This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Few of the customers today know it, but the entire digital universe is in orbit around one picnic table out back where computer scientists relayed the first message over the internet one summer afternoon in 1976. That August, scientists from SRI International—the research institute in nearby Menlo Park—pulled up to the Zott’s parking lot in an old bread truck to perform a demo for Pentagon officials who’d flown in for the occasion. The choice of locale was an inside joke; the SRI geeks had hoped there’d be some Hells Angels bikers in the mix. Sure enough, when they greeted the generals that day, one asked: “What the hell are we doing in the parking lot of a biker bar?” “We thought you’d ask that,” one of the scientists had replied. “We wanted to do this demo in a hostile environment.”