Blog 1: The Infinite Internet

Before I talk about what Blum wrote about I think it is important to know what I have previously learned about the Internet before reading these chapters. I have had a lot of background information about how the Internet came to be from taking HSCI 4321 History of Computing. We talked a lot about ARPANET and the transition to the Internet. The information that Blum talks about was not new to me. However, his perspective of how he came to be so interested in the Internet was very interesting.

Blum talks about how one day he was using a VOIP service (such as skype) and the connection started getting fuzzy. He called his Internet Service Provider (ISP) to come take a look and see what was going on. In the process of trying to figure out what was wrong, they discovered that a squirrel had decided that the wire connecting Blum to Internet was going to be a snack. This is how Blum became so fascinated. He wondered where that wire went and how the Internet actually worked.

Something that stuck out to me was how he kept saying that he thought the Internet was infinite before realizing that it was just a bunch of computers connected by cables. His first stop was in Milwaukee to what was once Milwaukee’s Athletic club, which is now the center of the Internet for Milwaukee. He was given a tour and saw all the fiber optic cables running through the building which ran to different parts of the country like Chicago. Next on his stop he took a trip back in time to meet the person who helped install the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) Leonard Kleinrock. He goes on to talk about how IMP was used to create the ARPANET which consisted of “nodes” sending information to each other. The next thing he does is go on to explain MAE-East. This section of the chapter was a little confusing to me but it basically seems like the ISP's came up with a hub that used existing data lines to essentially create a roundabout for the Internet. Something that I noticed, was Blum never mentioned Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee invented HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which is the basis of how we browse the Internet today. Maybe this will be coming up in a future chapters.

Questions that I have for this chapter are,

Do you see the Internet as this infinite entity (the cloud) as Blum previously describes it or do you think of it as a physical network with a bunch of cables?

Why do you think the ARPANET took so long to get from the military into the hands of the public?