Nick G. > Recent Status Updates

It's funny to think that 24 bits (a whole three bytes!) of information was a lot to add to a transmission in the late 60s, making for a lot of pushback when BBN wanted to implement checksums into ARPANET. Nowadays, we don't think twice about using 128- or even 256-bit checksums for data verifications.

Fun fact: Jay Forrester, a professor at MIT, managed to teach a whole generation of comp-sci students to build reliability into their code not just at a reasonable level but at a "My workstation uses ECC memory and is connected to a UPS which is connected to a surge protector that is on its own circuit, which is in a house that does not use power from my city's power grid because that could cause outages" level.

It's funny to think that a recovery disk (or rather a recovery tape, seeing as they were still using paper tape back then) was a brand-new concept in 1969.

It's been a few weeks and I just finished one third. Maybe I ought to read this at home, too, instead of 10 minutes every day in English.

Fun fact: computer science isn't a real science. Nobody in the 60s thought so (besides computer scientists), anyway.

I think chapter titles making sense at the end of a chapter is going to be a theme of this book.

"Why would I need to access other computers?" -- Everybody who heard Roberts's idea for his network. Fifty years later, it's a necessity for daily life. Huh.

Fun fact: the packet system was actually invented in two places at once (America and London), exactly what ARPANET and the early Internet were designed to prevent. Ironic.

I just read about the original conception of distributed networks and packets. Nobody else reading this probably knows what that means, but what's important is that they're both super basic building blocks for ARPANET and the modern Internet. 👀

The section that I read today had replicas of Larry Roberts's concept diagrams for the first computer network systems. Seriously good addition.

Finally finished the first chapter. Wow, that was long. Its name, though, "The Fastest Million Dollars", finally made sense at the end of the chapter.

J.C.R. Licklider basically had the idea of Neuralink before Elon Musk was even born.

J.C.R. Licklider, one of the pioneers of modern computer science, preferred to go by "Lick". What a guy.

Hey, I can write stuff here!

So sad to hear that ARPA was gutted after NASA was created, but I'm getting to the part where they interface with computers with terminals instead of punch cards, so that's cool.