February 12, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, renowned biographer and author of The Innovators, Walter Isaacson, tells the story of the teams that created the internet—and the computer.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we return to our American stories. Up next a
story from an owned writer and biographer, Walter Isaacson, on
the invention of the computer.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
And the Internet.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
We like to thank the Library of Congress for this
wonderful audio from a book talk back in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Let's get into the story. Take it away, Walter.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We know that we distort history a little bit. We
make it seem like there's some lone genius who ripples
the surface of history, some guy a gal who goes
to a garage or a garrett and has a light
bulb moment and innovation happens. That's not the way it works.
We know that in our lives, creativity is a team sport.
(00:55):
It's not done by loaners. The reason we do not
really know who invented the computer and who invented the
internet is they were invented by teams of people who
had the wonderful quality of wanting to share credit more
than take credit for themselves. Now I must have been
(01:16):
I didn't know too much about Ada Lovelace. In fact,
I had started maybe eight years ago. My daughter was
applying to college. And if you know, people like us,
we think were supposed to be involved with the college
application process. I was supposed to help a little bit,
and my daughter was having none of that. She wouldn't
even tell us who she was writing about. Finally she said,
(01:37):
I sent it in. I said, well, who was your
essay on and she said, Ada Lovelace, And I said,
remind me what did she do? And Ada Lovelace was
the daughter of Lord Byron, the only legitimate child of
Lord Byron. And by being the daughter of Lord Byron,
she had a poetic, artistic sensibility. But she also loved
(02:00):
math and science and engineering, and she would go around
industrial midlands of England and see the beauty of the
connection of art to technology with the mechanical looms that
were using punch cards to tell the looms how to
weave beautiful patterns. Now, her father, Lord Byron, was a Luddite.
(02:24):
I mean that literally. His only speech in the House
of Lords was defending the followers of ned Lud who
was smashing these looms because they thought it would put
people out of work. Back then, people were afraid that
technology would put people out of work. They were wrong then,
just says they're wrong now. And Ada got that because
(02:46):
she believed that the combination of human creativity and scientific
technology would always create more productivity and more creativity. So
she had a friend named Charles Babbitt. She was making
a calculating machine doing numbers, and she realized that if
(03:06):
you use punch cards in the analytical engine, which was
the name of his machine, that the calculating machine could
do more than just numbers. She actually wrote and published
a scientific article, which was unusual for women in the
eighteen thirties, in a journal in which she said that
with the punch cards, this calculating machine could do not
(03:29):
only numbers, but it could do words. It could do pictures,
it could do patterns, it could do art, it could
do sounds, it could do anything that can be notated
in symbols. She even wrote an algorithm explaining how it
would work. In other words, she conceived of the computer,
the general purpose computer that wasn't just a numerical calculator. Now,
(03:54):
when it came to actually making this computer, you focus
on a guy named John Vincent at a nassof who
was a professor at Iowa State, and he wanted to
build a logical sequence computer. And he decides to do
it in the basement of the Iowa State Physics Building.
But he doesn't collaborate. He's a loaner. In fact, when
(04:18):
he has a big problem to solve, he just gets
into his oldsmobile and drives all the way long distances
to think it through, sometimes all the way to the
Illinois border. I think he went there not just to think.
But you could actually buy alcohol by the drink in
Illinois and you couldn't in Iowa. So he'd sit in
a bar and do it and write down. But he
(04:38):
got it pretty much figured out, but he never got
it working. Why because he had no mechanics. The punch
card burners didn't work, the machinery kept getting clogged. He
had the concept, but he didn't have the execution. And
one thing about innovation is a simple lesson that vision
without execution is a hallucination. So he gets called into
(05:03):
the navy and he leaves, and he leaves his half
built machine down there, and they don't know what it
is after a few months, and they need the space,
so they'd take it apart and throw it away. It
would have been lost to history had it not been
for somebody from this town named John Markley, who you've
never heard of, because he liked giving credit more than
(05:24):
taking it. But he knew that building a computer wasn't
just about building a computer, it was about building a
team that could collaborate. So he went all over the
country as he tried to build a computer. He went
up to the nineteen thirty nine World's Fair, He went
to Dartmouth where there was an electro mechanical machine, to
Harvard where there was another mechanical machine that Grace Hopper
(05:47):
and Howard Aiken had built. He even heard about this
guy in Iowa and drove with his nine year old
boy all the way to Iowa to meet at an
ass Off And he stayed there and he took notes
and he brought up the ideas back. If any of
you know any intellectual property lawyers, you know the upshot
of the story, which is there was a seventeen year
(06:08):
lawsuit about whether or not Mawkley, who created UNIVAC, had
stolen the ideas from Ada Nassov. But I try to say,
that's not stealing, that's collaboration. That's how we get things done.
