Reflection on NSFNet

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