So, in that video, the University of Michigan, the unexpected underdog in the
competition for the National Science Foundation wins. And they win using, sort
of an old fashion technique. Basically, many might say that was cheating, right?
They didn't play exactly by the rules. This is becoming an increasingly common
technique sometimes when, when an institution wants to win a grant. They'll,
they'll you know, they'll, they'll bring so much more money to bear on but it's
kind of an obvious, obvious thing that they can, that they're going to win the
grant. So the, but, so there is actually a couple of schools that thought that was
kind of unfair. But the other thing to think about in this is the lobbyists
carefully crafted the15 million dollars. I would claim they carefully crafted the
fifteen million dollars so this network would fail because they knew how much, if
you leased the lines from AT&T, it would, it would cost so much that the only
thing you could afford was 56 kilobit lines for the network that was being
proposed. Now, when you think of 56 kilobits, right? So here, take your, take
your phone, right? You got your 3G and your 4G, and the thing that came before
all those was EDGE. You remember EDGE? Now, of course, if you go to the wrong
place, you end up in a basement or something, you go EDGE on your, on your
phone. Edge, the thing that's your phone's doing when it's doing real bad connection.
Edge is 128 kilobits, which is twice what the national backbone for all the
scientists talking to all the computers in the country. 56 kilobits was the national
backbone that the lobbyists carefully authorized funds for. And there will be
only one conclusion at this point and that was that they wanted it to fail. And, as
is said in the movie Jurassic Park, nature finds a way. And, and if, if you think
about it the story that Doug van Holland just told is like a perfect storm. Mci
just started existing. You know, they just started existing and so they wanted to do
something cool , and so they were willing to take a risk. Doug had, just come from
Carnegie Mellon University, where he had worked with IBM before. So, what's the
likelihood that, here's a school that has a long network history, but didn't work on
the Arpanet. Knows IBM intimately. Just it's just pretty amazing, you know, that,
that this all happened. And so, but it did. Nature found a way just like in
Jurassic Park and all the plans and all the attempts to, to, to box, to put and to
draw a fine line around this failed. And so, the NSF net as Dough said, just took
off, alright. And the, going back to what Larry said, the, the key was is that each
school had to be, you know, first on it or you're going lose your physicist, right,
it became a badge of honor. And so, schools basically panicked and they found
money somewhere to run fiber, to run networks to people's offices. This is a
whole bunch of infrastructure that, that needed to be installed. And I wasn't at
University of Michigan at the time, I was at Michigan State University at the time,
just up the road. And I saw the internet for the first time in the, in the building
that's here in this upper left hand corner of the, of the slide. And that is the what
we used to call SI North, the school that I'm part of. It's really a rather
nondescript building but they used to have monitors and watching all these things.
And so, the traffic grew, the performance grew there's all kinds of things that,
that had to be solved through this thing. It started in 1988 and was supposed to go
through 1993, for five years and it ended up going through 1995. Now, the key thing
is if you think about that time frame, you know, by early 1990s, things were pretty
universal. I mean we'd gone from will this happen to every, everyone had to be, you
know, everyone that mattered was pretty much on the network. And the question was
how much bandwidth, what with these servers, how do we work with all these
things? And so the, the original NSF Net was aimed at research universities and
they had made a bunch of rules about that. And, and there were some universities in
particular Cleveland the Case Western Reserve at Cleveland it, well Cleveland
area, Case Western, around Case Western Reserve University, had this thing called
a Freenet. And these were bulletin board systems. And there was lots of bulletin
board systems but they were all very local and some bulletin board systems started
having sort of partnerships with universities and sneaking regular people
onto the Internet. I remember personally, just in a working university, the internet
was this cool thing. And, it was something that only we at universities could do.
And, we, we're the only ones that could use it and all you want to do is tell
people about it. And then, things like these Freenets made it available to the
average citizen and that just created so much more demand. And so, towards, you
know, early 1990, late 1980s, this academic only rule sort of started to be
relaxed and they made some rules about who could do what. And by, by this point in
time, the cat was totally out of the bag, right. I mean the network was 45 megabits
and all the schools on the planet. So, it was pretty tough at this point for the,
for the lobbyists to shut it down [laugh], right? They had carefully laid plans, had
failed and out we go. Okay, and so we have this connectivity. And one thing I
remember about the connectivity in the early days is we used to have post-it
notes of all the cool servers where you could download software or where email
list were or, or newsgroups were. And, and you, you have to have post-it notes and
keep track of all these host names etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so, once
the connectivity was there, and this was happening worldwide and in additional states
as well. And the question was is how would we organize all this information? How
would we make sense of it? And so we started Illinois, University Illinois in
the supercomput er centers and we moved to the University of Michigan, where the
first NSF Net happened, and then grew and expanded. And the, the next place on our
stop is CERN, CERN High Energy Physics Lab. And so, you probably know that the
CERN is the birthplace of the web but that's not all it does. A matter of fact,
it chose that the web was not it's purpose because it's purpose is Physics, high
Energy Physics. And. One of the things about experimental Physics is that, kinda
like super computers. The in order to make the next step in physics research, you
need to you need to build a bigger experiment and a bigger experiment. So, it
used to be that a physicist could learn things about electrons and neutrons by
something about the size of this table like a cloud chamber. And something would
go through and they could write a little paper. And then once, once you've seen
everything you can see and things and the size of this table, you'll say, well, I'll
do something ten times larger than the table. And then I get a new set of papers
and a new set of results and at some point, you've, you've gained as much
Physics as you can gain from that. And this repeats itself, and it gets larger
and larger and larger. And it gets to the point where you literally can only afford