So he comes back to the University of Pennsylvania. He
gets a really great engineer whose grandfather had helped create
(06:29):
the Turkish taffy machine to do the mechanics. He gets
all sorts of people who know how to do wiring
and pull it all together, and he even hires six
great women mathematicians to do the programming. Back then, more
women got PhDs in math in the nineteen thirties than
they did a generation later. It was before men had
(06:52):
told women that they didn't know how to do math.
And so from Ada Lovelace to the six women of Eniac,
you have women in the forefront of programming. I also
think it's because boys with their toys, thought the hardware
was the most important thing. But the women realize that
the operating system software was the most important. So they
(07:13):
collaborate to create cobal in the operating system markedly collaborates
to create the first computer Eniac and Univac. And it
is a model of how collaborative creativity can work, because
you bring people together from all different types of backgrounds,
(07:35):
and somehow by putting them together, magical things happen. It
happened a few years after that at Bell Labs. This
was back in the good old days when we actually
did basic research in this country. So there'd be something
called Bell Labs, which is partly funded by the Bell
(07:55):
system at and T, partly funded by the government which
gave it a lot the contracts, and partly connected to
a lot of great universities. There was a collaboration of government,
universities and industry to create things like Bell Labs. And
at Bell Labs they knew they had a couple of
(08:16):
challenges like amplifying a phone signal, and what they did
is they threw together all sorts of diverse people. There
were people like William Shockley who was a great physicist,
and John Bardeen who worked with him, who's a quantum
theorist and knew how electrons would dance on the surface
(08:37):
of a semiconducting material. But there was also John Bardeen
who sat in the cubicle with him, who knew how
to do experiments like putting a paper clip in a
piece of silicon or germanium to see if he could
break the surface state. And there was Claude Shannon who
would ride a unicycle up and down the halls juggling
balls because he was an information theorist. And he even
(08:58):
invited Alan Turing to come over, you know, from Blatchley Park, England,
and together they invent the transistor.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson giving a talk
back in the Library of Congress in twenty fifteen, and
the subject was how well how the Internet and how
computers were invented. And indeed what he got at and
got at straight, was that not always are these things
created by that one guy alone. In fact, almost nothing's
(09:29):
created by one guy alone.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
There's collaborative creativity. And it's not just guys, it's women too.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
But the point he made about vision without execution being
hallucination is as true back in the nineteenth century as
it is today. When we come back more of this
remarkable story about how things get made, big things like computers,
the Internet, and so much more here on our American story.
(10:09):
And we returned to our American stories and with the
story of the innovators with renowned biographer and author Walter Isaacson.
When we last left off, Walter was telling us about
the invention of the transistor and the crew they created it.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
At Bell Labs, they knew they had a couple of
challenges like amplifying a phone signal, and what they did
is they threw together all sorts of diverse people, and
together they invent the transistor. But a lesson for that
is that William Shockley, who in some ways was the
leader of the team inventing the transistor, had a definite
(10:49):
two flaws, one of which as he becomes a racist,
the other of which is he's paranoid and he wants
all of the credit. And when they pulled together the
team and they win the Nobel Prize and everything else
in the pictures, he insists by contract that he has
to be in the center of the pictures. So when
he starts a semiconducting company, nobody will come work with him.
