Who Invented the Internet?

On this episode of Our American Stories, no, Al Gore did not invent the internet, but no one man did either. Critically acclaimed biographer and author of The Innovators, Walter Issacson, shares how the internet came to be with his audience at a book talk at the U.S. Library of Congress.  

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people who invented the Internet. Here to tell the story
is Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators, How a group
of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the Digital Revolution. And

(00:30):
a special thanks to the Library of Congress for allowing
us to use this remarkable storytelling. Let's get started.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
The two most important inventions of our time, the computer
and the Internet, were invented, and with all due respect
to Al Gore, you probably don't know who invented them.
But the reason we do not really know who invented
the computer and who invented the Internet is they were

(00:58):
invented by team of people who had the wonderful quality
of wanting to share credit more than take credit for themselves.
There were computers at various research universities, and so the
government back then, very efficient, decided we need a network
so people can share computer resources, and they figured out

(01:22):
how to get all these great research universities to agree
on what was originally called the arpanet after the Advanced
Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. To make it all work,
where each one of these computers could have equal power
and share ideas, be nodes on a weblike network. They
came up with that idea and then they just told

(01:45):
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. So you had thirty
graduate students who decided to figure out, how were we

(02:05):
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 the what became the Internet. And
they wanted to do it in the most collaborative way.

(02:26):
And you see that in every great team, even the
founding of America. I'm here competing with Joe Ellis in
the next room over, and you know he's doing that,
but in his Founding Brothers he talks about and David
McCullough does it excellently. You needed a team. You needed
smart people like Jefferson and Madison. You needed people of
great rectitude like Washington. You needed passionate people like John

(02:48):
Adams and his cousin Samuel, and you also needed somebody
who could bring together a team like Ben Franklin. So
when you say what does it take to be a
great leader, part of this book is saying it's not.
Being a great leader, is being a creator of a
team of great leaders. So they got together and they
had no votes, they had no chair whatever. They just

(03:09):
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. And Steve Crocker, he wanted to make
sure that it didn't seem like they were handing down
rules from on high, because he wanted it to feel

(03:30):
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 is the only
place he could go and get away from his future
in laws and think. And he came up with the

(03:51):
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.
Now that's pretty cool that that's how they created the Internet.

(04:12):
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
are done collaboratively. Now, when I was at Time magazine,

(04:34):
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
built so that each and every note of the Internet

(04:56):
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,
who said, no, that's not why we did it. We
were graduate students, we were gradually sands. We were avoiding

(05:19):
the draft, we weren't helping the Pentagon, and he wrote
a letter to Time. Time was somewhat arrogant back then.
If you saw Amy Willentz, who was preceding me and
I were both at time, I know, so we didn't
print the letter. So years later, I'm researching this, and
as I said, I was in this neighborhood having coffee

(05:40):
with 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 actually
ran ARPA and he had said, yeah, yeah, the graduate

(06:01):
We didn't tell the graduate students we were 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're doing We just didn't tell them. And
so lucas It said, tell Steve Crocker that he was
on the bottom and I was on the top, so
he didn't know what was happening. So I had my
coffee with Crocker again. I told him that, and he

(06:22):
strokes his chin and he says, tell Lukeasic. He was
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

(06:43):
there imprinted on the genetic code of the Internet, so
it can't be censored. It's totally decentralized and distributed, and
it allows collaboration from people who've never met each other,
never seen each other.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
In a terrific job by the editing and production by
our own Greg Angler, and the storytelling, well, it's Walter Isaacson,
one of our best and he's the author of The Innovators.
How a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the
digital revolution and the decentralized nature of the Internet is
what made it happen. It allowed collaboration by people who

(07:18):
never saw each other and didn't even know each other.
The story of who invented the Internet here on our
American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories.
Every day, we set out to tell the stories of
Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities,

(07:38):
and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But
we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows
are free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com.