to have one experimental facility in the entire world. And this is what CERN is
dedicated to. It's dedicated to the notion of if you're going to build a physics
experiment, let's build it here at CERN. And there's a whole structure around this
where people come from all over the world. It physically straddles the border between
France and Switzerland. It's got, you know, that Switzerland of course, has you
know, has really good relationships and people can come and, you know, even
Russian, you know, back when there was some tension between governments,
scientists can still get together and work. And the lead time on these projects
is fifteen to twenty years and the, the size of the things that they build is just
gigantic like the, the Atl as the, the, the, the, most recent detector is like six
stories tall and took years to build. So, these people have to work and build and
think. And it turns out that they have a lot of fun. So I'm going to introduce you
in this next slide to the Cernettes. So, the Cernettes, is a musical group from
CERN. And, and so basically you [laugh], you, you can view some of the videos that
I have here. You don't have to, but I suggest that you do. They're just pure
fun. Their, their, their music is about the web, about high-energy physics, about
colliders, and about supercomputers. And you see the women sitting around the
supercomputer in one of their music videos. And so, it's just kind of fun. But
remember that the reason that these people are together is to mix something that
can't be made separately. So, take a look and then come back. Well, welcome back. So
continuing. I have been to CERN many times. The first time that I went to CERN
was to do a lecture recording. And I have been working for many years, since 1999,
with a physicist named Steven Goldfarb. That's Steven Goldfribe right there. He is
the lead singer of the, of the Canettes Blues Band. And everyone else in the
Canettes Blues Band is also a physicist, [inaudible] physicist. She actually is I
believe the secretary general something. So, these people are all physicist and,
and, and so they, they play together, right? You saw the Cernettes, if you
choose to see. And now, here we have the Canettes. This is a blues band. Part of
the reason that they do blues is because, you know, these people come from America
and they like the blues, and there might not be a blues band so they just make one.
They actually have a club. The CERN provides a place for them to play music
and they have lots of fun. And so, so, the other thing I like about CERN, if you ever
get a chance to visit go in the back, this is the cafeteria right by the building 40.
And they have steak. I mean, the food is just magnificent. I mean, it's Europe.
It's, it's France and Switzerland, after all. And, and there's, I just have so many
fond memories of hanging out at this, at this cafe. And so, then we have over here
not a lot of people probably have a family photo, deep inside the detector pit, of
the Atlas. And so and so, let's see, where's my, there's my wife, Teresa, right
there, my son, Brent there's me and there's my daughter, Mandy. And so we took
a family trip to CERN and now, you can't go in, let me clear this bit here, let me
clear this. You can't go in the detector anymore, right. So, this is the five
stories, this is where the beam comes in. So, down there that`s the 2.5 stories and
then up is another 2.5 stories. We happen to be in the middle when we are taking
this picture. If you are to go into, into this area right now, this is full of
equipment, okay. Just absolutely, just full. Go look for the Atlas detector. And,
and basically you actually can't go in cuz it's all full of radiation now, too. And
so we got in one of the, this was not, this was early on. I came back and got
another tour when it was almost done. And so, this just is fun, but really smart
people. And so, that's sort of the, the key message here. So I'm going to show you
another video and this video is optional and this is a video of blues, our blues
band, Steven Goldfarb, and other physicists and then I, I showed up and
sang with them. And so, this again is optional. So again, what I say is as you
see the crowd shots, most of the crowd are also physicists. They work really hard and
they play really hard. Okay. Welcome back. So, why did I waste all that time showing
you music videos and other silly things? Well, I mentioned that innovation springs
from a culture. It doesn't spring from sort of like someone saying you innovate
right now. It springs from a culture of fun and accepting new ideas and trying new
things and then attempting to do something. And maybe, maybe you don't even
accomplish w hat you tried to do but you, you run into something really cool along
the way. And that really is the story of the web. You know the internet was there.
The packets were moving. We could move files. We could, move images. We could
move video. But we couldn't find it and it looked ugly. But frankly, to those of us
using it, who cared if it was ugly. Once you figured it out, it was just, just
totally awesome. And so, this group, Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee were
working at CERN. And they had a problem to solve. And the problem they wanted to
solve was the distributed documentation for physicists. Now, these people have to
build things that take twenty years with thousands of people spread all over the
earth. So, they have to like come up with designs. They have to share the designs.
They have to write reports. They have to tell, you know, they have to do some kind
of an audit. So, they needed to sort of write documents. Except they wanted to
share them. And they wanted to use this new internet thing to allow the collective
editing of documents. Now, that starts to sound a little bit like Wikipedia, but
it's not. What they wanted to, what they wanted was the documents to be on
different computers and then link the documents together and make it so you
could edit them. So, certain documents might be in Poland, and certain documents
might be in Switzerland, and certain documents might be in the United States of
America, other documents might be in Japan. And they wanted to be able to edit
them all and then link them all together and edit them both locally and remotely as
well. And so, they created effectively a hypertext text editor with hyper links in
it. Alright, these links from one web, one online document to another. They had to
figure out the format to write these documents in. Then they had to figure out
a way to represent links. And then they had to figure out a network protocol to
move the data back and forth, to store and retrieve the documents. And all that
becomes HTTP, the hypertext transf er protocol, HTML, the hypertext markup
language. Web servers, which is where the HTPD web servers, which is where the
documents are stored. And web browsers. And so, they had to build a complete
infrastructure to create the document, distributed documentation environment that
they had imagined. So, lets go meet Robert Cailliau at CERN, in his office just
across the street from where the coffee shop and the steaks are at in the CERN