I Don't Know About That - History of the Internet

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Jim thinks the Internet was made just to sell Pez, well, our expert Ian Milligan (@ianmilligan1) proves us otherwise! www.ianmilligan.ca Omaha Steaks - Preroll https://omahasteaks.com/IDK BetterHelp - Mid 1 “This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/IDK and get on your way to being your best self.” Shopify - Mid 2 https://shopify.com/IDK Manscaped - Mid 3 https://manscaped.com/IDK Our merch store is now live! Go to idontknowaboutthat.com for shirts, hoodies, mugs, and more! Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/IDKAT for ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and more exclusive perks! Tiers start at just $2! Go to JimJefferies.com to buy tickets to Jim's upcoming tour, The Moist Tour.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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complete confidence today knowing that you're ordering the very best visit omahasteaks.com and use the promo code idk at checkout and get the extra 30 off your order minimum order may be required tennis bag mitten croquet they're all pretty stupid really anything that involves a shuttlecock can fuck right off all right here we are on the i don't know about that podcast i just now i'm just in the intros just saying how I feel. We're in Asia right now? Yeah.

We're in Asia. Pretty exciting to be in Asia. We're right now. Australia's just gotten through the group stage. How good were we against England in the next game or Argentina, whoever we played. Yeah. So good.

So good. America got through as well. Yay, America. Goals. We did very good and the Welsh have been knocked out. Oh, not a lovely time. We'll be, in saying that, I'll be performing in Cardiff. Come and see me.

I got gigs all over Asia, all over Europe, all over Great Britain, who isn't a part of Europe anymore. Well, they are geographically. No, you voted out. You're getting the same passport line that I have to fucking get into at the airport. And, Forrest, you got any gigs coming up you want to tell people about? We actually had to record this intro again because Forrest you got any gigs coming up you want to tell people about we actually we had to record this intro again because

Forrest is about to sit in the seat over there all of a sudden he'll go like that but Jack deleted the one I said I wouldn't mention it but then I realized that Forrest was in the room so we're gonna have to yeah so we're gonna have to because Forrest is gonna go switch switch over to where Jack is with a different outfit on yeah yeah so so we're doing a different intro because Forrest says COVID. Just do a one, two, three, snap. And then Forrest is there.

I do have some gigs. I'll be with you in Asia, and I'll be with you in part of the Europe tour. But I also will be at the Comedy Cellar in Las Vegas January 9th through 15th. So come check that out. And I have some other dates too. But you can go to ForrestShaw.net. They're all on there. And then listen to the Merman podcast as well

and as a reminder we will be off the air after next week until February so check us out on Patreon, patreon.com slash idcat and follow us on Instagram at idcatpodcast ready for holidays okay

please welcome our guest Dr. Ian Milligan Dr. Ian Milligan. Dr. Ian Milligan, now it's time to play... Yes, maybe, who knows? Judging a book by its cover. We always tell our guests there's going to be a moment of silence, but there's not that anymore. I always give them a bit of noise.

Okay, so Dr. Ian Milligan. Doctor, I believe you're a red book enthusiast. You have a lot of red books. Okay, so first of all, does it involve medicine? No. Oh. Are you a doctor of medicine? Nope.

You're one of these guys that when they go, is there a doctor on the plane? And you come up and go, well, Plato once said. Are you a doctor of theology? Nope. Oh, God. We'll have to find out what he's a doctor of then. Are you a doctor?

I'll tell you right now. He's a professor of history. Okay. So is this about history? Yes. Is it about a war? I love it. Always about a war.

No, no wars. It's something you don't like. I'm sorry, Ian, go ahead. Maybe a war, but not really a war. Something I don't like. Sometimes you like it, but other times you really don't. Have we done women before? I'm joking, ladies.

I'm joking. I like all of you. You get frustrated with us. Stop pushing this joke. I get frustrated with it. Is it something to do with recent history? Yes. Okay.

So it's not like cavemen and spears and shit. You get frustrated with cavemen a lot i do i do i feel like that i get enough credit um is it something to do with human rights not really i thought you would like that is it is it food based not really you use this every day but you have said that my wife's good nature yeah but you have said you would you would do without this in a heartbeat oh yeah okay i use it every day but oh oh the internet that's correct oh yeah your bloody internet pain in the neck pain in the neck the world was better without it but But you like Call of Duty. I like Call of Duty, but I could go back to when we just played the games online. But like we just promoted your world tour.