(11:13):
And he finally gets a couple of great people, Bob
Doyce and Gordon Moore, and after about a year they
can't stand working with him, and so Shockley Semiconductor blows apart,
and you have the creation of the greatest company in
the digital age, which was Intel, where Bob Noys, a
(11:34):
congregationalist from Iowa who loved madrigal singing, where nobody sang
solo and everybody worked together, and Gordon Moore and they
put together, but they ended up eventually calling Intel, and
they did it in a room about this size. It
was an old apricot born, and instead of having corner
(11:54):
offices or organizational charts, they made it a collaborative enterprise
with Noise and more putting their battered desk right in
the center, and anybody could come up and talk to them.
Somebody who was just hired said, well, can you show
me who I report to what the chart is? And
Noise said sure. He took a white piece of paper
(12:16):
and he said, here's you right in the center, here's
everybody else. Draw a line between you and everybody else,
and collaborate with whoever you want. And this is a
new type of physical based systems where people come together
and learn collaboration. You see that notion of physical spaces
(12:39):
being so important, Being there in the flesh makes a difference.
This is something Ada Lovelace could have told you. But
it's also something Steve Jobs understood when he created Pixar Studios.
He looked at all the Hollywood studios. We've had a
lot of cottages and different buildings for different things. He said, no,
(13:00):
I want one big building with one huge atrium, and
to get to the bathroom of the screening room or
the cafe, you got to go through this big atrium
because when people bump into each other and see each
other physically, they have serendipitous encounters, and that's how creativity happens.
He did that with the new Apple headquarters that they're
(13:22):
now building in Cooper, Tino. Now that type of collaboration
also happened when they created the Internet. There were computers
at various research universities, and as I said, the government
was funding some of these research centers. And so the
government back then very efficient, decided we need a network
(13:46):
so people can share computer resources. And they figured out
how to get all these great research universities to agree
on what was originally called the ARPA neet after the
Advanced Research Project's Agent and see at the Pentagon, to
make it all work where each one of these computers
could have equal power and share ideas, be nodes on
(14:09):
a weblike network. They came up with that idea and
then they just told the research universities, and you figure
out the way to make it work. The network work. So,
being great research universities, the research professors did what they
always do is they delegated it to their graduate students.
(14:30):
So you had thirty graduate students who decided to figure
out how were you going to make the protocols work
for the packets to go darting around this wonderful web
and know how to reunite and know where they're supposed
to go, and know what to happen if one of
the packets doesn't make it. All these rules of what
became the Internet, and they wanted to do it in
(14:53):
the most collaborative way. So they got together and they
had no votes, they had no chair whatever. They he
just went from city to city, San Diego, Salt Lake,
They went down to New Orleans once, and they would
meet every few months, and the youngest one of them,
Steve Crocker, would take notes. He wanted to make sure
(15:14):
that it didn't seem like they were handing down rules
from on high, because he wanted it to feel like
a collaborative network. So he tried to come up with
the name of what these rules would be. And he
said he was showering in his girlfriend's parents' house. He
late at night. He'd just shower was the only place
(15:34):
he could go and get away from his future in
laws and think. And he came up with the notion
of calling these things requests for comment. In other words,
these want rules, these want regulations. These were not handed
down manuals. They'd send them around and say requests for comments.
So everybody felt they could be part of building the Internet.
(15:58):
Now that's pretty cool. That's how they created the Internet.
Which is particularly cool to me is that still how
the Internet's being created. People are still doing the request
for comment process. I think they're up to number seven
nine hundred as they figure out how do we incorporate bitcoin,
how do we have small payments. All of these things
(16:18):
are done collaboratively. Now. When I was at Time magazine,
we wrote a story that said they did it that
way so that it would survive a Russian nuclear attack,
because if you do it with a central hub and
central rules, you know, a missile takes out one of
those hubs, the network goes down. But the Internet is
(16:42):
built so that each and every node of the Internet
has equal power to store and forward packets of information.
