callousness, but I sincerely believe that if you think creatively, if you find a different angle, if you innovate with a positive attitude and without fear of failure, then you can change things for the better. Spain needs to seize the moment to reinvent itself, grasping the opportunities offered up by the online world. We need to act, take decisions, avoid “paralysis through analysis.” I sometimes feel we are too inclined to navel-gazing: Spain shuts itself off, fascinated with its own contradictions and local issues, and loses its sense of perspective. Spain should open up to the outside, use the crisis as an opportunity to do things differently, in a new way—creating value, underlining its strengths, aspiring to be something more.

In the United States, for instance, diving headfirst into a personal Internet-related startup is regarded as perfectly normal. I’m glad to see that this entrepreneurial spirit is beginning to take hold here as well. I believe in working hard, showing perseverance, keeping your goals in view, surrounding yourself with talent, and taking risks. No risk, no success. We live in an increasingly globalized world: of course you can have a Spain-based Internet startup, there are no frontiers.

We need to take risks and keep one step ahead of the future. It is precisely the most disruptive innovations that require radical changes in approach and product, which might not even find a market yet ready for them—these are the areas providing real opportunities to continue being relevant, to move forward and “earn” the future, creating value and maintaining leadership. It is the disruptive changes that enable a business, product, or service to revolutionize the market—and, particularly in the technology sector, such changes are a necessity.

The Future of Social Communications, Innovation, Mobile Technologies, and Total Connectivity in Our Lives

The future of social communications will be shaped by an always-online culture. Always online is already here and will set the trend going forward. Total connectivity, the Internet you can take with you wherever you go, is growing unstoppably. There is no turning back for global digitalization.

Innovation is the driving force of growth and progress, so we need to shake up entrenched processes, products, services, and industries, so that all of us together—including established businesses, reacting to their emerging competitors—can move forward together.

Innovation is shaping and will continue to shape the future of social communications. It is already a reality that Internet connections are increasingly mobile. A survey we conducted in early 2013 in partnership with Ipsos found that 94 percent of Tuenti users aged 16 to 35 owned cell phones, 84 percent of users connected to the Internet using their phones, and 47 percent had mobile data subscriptions for connecting to the Internet. A total of 74 percent of users reported connecting to the Internet from their phone on a daily basis, while 84 percent did so at least weekly. Only 13 percent did not use their phones to connect to the Internet, and that percentage is decreasing every day.

Mobile Internet use alters the pattern of device usage; the hitherto familiar ways of accessing the Internet are changing too. The smartphone activities taking up the most time (over three hours a day) include instant messaging (38%), social media use (35%), listening to music (24%), and web browsing (20%). The activities taking up the least time (under five minutes a day) are: SMS texting (51%), watching movies (43%), reading and writing e-mail (38%), and talking on the phone (32%). Things are still changing.

Smartphones are gaining ground in everyday life. Many of the purposes formerly served by other items now involve using our smartphones. Some 75 percent of young people reported having replaced their MP3 player with their phone, 74 percent use their phone as an alarm clock, 70 percent use it as their camera, and 67 percent use it as their watch.

We have been observing these shifts for a while, which is why we decided to reinvent ourselves by placing smartphones at the heart of our strategy. I want to use this example as a showcase of what is happening in the world of social communication and the Internet in general: mobile connectivity is bringing about a new revolution. Tuenti is no longer just a social network, and social media as a whole are becoming more than just websites. The new Tuenti provides native mobile apps for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone, as well as the Firefox OS app and the mobile version of the website, m.tuenti.com. Tuenti is now a cross-platform service that lets users connect with their friends and contacts from wherever they may be, using their device of choice. A user with a laptop can IM in real time with a user with a smartphone, and switch from one device to another without losing the thread of the conversation. The conversations are in the cloud, so data and contacts are preserved independently of the devices being used. This means the experience has to be made uniform across platforms, which sometimes involves paring down functionalities, given the processing and screen size limitations of mobile devices. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on are all evolving to become increasingly cross-platform experiences. But Tuenti is the first social network that has also developed its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—the company is an Internet service provider over the mobile network. Tuenti is an MVNO with a social media angle, and this may be the future path of telecommunications.

Social media are evolving to become something more, and innovation must be their hallmark if they are to continue being relevant. Tuenti now embraces both social communications and telecom services provision, offering value added by letting you use the mobile app free of charge and without using up your data traffic allowance, even if you have no credit on your prepaid card—this is wholly revolutionary in the telecom sector. The convergence of social media with more traditional sectors is already bringing about a new context for innovation, a new arena for the development and growth of the Internet.

Just about everything in the world of the Internet still lies ahead of us, and mobile communications as we know them must be reinvented by making them more digital. The future will be shaped by innovation converging with the impact of mobility. This applies not just to social media but to the Internet in general, particularly in the social communications field. I feel that many people do not understand what we are doing and have no idea of the potential development of companies like ours at the global level. Right now, there may be somebody out there, in some corner of the world, developing the tool that will turn the Internet upside down all over again. The tool that will alter our day-to-day life once more. Creating more opportunities, providing new benefits to individuals, bringing more individual and collective well-being. Just ten years ago, social media did not exist; in the next ten years, something else radically new will emerge. There are many areas in which products, processes, and services can be improved or created afresh. The future is brimming with opportunities, and the future of the Internet has only just begun.

Related publications

The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective
Implications of the Revolution in Work and Family
Vision 2020+: A Future to Be Built

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History Of Internet Short Essay

The Internet has a long and complex history. Its origins can be traced back to the early days of computer networking in the 1950s. In the decades since then, the Internet has undergone numerous changes and developments, transforming from a simple network of computers into the global phenomenon we know today.

