How the Internet Was Born

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Being online has become an indispensable part of modern life. We rely on the internet for smart driving, for listening to the shows we like today, and for enjoying great programs on our phones and tablets. Today let's talk casually about how the internet was born: how it went from a military project to finding its way into millions of homes, and how it has shaped modern society.

Our story has to begin with World War II. After the victory over the Axis powers, once the common enemy was gone, the Allies quickly split apart. The United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time, became each other's number one imagined enemy. Under the shadow of hostile war, human creativity can be stirred. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union fiercely competed in military, technological, and other fields. This competition was full of danger, but it also drove many major technological breakthroughs. The most striking of them all is the birth of the internet.

When the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite in 1957, ahead of the United States, America got a bit panicked. After all, it meant the other side had the ability to project power into space. A satellite might be little more than a lump of metal, but what if the other side put nuclear weapons on it? America had fallen behind in this area, and that just wouldn't do!

So the United States reacted quickly. In 1958 it established the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA for short. It had one purpose: to develop high-tech military technology across the board and catch up with the Soviet Union!

At the time, the United States had already built the world's first supercomputer, and it quickly took on the main computing tasks for ARPA. Later, new supercomputers were built and brought in, but each machine could only carry out its own tasks, and data between projects was isolated and could not be shared. Meanwhile, the military also had a new need for a distributed network: a way to keep data and communication alive even after a nuclear strike! If one command center was attacked, its data had to be backed up in advance to other command centers, unaffected, and each command center had to keep communicating normally. Yes, like a spider's web, every key node had to stay 100 percent online.

In 1962, communications expert Joseph Licklider was invited to ARPA and became the first director of its Information Processing Techniques Office. His main job during his tenure was to find a way to connect all these computers, and to build a team of talent. Finding a solution to this distributed network requirement was not easy.

It wasn't until 1969, which was actually after humanity had landed on the Moon, that experts and professors at universities finally found a reliable method for computer communication. After all, computers can't talk to each other on the phone the way people can, and there was no unified operating system at the time. And back then, very few people understood computer programming languages. They were basically only military and research institution talent. On top of that, wiring the computers together to communicate was a big problem.

On October 29, 1969, a thrilling day in the history of the internet, at 10:30 p.m., the first ARPANET connection experiment began. One end was at UCLA, and the other end was 500 kilometers away at the Stanford Research Institute. The test task was to transmit a single word from the computer in Los Angeles to the computer at Stanford: "login," which means to log in.

We typed L. Did it arrive? Yes, it arrived! The Stanford staff could not hold back their excitement.

We typed O. Did it arrive? It came through! The staff's hands were trembling with excitement.

Then we typed G, and suddenly the transmission system crashed, and the transfer was interrupted.

Although humanity's very first internet connection transmitted only two letters, L and O, the door to a new era had already opened.

The very first ARPANET in 1969 had only four nodes, located at four universities: UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. In other words, it connected the computers of four universities. After that, the nodes expanded rapidly. In 1971 there were 15 nodes, and by 1981 the number had grown to 213.

But a new problem appeared again. Although each university had its own computers, they weren't all the same model. At the time, the concept of a general-purpose computer didn't exist yet. Each computer was usually designed for one specific purpose, such as data storage or ballistics calculations.

It's a bit like thinking of our apps today as individual computers, where each computer can only handle one kind of task. So communication between computers of different kinds became a big problem. If you imagine computers as skyscrapers in a virtual world, then the roads between those buildings were basically dirt tracks in the countryside, with no navigation. You went wherever you went and hoped you'd get there. You never knew whether a given road was even open. It goes without saying that the amount of data that could be transmitted was very small.

And as new computers kept joining, this original NCP communication protocol simply wasn't up to the job. It's like a primitive village where everyone knows each other and can communicate without obstacles. Then one day a flood of newcomers arrives, speaking different languages and following different customs. Communication between people becomes difficult. To let everyone communicate together, you need to invent a common language, a communication protocol, to standardize things.

In 1974, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf proposed the idea of the TCP/IP protocol, which is how we go online today, and it marked the beginning of the era of unification for the internet. Back when your home first got internet access, people talked about "dial-up internet." The process basically meant applying to a telecom operator for an IP address, then plugging in a modem, and your home was online.

The IP address is like assigning a unique house number to every computer that wants to connect to the internet. These house numbers usually have four dots, for example 1.1.1.1. And the TCP protocol handles data transmission. It stipulates that whenever there's a problem, a signal is sent and the data is retransmitted, until all of it has been fully delivered.

After nearly a decade of research and development, this set of ideas was finally fully deployed on ARPANET in 1983. It's worth noting that it was still called ARPANET rather than "the internet," because it wasn't yet fully open to the general public. Early ARPANET was quite closed, and basically only the military and research institutions could get online. Its purpose was very focused: either military or academic. In other words, it was a product of a small circle. At the time, the military hadn't yet withdrawn from ARPANET, and computers used for commercial purposes were not allowed to connect. But a great invention like this would be known to more and more people, and the need for a commercial internet became more and more urgent. That was when ISPs were born. The full name is Internet Service Provider. They mainly provide internet access services. The telecom operators we know today, such as China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, are also called ISPs.

Every phone and computer that wants to go online needs to apply to an operator for an IP address, and then get online through various base stations or switches.

But this still wasn't the real internet. Computers could now connect to each other, but to obtain information and content from other computers, you still had to write complicated code. That still had nothing to do with ordinary people. The internet was still limited to...

As a result, the early internet was limited to the hands of a small group of people and was not widely popular. Then, in 1989, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, wanting to bring the appeal of the internet to more ordinary people, went through one experiment after another, writing code over and over again, until he invented the World Wide Web, the WWW, along with the browser that goes with it. This was a global internet information system. From then on, any ordinary person who got online could use a browser to find shared information. This invention greatly boosted human efficiency, and the speed of information spread was upgraded to the "speed of light" era.

The emergence of the internet has not only changed how information spreads, but also profoundly influenced the global economic landscape. It provided fertile soil for the development of new industries and gave rise to many tech giants, such as Google, Amazon, and Alibaba. These companies not only created enormous economic value, but also continue to drive the innovation and development of internet technology.

In the next episode of Cold-Knowledge Blind Box, we'll go deeper into the everyday technical principles of the internet, the interesting business stories of the internet age, and the dot-com bubble that followed, and how it burst. Well, that's the end of this episode of Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. If you have any other cold facts you'd like to hear, you can also open the NIO app, go to the friends screen, find the community called NIO Radio Shenzhen City Branch, and share the cold facts you love with us!

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