So somebody takes out a packet, I mean a node,
Internet just routes around it. And we said that was
done to survive a nuclear attack. We got a letter
from Steve Crocker, who I did not know at the time,
(17:02):
who said, no, that's not why we did it. We
were graduate students, we were gradually sands. We were avoiding
the draft, we weren't helping the Pentagon, and he wrote
a letter to Time. Time was somewhat arrogant back then,
so we didn't print the letter. So years later, I'm
researching this. I was in this neighborhood having coffee with
(17:24):
Steve Crocker and he reminded me of this. I said, oh, well,
I remember that vaguely, and I called up the current
editor of Time, and I said, go get me the files.
I want to know who the better source was, because
Time said they had a better source. Well, the better
source was a guy named Steve Lukasich, and he had said, yeah, yeah,
the graduate We didn't tell the graduate students. We were
(17:44):
doing it to survive a Russian attack. But that's the
only way we could get money out of the colonels
at the Pentagon. That's why we were doing We just
didn't tell them. And so Lucasis said, tell Steve Crocker
that he was on the bottom and I was on
the top. Know what was happening. So I had my
coffee with Crocord again. I told him that, and he
strokes his chin and he says tell Lukeasic. He was
(18:09):
on the top. I was on the bottom, so he
didn't know what was happening. And that is the essence
of the collaborative nature of the Internet, and the fingerprints
of the founders of the Internet doing that way are
there imprinted on the genetic code of the Internet, so
it can't be censored. It's totally decentralized and distributed, and
(18:33):
it allows collaboration from people who've never met each other,
never seen each other.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
He was on the road in twenty fifteen plugging his
book The Innovators, a story about well, how the Internet
and computers got created, in other words, how the modern
age got created. And it was not the way we'd
normally think as Americans, which is that one man.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yes, there's that leader.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
And we learn about some of those leaders at places
like Intel, giants like Bob Neiss and Gordon Moore.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
But what did they immediately do.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
They sought team input, they sought a collaboration on a
very high level. And then the Internet itself, how it
was developed, My goodness, the story of the Innovators, the
story of the modern Age, the modern digital age.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Here on our American stories,
And we return to our American stories. Up next a
story from an owned writer and biographer, Walter Isaacson, on
the invention of the computer.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
And the Internet.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
We like to thank the Library of Congress for this
wonderful audio from a book talk back in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Let's get into the story. Take it away, Walter.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We know that we distort history a little bit. We
make it seem like there's some lone genius who ripples
the surface of history, some guy a gal who goes
to a garage or a garrett and has a light
bulb moment and innovation happens. That's not the way it works.
We know that in our lives, creativity is a team sport.
(00:55):
It's not done by loaners. The reason we do not
really know who invented the computer and who invented the
internet is they were invented by teams of people who
had the wonderful quality of wanting to share credit more
than take credit for themselves. Now I must have been
(01:16):
I didn't know too much about Ada Lovelace. In fact,
I had started maybe eight years ago. My daughter was
applying to college. And if you know, people like us,
we think were supposed to be involved with the college
application process. I was supposed to help a little bit,
and my daughter was having none of that. She wouldn't
even tell us who she was writing about. Finally she said,
(01:37):
I sent it in. I said, well, who was your
essay on and she said, Ada Lovelace, And I said,
remind me what did she do? And Ada Lovelace was
the daughter of Lord Byron, the only legitimate child of
Lord Byron. And by being the daughter of Lord Byron,
she had a poetic, artistic sensibility. But she also loved
(02:00):
math and science and engineering, and she would go around
industrial midlands of England and see the beauty of the
connection of art to technology with the mechanical looms that
were using punch cards to tell the looms how to
weave beautiful patterns. Now, her father, Lord Byron, was a Luddite.