The Internet first came into existence in the late 1960s, with the development of a computer network called ARPANET. This network was designed to allow government agencies and universities to share information and resources. ARPANET quickly grew beyond its original purpose, and by the early 1970s it had become a major research tool for scientists all over the world.

In the 1980s, a new generation of computer networks emerged, based on the TCP/IP protocol. These networks, which included the Internet, allowed for greater communication and collaboration between users. The Internet soon became a popular tool for business and commerce, and by the 1990s it had become a staple of everyday life.

Today, the Internet is used by billions of people all over the world. It has become a vital part of our economy and our society, and shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to its origins in ARPANET, the Internet is one of the most resilient and adaptable technologies ever created. Its future is bright, and we can expect to see even more amazing things from it in the years to come.

Within our culture, there has been a revolution that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution. The Technological Revolution is credited with launching this change. The Internet is at the forefront of this transformation. This information haven has all types of thrills, surprises, and even love for some people. Today, everyone in society knows what the Internet is and where it came from, yet for others it’s still unclear What is the Internet and how did it develop? A strange strategic problem arose thirty years ago for RAND Corp., America’s leading Cold War think-tank.

The solution they came up with was a ‘network of networks’, a concept that would eventually be known as the Internet. Although the Internet was originally designed for military purposes, it soon became apparent that this new technology had much wider applications.

In the early 1980s, US universities began to connect to the Internet, followed by research laboratories and government departments. By the end of the decade, there were over 100,000 computers connected to the Internet worldwide. The Internet had become a truly global phenomenon.

The Internet has come a long way since those early days. It is now possible to use the Internet for everything from booking airline tickets to listening to music and watching movies. The Internet has become an essential part of our lives, and it is hard to imagine a world without it.

The infrastructure required in a post-nuclear America would need to include a command-and-control network that was connected from city to city, state to state, and base to base. Regardless of how well that network is armored or protected, its switches and wiring will always be vulnerable to the effects of atomic bombs.

A nuclear assault would destroy any network imaginable. Also, how would the network be managed and directed? An aggressor’s missile would target any centre of authority, whether it is a central authority or a network headquarters. RAND considered this macabre conundrum in great military secrecy and devised an innovative answer.

They would create a distributed network, one that had no central authority and no single point of failure. This would be the world’s first information network—an idea that would later come to be known as the Internet. RAND’s engineers designed a distributed network based on a new technology called packet-switching.

In packet-switching, messages were chopped into small pieces, or packets, and sent through the network independently. This allowed messages to take any number of possible routes from sender to receiver, circumventing any damage that might be done to individual sections of the network.

The first test of RAND’s design was in 1957, when a team of graduate students at UCLA sent a message from one computer to another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The message read simply: “Lo.” It was the first ever Internet communication.

In the 1960s, packet-switching technology was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense for use in its own communications network, which came to be known as ARPANET. ARPANET’s original purpose was to link together military computers and share information between them. But as more and more universities and research laboratories were connected to ARPANET, it became clear that this new network had much wider implications. It was becoming a place where people could communicate and collaborate in ways never before possible.

In 1974, two computer scientists at Stanford University, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, laid the foundations for what would become the Internet’s governing protocol—the set of rules that allow different computer networks to talk to each other. Cerf and Kahn’s protocol, called TCP/IP, is still in use today.

In the 1980s, the Internet began to spread beyond the borders of the United States. Companies and individuals in other countries saw the potential of this new technology and started to build their own networks that connected to the Internet.

The 1990s saw a massive expansion of the Internet, as more and more people got online and new websites and services were created. The Internet was becoming a part of everyday life, used for everything from shopping to banking to staying in touch with friends and family.

The 21st century has seen even more dramatic changes, as the Internet has moved beyond the realm of computers and into the world of mobile devices. Nowadays, we access the Internet not just through our desktop or laptop computers, but also through our smartphones and tablets. And with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we’re using the Internet to share photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family all over the world.

The Internet has come a long way since its humble beginnings in post-nuclear America. It’s been used for everything from military communication to online shopping to staying in touch with friends and family. And it’s only going to keep growing and evolving in the years to come. So whatever your favorite Internet activity is, there’s no doubt that it will be even better in the future. Thanks for being part of the Internet’s History!

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

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For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

In This Issue

Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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The Evolution of the Internet: From Early Networks to Today‘s Global Phenomenon

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How Did We Get Here? The Late 1970s, Early 1980s, and Usenet

GeoCities: Yahoo! Pioneers

Key Takeaways

The internet: History, evolution and how it works

What is the internet?

How do websites work?

Additional resources

When was the internet invented?

How the onternet works

Internet speed and bandwidth

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A short history of the internet

The origins of the internet

Who invented the internet?

• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)

• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)

• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)

• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)

• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)

• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)

• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)

• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)

The first use of a computer network

The life and death of the ARPANET

What is packet switching?

What is TCP/IP?

What is DNS?

The beginnings of email

Early home computers

More information about collection object

How is the World Wide Web different from the internet?

The introduction of web browsers

Early ecommerce and the ‘dotcom bubble’

Further reading

More objects and stories

The first digital photos, from Victorian technology to the internet

Yorkshire Games Festival

Internet50 Highlights

President Eisenhower Created the Advanced Research Project Agency

Why Did You Pick October 29th, 1969?

When the Idea of a Network – We’ll Be One of their First Nodes

Request for Comment and the Basic Plan for the ARPANET

ARPANET and how to make it flexible Enough to Accommodate the Future

Was it a Hacker Culture?

How Leonard Kleinrock Came to Put Together the Networking Group

Survivability in the Event of a Nuclear War

How Distributed Architecture Won the Day

First Demonstrations of Email

Why Did the Network Name Change from ARPANET to Internet

Moment Understood it was Going to Impact the World

A Brief History of the Internet

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A Concise History of the Internet—I

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