Look, look, I am arguably a product of the internet, but I find the internet to be a nasty place for the most part, a mean-spirited place. I don't think it's made as better. Look, banking, great. We're going to talk about the history of the internet, though, today. So we're not going to say whether it's good or bad. We're're going to talk about the history of the internet though today so we're not going to he's not going to say whether it's good or bad we're just going to talk about the history right right so he might have an opinion though uh dr ian milligan is a

professor of history at the university of waterloo where he has taught courses on the history of the internet and researches how historians will use the internet and the web as historical sources he is the author of the 2019 book history in the age of abundance how the web is transforming historical research and occasionally tweets at ianmilligan1 you can learn more about him at ianmilligan.ca heard you singing waterloo yeah i like this um so do you guys ever sing that at the university do you ever hear kids in the hallway waterloo oh it's banned it's banned is it yeah yeah no no no that's that's not what we're about what you know you don't like abba what type of type of university is this what type of educational place is this where you ban abba what are, the university from Footloose?

Can you talk a little bit just about how you got to this point about the history of the internet? Yeah, so I'm a historian. I started out doing normal historical research, the 1950s, the 1960s, and then my way into it was realizing that you know one day uh everything that we're producing right now our tweets our social media posts our websites our online news misinformation information etc all of that in 20 30 40 years are going to be what historians need to to use to understand today so my first part into this was really

thinking about what's a historian in the future going to make sense of the world around us? And then, of course, you go down that road, you say, wow, I should really, really learn about the history of the internet and think about the long history of, you know, how it's all come together to this moment we're at today. Is there an argument that the history will be better because they'll have more information or will there be some fake news that will slip through as fact? And also, this is a three-part question, also has that happened without the internet?

Like, you know, all this stuff, fucking Washington had wooden teeth and shit like that, you know what I mean? There was a lot of stuff that's gotten through that's mythology paul revere riding around and they probably probably went past one house the british are coming you didn't do it all day day done yeah yeah you should come do my guest lectures because that's a point i often try to make that we you know the internet seems new but many of the things that we're facing with the internet are obviously things that we've faced a long time before. I mean, I think history will be better. I say that cautiously. And I think it's going to be better because we have so many more voices. You know, if I'm a historian, I'm studying the 50s and 60s,

our source base is really, really limited. Now I could use, you know, social media posts and Twitter. We've got posts from children. We've got posts from people living through events. We've got all these voices. Now the flip side is the question of misinformation. things in archives we need to critically assess and think about and to me that's why you know we should hire more historians because historians are really good at thinking about context we can look at that tweet we can look at that document in an archive we can look at that library book and we connect it to everything around it to make an informed judgment of you know is this is this a credible account of what we were looking at or is this misinformation or is this just nonsense well i i believe that the history that i learned in school which was mostly australian history and the australian history that i learned they would be learning substantially different history now we were learning basically from when you know the white guys came into the harbor and you know

settled the country and that's sort of where we learned from, you know. People like Captain Cook were, in my history books, were revered as heroes. And now I don't know if they are anymore or whether, I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or there's some middle ground or whatever. I don't want to get into that debate. But we were definitely learning a different thing.

And then you've got, like, do you believe in the idea that history is written by the victors? So if, if world war two was one, would they be like, and then Hitler did this awesome thing? You know what I mean? Like, like, like if, if they won would have, would have the, the bad history been erased. It is, is that how it happens?

It does. I mean, war is really bad for history because it wipes out all sorts of records. And as you say, there's selectivity. You know, I mean, I think the way I often try to think about it is that there's the past. And the past happened. We can't go back.

We don't have time machines. That's set in stone. We can't change that. But we can't go to the past. We don't have a holodeck. We don't have any magic way to see what happens. We can only view history. And history is the scattered documents, some memories, some stories, all of these things, a little bit here and there that's left behind that we interpret through the lens of today. So, you know, Australia, Canada, where I am, similarly, 20 years ago, the history that we would have taught was you know rah rah great people came set up this country

and then we're also simultaneously now we're really reassessing you know what what was the role of colonialism what was the role of our first nations people you know and the past didn't change but the way that we think about it and the way that we interpret it has. Right. All right. Well, I'm going to ask Jim some questions about the history of the internet. And then when he's done answering those, you're going to grade him on his accuracy, 0 through 10, 10 is the best. Kelly's going to grade him on confidence. I'm going to grade him on et cetera.

And we will add those scores together. And I did not make categories. All right. 21 through 30, your Gmail. 11 through 20, Hotmail. 0 through 10, AOL. There you go. What is the internet and how does it work, Jim?

What is the internet? Okay. The internet is a way of sharing information or anything or, or talking to each other, or it's a way of connecting people through a computer, whether it be in your pocket or anything, to swap and converse and the swapping of ideas or anything like that. And how does it work? Yeah. Whee! Like that.

That's its inner monologue. Yeah. That's where it's working it wants to do that noise yeah um but it's through optic fibers and stuff and yeah wi-fi and i don't know either it's like the force it surrounds us it binds us it's all living things. We did an episode on Star Wars yesterday, so there you go. Who invented it and when? Well, I have a friend, a Scottish bloke, who's a bit of a bullshitter, and he reckons his son invented it. He doesn't. You know the guy.