(02:24):
I mean that literally. His only speech in the House
of Lords was defending the followers of ned Lud who
was smashing these looms because they thought it would put
people out of work. Back then, people were afraid that
technology would put people out of work. They were wrong then,
just says they're wrong now. And Ada got that because
(02:46):
she believed that the combination of human creativity and scientific
technology would always create more productivity and more creativity. So
she had a friend named Charles Babbitt. She was making
a calculating machine doing numbers, and she realized that if
(03:06):
you use punch cards in the analytical engine, which was
the name of his machine, that the calculating machine could
do more than just numbers. She actually wrote and published
a scientific article, which was unusual for women in the
eighteen thirties, in a journal in which she said that
with the punch cards, this calculating machine could do not
(03:29):
only numbers, but it could do words. It could do pictures,
it could do patterns, it could do art, it could
do sounds, it could do anything that can be notated
in symbols. She even wrote an algorithm explaining how it
would work. In other words, she conceived of the computer,
the general purpose computer that wasn't just a numerical calculator. Now,
(03:54):
when it came to actually making this computer, you focus
on a guy named John Vincent at a nassof who
was a professor at Iowa State, and he wanted to
build a logical sequence computer. And he decides to do
it in the basement of the Iowa State Physics Building.
But he doesn't collaborate. He's a loaner. In fact, when
(04:18):
he has a big problem to solve, he just gets
into his oldsmobile and drives all the way long distances
to think it through, sometimes all the way to the
Illinois border. I think he went there not just to think.
But you could actually buy alcohol by the drink in
Illinois and you couldn't in Iowa. So he'd sit in
a bar and do it and write down. But he
(04:38):
got it pretty much figured out, but he never got
it working. Why because he had no mechanics. The punch
card burners didn't work, the machinery kept getting clogged. He
had the concept, but he didn't have the execution. And
one thing about innovation is a simple lesson that vision
without execution is a hallucination. So he gets called into
(05:03):
the navy and he leaves, and he leaves his half
built machine down there, and they don't know what it
is after a few months, and they need the space,
so they'd take it apart and throw it away. It
would have been lost to history had it not been
for somebody from this town named John Markley, who you've
never heard of, because he liked giving credit more than
(05:24):
taking it. But he knew that building a computer wasn't
just about building a computer, it was about building a
team that could collaborate. So he went all over the
country as he tried to build a computer. He went
up to the nineteen thirty nine World's Fair, He went
to Dartmouth where there was an electro mechanical machine, to
Harvard where there was another mechanical machine that Grace Hopper
(05:47):
and Howard Aiken had built. He even heard about this
guy in Iowa and drove with his nine year old
boy all the way to Iowa to meet at an
ass Off And he stayed there and he took notes
and he brought up the ideas back. If any of
you know any intellectual property lawyers, you know the upshot
of the story, which is there was a seventeen year
(06:08):
lawsuit about whether or not Mawkley, who created UNIVAC, had
stolen the ideas from Ada Nassov. But I try to say,
that's not stealing, that's collaboration. That's how we get things done.
So he comes back to the University of Pennsylvania. He
gets a really great engineer whose grandfather had helped create
(06:29):
the Turkish taffy machine to do the mechanics. He gets
all sorts of people who know how to do wiring
and pull it all together, and he even hires six
great women mathematicians to do the programming. Back then, more
women got PhDs in math in the nineteen thirties than
they did a generation later. It was before men had
(06:52):
told women that they didn't know how to do math.
