#18 The History of the Internet w/ Bradley Fidler
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2016
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
In the first episode of The Road to Now recorded over the Internet via Skype, Dr. Bradley Fidler explains the key moments in the development of the Internet and gives his take on the issues facing us as we move further into the 21st century. An episode about the Internet, recorded over the Internet? Yes, and it gets better because we recorded the interview at UCLA's Boelter Hall ARPANET exhibit, and ARPANET was one of the most important networks in the early Internet.
Dr. Bradley Fidler is a researcher and historian with UCLA Computer Science whose research examines the remarkably complex and brilliant process that brought us to the Internet that we ended up with today. As Bradley makes clear, today's networks have deep roots that involve a number of actors in both the private and public sector (and yeah, Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but his role in its expansion was probably more significant than most people realize).
Interview recorded Friday, July 22nd at the Boelter Hall ARPANET exhibit on the campus of the University of California-Los Angeles (w/ Bob via Skype from Portland, Oregon).
For more on our podcast: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on the road to now. |
| 0:05.0 | Suddenly they are what the verb, internetting, or inter-networking, which we now call internet. |
| 0:12.0 | That's what that stands for. Other contenders were supernet, which was something that you see in the |
| 0:17.0 | literature, which is pretty awesome. And cat-in-net, as in concandidated networks networks, which is almost like Catnet, which would have also been fine. All of those names are fine. Internet's fine, too. I'm happy with that. The basic, like, if you were a computer scientist or if you were really plugged into an academic culture, you could use the internet and know about it. The next phase was to build it out for the public. Get it into the primary schools, right? |
| 0:39.3 | That's where the government steps up again. And Al Gore, I think what he actually, I feel bad for the guy, because I think what he actually tried to say was I took a leading role in, you know, making the internet what it was, what it is today. That, yes. Inventing no, but he gets straighted around, but he did actually do a lot. |
| 0:58.9 | This question about what it means for everyone to be online. |
| 1:02.1 | One is let it happen. |
| 1:04.7 | It's going to happen. |
| 1:06.0 | Let it happen. |
| 1:06.8 | You can't escape it. |
| 1:08.3 | There's this thing, my boss says, he says, if you want privacy, what you do is |
| 1:12.7 | you drive to a beach, take off of your clothes, walk into the ocean, and just keep walking until you get |
| 1:18.0 | as deep as possible. And then the sonar nets have got you. You thought you were free, but you're not. |
| 1:23.8 | It's totally gone. I'm Bob Crawford. And I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 1:28.8 | Well, Ben, we have an episode today that we recorded a few weeks ago and I was in Portland and you were in Los Angeles. |
| 1:36.0 | That's right. And even though we've broadcast a few episodes that we've done over Skype so far, |
| 1:41.9 | this was actually our first attempt to do this and it was great because today's |
| 1:46.2 | episode is about the history of the internet and we recorded the history of the internet from |
| 1:51.1 | ARPANET at UCLA's campus home and in the exact same room where the first ever internet signal was sent |
| 1:57.4 | and basically that was our first internet interview. |
| 2:01.6 | Yeah, it was pretty ironic and it is it's hard to believe that we haven't always had the internet in our lives. |
| 2:08.6 | It is. I mean I do remember, I mean I didn't use the internet for the first time until about 1999, 98 or 99. |
... |
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