I'm not going to put you there. You know the guy, right? I've talked to him. He reckons his son invented it. So there's a guy in Glasgow who invented it. So it was invented originally, I believe, by the military, and then the guy who invented it wanted to give it out to the world for free. It was just like, and we can all have this thing.

And then people were like, no, no, no. Did it land? And then people were like, no, no, no. When abouts? I believe its infancy was invented in the early 90s. Okay. Why didn't the Soviet Union invent the internet? Because they're too busy fucking pumping Drago with steroids.

Too busy cheating at the boxing against Rocky. Yeah, they're busy with that. What is the ARPANET system? A-R-P-A. I don't know. ARPANET, I think I'm saying. I'm quite proud of my lack of knowledge on this one, to be honest with you.

Okay. Why was the Advanced Research Project System, ARPA, formed in 1958? Okay, so that's when the internet was in its infancy. Yeah, this is your go-to thing on this podcast. You always redo your questions. It would have been some way of, you know. Why was it formed, though? For the military. Military?

Yeah, military, to pass information on. Okay, that was original. Yeah. What is a URL, and what does URL stand for? I know. You've heard of it, though, right? I know. It's a URL.

You don't know what it stands for, URL? Ultra Ray Lights. Got it. How does the World Wide Web differ from the Internet? Ah, it doesn't that's one thing we got to get rid of putting www in front of things that was some places don't have it yeah but as soon as the first person to do it was like and then you put world wide web like get the fuck out of here put the fucking thing in that's stupid i hope they don't look upon that person in history kindly.

Well, here's the next question. What is the web and how does it work? It's the internet. Okay. And it's worldwide. Yeah. And you can send emails and shit on it through the sky. Okay.

Who invented the World Wide Web? Guy in Scotland's son. Same guy. Same guy? Yeah, same guy. What is the name of the World Wide Web? Guy in Scotland's son. Same guy. Same guy? Yeah, same guy. What is the name of the first web browser? So you know with the browsers you have like Safari. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's the name of the first web browser? First web browser. It wouldn't have been Ask Jeeves. He would have been like number five. That's a search engine, I think. Like we have Safari on your iPhone. Yeah, Safari. I'll say Explorer.

Explorer, okay. When was the first image uploaded to the web and what was it of? The first image that was put up on the web was a photo of the guy who invented the Enigma machine. The gay fella. Oh, from the movie? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His name's... Yeah, I know what his name is now.

Yeah, yeah. It starts with a T. Yeah, yeah. Turing. I don't know if you're right. Alan Turing, a picture of Alan Turing. That's the first image? Yeah.

Are you right? I believe so. I don't know. Do you know when that was? I have no idea. The first page on the World Wide Web was released in 1991. What was its topic? It was M&M's.com.

It was just about M&M's. Wow. Still around today. What was the first ever item sold on eBay? eBay was invented because, as with everything, people always have this one idea. They're like, I could do this. And then they're like, what?

I could do this for everything. Like Amazon was just books. And then he's like, I could sell more than books. The first, the reason that eBay was invented was there was a lady who collected PEZ dispensers and she wanted an online forum where people could swap and sell their pez dispensers i went to the pez museum with me yeah so i fucking know connecticut i think it's like we were driving to in between casino gigs and we were on our way to a casino in connecticut i think

it's somewhere in connecticut or upstate new york here's another thing you might not know about me if we're driving somewhere the gigs and someone says there's the biggest blah blah blah, we're taking a decoy. Yeah, it's at Pez Museum or whatever. Jim and I just pulled over and went to the Pez Museum. It was really good. It was pretty cool actually. It was pretty well organized. You can put your head on top

of a Pez thing and you can be a Pez dispenser? Oh yeah. We bought Pez dispensers? Yeah, I bought loads of Pez dispensers. Okay, so what is the meaning behind eBay's name? So that was the first item I ever sold to Pez dispensers? Yeah, I bought loads of Pez dispensers. Okay, so what is the meaning behind eBay's name? So that was the first item I ever saw. That's the first item was a Pez dispenser? Pez dispensers, yeah. What is the meaning behind its name, eBay?

Electronic bay. Electronic sales. Bay? Yeah. Old bay. Yeah, like when you used to drop things off at the bay, like shipping containers go to the bay. I think I know what your answer is going to be, let me ask you who developed email and when scottish guy no email email was invented um i believe an australian invented the internet or

something there's some australian in here somewhere because sometimes there's a question about australia later but it's about- Sometimes we have like invention offs. Yeah. You know what I mean? Where I give all the good inventions Australian gives. I can normally beat a Canadian or something, but very hard. Yeah, you, me, and JJ did it. I represented America.