And so from Ada Lovelace to the six women of Eniac,
you have women in the forefront of programming. I also
think it's because boys with their toys, thought the hardware
was the most important thing. But the women realize that
the operating system software was the most important. So they
(07:13):
collaborate to create cobal in the operating system markedly collaborates
to create the first computer Eniac and Univac. And it
is a model of how collaborative creativity can work, because
you bring people together from all different types of backgrounds,
(07:35):
and somehow by putting them together, magical things happen. It
happened a few years after that at Bell Labs. This
was back in the good old days when we actually
did basic research in this country. So there'd be something
called Bell Labs, which is partly funded by the Bell
(07:55):
system at and T, partly funded by the government which
gave it a lot the contracts, and partly connected to
a lot of great universities. There was a collaboration of government,
universities and industry to create things like Bell Labs. And
at Bell Labs they knew they had a couple of
(08:16):
challenges like amplifying a phone signal, and what they did
is they threw together all sorts of diverse people. There
were people like William Shockley who was a great physicist,
and John Bardeen who worked with him, who's a quantum
theorist and knew how electrons would dance on the surface
(08:37):
of a semiconducting material. But there was also John Bardeen
who sat in the cubicle with him, who knew how
to do experiments like putting a paper clip in a
piece of silicon or germanium to see if he could
break the surface state. And there was Claude Shannon who
would ride a unicycle up and down the halls juggling
balls because he was an information theorist. And he even
(08:58):
invited Alan Turing to come over, you know, from Blatchley Park, England,
and together they invent the transistor.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson giving a talk
back in the Library of Congress in twenty fifteen, and
the subject was how well how the Internet and how
computers were invented. And indeed what he got at and
got at straight, was that not always are these things
created by that one guy alone. In fact, almost nothing's
(09:29):
created by one guy alone.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
There's collaborative creativity. And it's not just guys, it's women too.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
But the point he made about vision without execution being
hallucination is as true back in the nineteenth century as
it is today. When we come back more of this
remarkable story about how things get made, big things like computers,
the Internet, and so much more here on our American story.
(10:09):
And we returned to our American stories and with the
story of the innovators with renowned biographer and author Walter Isaacson.
When we last left off, Walter was telling us about
the invention of the transistor and the crew they created it.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
At Bell Labs, they knew they had a couple of
challenges like amplifying a phone signal, and what they did
is they threw together all sorts of diverse people, and
together they invent the transistor. But a lesson for that
is that William Shockley, who in some ways was the
leader of the team inventing the transistor, had a definite
(10:49):
two flaws, one of which as he becomes a racist,
the other of which is he's paranoid and he wants
all of the credit. And when they pulled together the
team and they win the Nobel Prize and everything else
in the pictures, he insists by contract that he has
to be in the center of the pictures. So when
he starts a semiconducting company, nobody will come work with him.
(11:13):
And he finally gets a couple of great people, Bob
Doyce and Gordon Moore, and after about a year they
can't stand working with him, and so Shockley Semiconductor blows apart,
and you have the creation of the greatest company in
the digital age, which was Intel, where Bob Noys, a
(11:34):
congregationalist from Iowa who loved madrigal singing, where nobody sang
solo and everybody worked together, and Gordon Moore and they
put together, but they ended up eventually calling Intel, and
they did it in a room about this size. It
was an old apricot born, and instead of having corner
(11:54):
offices or organizational charts, they made it a collaborative enterprise
with Noise and more putting their battered desk right in
the center, and anybody could come up and talk to them.
Somebody who was just hired said, well, can you show
me who I report to what the chart is? And
Noise said sure. He took a white piece of paper
(12:16):
and he said, here's you right in the center, here's
everybody else. Draw a line between you and everybody else,
and collaborate with whoever you want. And this is a
new type of physical based systems where people come together
and learn collaboration. You see that notion of physical spaces
(12:39):
being so important, Being there in the flesh makes a difference.
This is something Ada Lovelace could have told you. But
it's also something Steve Jobs understood when he created Pixar Studios.
He looked at all the Hollywood studios. We've had a
lot of cottages and different buildings for different things. He said, no,
(13:00):
I want one big building with one huge atrium, and
to get to the bathroom of the screening room or
the cafe, you got to go through this big atrium
because when people bump into each other and see each
other physically, they have serendipitous encounters, and that's how creativity happens.
He did that with the new Apple headquarters that they're
(13:22):
now building in Cooper, Tino. Now that type of collaboration
also happened when they created the Internet. There were computers
at various research universities, and as I said, the government
was funding some of these research centers. And so the
government back then very efficient, decided we need a network
(13:46):
so people can share computer resources. And they figured out
how to get all these great research universities to agree
on what was originally called the ARPA neet after the
Advanced Research Project's Agent and see at the Pentagon, to
make it all work where each one of these computers
could have equal power and share ideas, be nodes on
(14:09):
a weblike network. They came up with that idea and
then they just told the research universities, and you figure
out the way to make it work. The network work. So,
being great research universities, the research professors did what they
always do is they delegated it to their graduate students.
