Nick G. > Recent Status Updates

I could've sworn I posted an update yesterday. Oh well. New developments: the only adult has left and has not come back for two days, a radiation cloud is turning people into marauders and vegetables, and all the high-school-aged kids are getting drunk instead of cleaning the store after an earthquake.

Accidentally didn't do an update for a week. Oops. Probably because I've been too sucked into the book to remember to do them. Unfortunately, this isn't nonfiction, so my updates might not be so detailed...

The big catalyst for the catastrophic hailstorm that starts the events of the book is an incredible volcanic eruption, starting huge storms and a megatsunami that's sweeping America. I feel like I've seen the concept of a megatsunami bringing the end of the world (or, realistically, just America) before, but I can't pinpoint where...

More has happened in the first twelve pages in this book than Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Dreaming in Code combined. I've been reminded that in real life, catastrophic events are pretty rare.

It just occurred to me that Ada Lovelace did all that she did while constantly being on opium that she had been prescribed for a chronic illness. Victorian medicine was wild.

The relationship between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage finally became a little more complex than sunshine and roses all the time. I know this is nonfiction and McCully can't change what actually happened, but it seemed too much like everything was going according to plan.

Seeing as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (one of the first computers) would've needed to be 500 feet long to compute 1000 variables, I'm sure people in the mid-1800s would've been amazed by modern semiconductors. Nowadays, we can compute billions of variables in a matter of milliseconds with a four-square-inch chip.

I couldn't imagine having three young children and still trying to study advanced math.

Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace's mother, took her to meet high-class men when she was 17 so that she could find a husband. While there, Ada met Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, the first design for a computer (as well as many other revolutionary devices). For a second, I thought they would be perfect partners, then I remembered that Ada was 17 and Babbage was 41. Welcome to the 1800s!

I can't believe what being a child to a rich family must have been like in Victorian England. Ada Lovelace basically had no friends for her entire childhood.

Ada Lovelace was pretty much the smartest kid I've ever heard of. She was learning first-grade topics before she was five years old.

Turns out that 267 to 304 is all chapter notes, the bibliography, and an index of terms. The epilogue of the book, though, was great; it showcased the party that the pioneers of the ARPANET and the Internet had to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first ARPANET IMP. It sounded like a great way to put BBN back in the spotlight as well as a great experience for everybody involved.

It's interesting how even in the age of the Internet, for as long as the ARPANET was still active, it was the center of the networked world. Your network wasn't worth anything if it wasn't connected to the ARPANET. I wonder what it was like when the ARPANET was shut down in 1990?

Around this point in the book, it's been revealed that nobody really invented the Internet. The Internet Protocol was created and various networks began to adopt it so that they could communicate with each other, and so the Internet was born. There wasn't really a turning point where it came to be, it just gradually happened. I guess that "turning point" would be the invention of the World Wide Web in the 90s.

DARPA eventually gave up ARPANET, handing over control to the Defense Communications Agency, who filled it with bureaucracy and restrictions, so that's fun. It's fine, though, because TCP was just split into TCP/IP and in the next section, Ethernet is apparently invented, so we're getting really close to the modern Internet.

...which is essentially one step before our modern Internet. When you think about it, the Internet works just the same as CATENET, just with the networks being across countries instead of your house.

The beginning of chapter eight basically glossed over new DARPA (ARPA renamed) network projects-- the packet radio network (PRNET) and the satellite network (SATNET)-- which I found really cool, as they basically translated ARPANET to different means of data transmission than telephone lines. The reason these were glossed over, though, is because the chapter is really about the Concatenated Network (CATENET)...

In other news, I think I'm getting to the part where they invent the Internet. The ARPANET has already made its shift from a system to transfer information to a space for anyone to work, play, and talk together. Now comes the big part where it is refined and made more available to everyone, making way for the World Wide Web.

Didn't read a lot today, but it did just occur to me that everybody using the expansive online community that was the MsgGroup was not doing so on their personal computer (which really didn't exist yet), but rather one provided by a college or large company. It's incredible how such a vast group of people can form when they all have such limited access to it.

It's interesting to read about the advent of free speech advocation on the ARPANET. While it was government property, its users (especially the members of its official mailing list, the MsgGroup) valued being able to communicate freely and keeping any sensible topics open to discussion.

It's funny how the only official ARPANET mailing list (basically a chatroom but with email), the MsgGroup, was the place where some of the first computer games where you're not against the computer were distributed and developed. Imagine being on a mailing list with the entire modern Internet, or even just your school, and developing Minecraft together.

It's a good thing that the original IBM PC sparked an entire market of clones, because things as trivial as email addresses were topics of contention on the ARPANET.

The first ever conversation between two chatbots was at a 1972 convention designed to show off the capabilities of ARPANET. It featured a doctor chatbot and a paranoid psychotic one. While it was obviously robotic, it was (and still is) incredible and funny to see them talk to each other, especially for the technology of the late 60s to early 70s.

I feel like every day I read, ARPANET gets a little closer to the modern Internet. Today, I read about the first Terminal IMPs, which connected directly to the IMP instead of communicating through a host computer. Imagine if every device connected to your home WiFi had to connect through a computer in the living room; that's essentially what it was like before 1970. Wild.

Apparently it's necessary for a computer company's network headquarters to look like a fortress.

The section that I read today had some awesome pictures of the people behind the ARPANET, the places it was developed, and the technology behind it. It's interesting to see how much the Interface Message Processors (the first network routers ever) look like modern servers.

It's interesting to see how the first ever use for ARPANET was to use one computer's terminal for another, which was ironically the opposite of what ARPA and BBN were aiming to do; they designed the system to help computers to operate together and ended up with one where one computer controlled the other. Not to mention that the first iteration of the "network" had a grand total of four connected computers.

I love reading about software engineers trying to invent two-by-fours.

I've noticed that the chapters in this book aren't really chapters; they more so outline parts of ARPANET's history. I came to this conclusion from the fact that I just barely finished chapter four...

Funny to think that ARPA invented dynamic routing (the system ARPANET and the Internet use to send data on the fastest possible path, even if nodes are down) without telling BBN, who was building the computers needed for ARPANET to exist, how it could be implemented at all.