The Internet: it was never supposed to work this well, and yet, here we are. This week, we’re diving into how we went from isolated, room-sized computers to a global, decentralized network that somehow (mostly) functions. We break down the early days of networking, when computers had to physically dial each other up, and how we eventually arrived at the distributed, self-healing, packet-switching magic that powers everything today.
Along the way, we cover the different network models—centralized, decentralized, and fully distributed—and why only one of them could survive a nuclear attack (always an important design consideration). We also touch on ARPANET, the first real Internet, and how a bunch of researchers, military contractors, and a few weirdly named computers set the stage for what we have now. Spoiler: it involves a lot of improvised problem-solving and some very lonely PDP-10s.
So if you’ve ever wondered how routing actually works, why the Internet doesn’t just collapse under its own weight, or what an “IMP” is, we’ve got you covered. Just don’t blame us if you leave this episode with a sudden urge to dig through RFCs.
🚀 LINKS
🔗 RFC 1206: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1206
🔗BGP episode: https://pod.chaoslever.com/break-the-glass-and-walk-away-a-very-brief-overview-of-bgp/
🔗Supercomputing episode: https://pod.chaoslever.com/from-cray-1-to-el-capitan-the-evolution-of-supercomputers-chaos-lever/
🔗Classical computing: https://pod.chaoslever.com/turing-to-transistors-classical-computing-101/
🔗Brief history of the internet: https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
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