(14:30):
So you had thirty graduate students who decided to figure
out how were you going to make the protocols work
for the packets to go darting around this wonderful web
and know how to reunite and know where they're supposed
to go, and know what to happen if one of
the packets doesn't make it. All these rules of what
became the Internet, and they wanted to do it in
(14:53):
the most collaborative way. So they got together and they
had no votes, they had no chair whatever. They he
just went from city to city, San Diego, Salt Lake,
They went down to New Orleans once, and they would
meet every few months, and the youngest one of them,
Steve Crocker, would take notes. He wanted to make sure
(15:14):
that it didn't seem like they were handing down rules
from on high, because he wanted it to feel like
a collaborative network. So he tried to come up with
the name of what these rules would be. And he
said he was showering in his girlfriend's parents' house. He
late at night. He'd just shower was the only place
(15:34):
he could go and get away from his future in
laws and think. And he came up with the notion
of calling these things requests for comment. In other words,
these want rules, these want regulations. These were not handed
down manuals. They'd send them around and say requests for comments.
So everybody felt they could be part of building the Internet.
(15:58):
Now that's pretty cool. That's how they created the Internet.
Which is particularly cool to me is that still how
the Internet's being created. People are still doing the request
for comment process. I think they're up to number seven
nine hundred as they figure out how do we incorporate bitcoin,
how do we have small payments. All of these things
(16:18):
are done collaboratively. Now. When I was at Time magazine,
we wrote a story that said they did it that
way so that it would survive a Russian nuclear attack,
because if you do it with a central hub and
central rules, you know, a missile takes out one of
those hubs, the network goes down. But the Internet is
(16:42):
built so that each and every node of the Internet
has equal power to store and forward packets of information.
So somebody takes out a packet, I mean a node,
Internet just routes around it. And we said that was
done to survive a nuclear attack. We got a letter
from Steve Crocker, who I did not know at the time,
(17:02):
who said, no, that's not why we did it. We
were graduate students, we were gradually sands. We were avoiding
the draft, we weren't helping the Pentagon, and he wrote
a letter to Time. Time was somewhat arrogant back then,
so we didn't print the letter. So years later, I'm
researching this. I was in this neighborhood having coffee with
(17:24):
Steve Crocker and he reminded me of this. I said, oh, well,
I remember that vaguely, and I called up the current
editor of Time, and I said, go get me the files.
I want to know who the better source was, because
Time said they had a better source. Well, the better
source was a guy named Steve Lukasich, and he had said, yeah, yeah,
the graduate We didn't tell the graduate students. We were
(17:44):
doing it to survive a Russian attack. But that's the
only way we could get money out of the colonels
at the Pentagon. That's why we were doing We just
didn't tell them. And so Lucasis said, tell Steve Crocker
that he was on the bottom and I was on
the top. Know what was happening. So I had my
coffee with Crocord again. I told him that, and he
strokes his chin and he says tell Lukeasic. He was
(18:09):
on the top. I was on the bottom, so he
didn't know what was happening. And that is the essence
of the collaborative nature of the Internet, and the fingerprints
of the founders of the Internet doing that way are
there imprinted on the genetic code of the Internet, so
it can't be censored. It's totally decentralized and distributed, and
(18:33):
it allows collaboration from people who've never met each other,
never seen each other.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
He was on the road in twenty fifteen plugging his
book The Innovators, a story about well, how the Internet
and computers got created, in other words, how the modern
age got created. And it was not the way we'd
normally think as Americans, which is that one man.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yes, there's that leader.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
And we learn about some of those leaders at places
like Intel, giants like Bob Neiss and Gordon Moore.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
But what did they immediately do.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
They sought team input, they sought a collaboration on a
very high level. And then the Internet itself, how it
was developed, My goodness, the story of the Innovators, the
story of the modern Age, the modern digital age.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Here on our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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