You did Australian. You think an Australian invented email? There's something to do with the internet that Australia invented. There's one bloke involved in it somewhere. Okay. So I'm going to say an Australian. And then when? Do you know about when email was developed? No, is computer junk mail called spam uh no one likes spam hawaiians yeah but some people like junk mail few people put in their eggs

what was the first live stream of? First live stream. Maybe it was a sport. It was Elvis Hawaii. That was a satellite. That wasn't internet. I'm going to say live stream. It was a picture of a cat playing a piano.

Okay. Why didia ban forwarding emails in 2001 you couldn't forward emails in 2001 because you can't forward regular mail that's handed to you it's like people you could you could that's why australia did it yeah i think it might have been a privacy thing so you can send someone an email go, really sorry about the other day, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they can forward it to a thousand other people. That didn't happen with letters. Okay. Last question is true or false.

True or false. The first webcam was set up to monitor a coffee pot. True. Sounds weird. Sure. Okay. Ian, how did Jim do in his knowledge of the history of the internet? Zero through 10.

10 is the best. I was thinking sometimes students take my knowledge of the history of the internet? Zero through 10. 10 is the best. I was thinking, sometimes students take my class on the history of the internet, and I don't think they come to any of my lectures, and they try to write the exam. Yeah. And this was a little bit better than that. So I'm going to give it a five and a half. You're all right.

There's some Pez points there, man. I know when you said Pez, I thought you were nodding your head like, I don't know, maybe you didn't. I don't know. Five, how do you do on confidence? I'm going to give him a six on confidence. Six, that's 11 total. I'll give you two on et cetera, your hotmail.

Do you still have hotmail? No, I never had hotmail. Okay. He's a hotmail. Yahoo till I die, baby. Yahoo, okay. It was a hot move. Yahoo till I die, baby.

Yahoo, okay. So what is the internet and how does it work? Jim did some dial-up stuff with his mouth. He said it's a way of sharing, connecting through a computer. But how does it work specifically? Yeah, maybe you can explain that. Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, Jim got it. The concept of it, it is about sharing. So the way I like to teach this is, you know, there's like the lowercase internet.

And so I, you know, I look at your room here, you've got some laptops, you've got different devices, you've got a network. If I've got a network in my house, I've got my, you know, gaming console, I've got a router, I've got a smart TV, I got a laptop. That's my network. If my network talks to your network, we have an internet work or an internet and so basically the internet is like this all the words the big global network of networks it's all the networks talking to each other and so part of it is yeah the beeping and the booping the fiber

optic cables wires switching boxes you know there's giant cables that run under the oceans, etc, etc. But the way that I really think the internet is significant and what it is, is it's a common protocol. It's that the world basically decided this is going to be the common language of networks. And so it really is the magic, you know, I've got a phone, my phone might be made in China, I can talk to your laptop that was made in South Korea, I can talk to my colleagues, you know, computer, he's got one that was made in America, which is pretty rare. You're in South Africa. I'm in Australia. Someone's in Canada. We can all talk and all of our devices know how to do it because everybody's agreed to use the same common set of standards. So to me, the internet is really just everybody deciding this is how we're going to communicate.

And we actually managed to do it. Yeah. That is pretty impressive when you put it that way, actually. Yeah. Because we don't agree on anything else, really. No, it's incredible. How do we not agree on PowerPoints? That does my head in.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Every time I travel, I'm about to go through Asia. I have to buy another one of those fucking things. Oh, I thought you meant PowerPoint, like presentations. I was like, is there a debate on this? The plugs. The plugs for the walls, yeah. I have like a universal one that I've kept in my, yeah.

I always lose them. It's a fucking pain in the neck. Yeah, but the internet. Yeah, that is a good way of putting it. Never really thought about that. Because it is, I think people do take it for granted that you just send an email on your phone. You're like, yeah, that's off.

Stupid email. And you're like. Or the fact that you used to go down to the bank and someone used to write your amount of money in a book. Yeah. Someone used to say, you have this much money in pen and then they just stamp it and you go, okay. Yeah. Spill a coffee on it.

Got it right here. Hope I don't lose this piece of hammer. My whole life on it. Yeah, mental. And then even credit cards, you get things. So there is some benefits, I guess, to the internet. Who invented it and when? Jim said it's some guy in Scotland. No, he used to say it by the military.

There was a guy in Scotland you mentioned. Well, they took it from him. is the way my mate is his son he goes my i my son invented the internet like that right and he goes and then the government stole it from him well who invented it and when yeah so it's sort of like like all annoying historical stories it's one of those there is no one single person who invents the internet. But some of the main characters in its development would be going back to the 60s and going back to people primarily in the United States who are initially thinking about how they can set up networks.

So there's somebody in 1962, J.C.R. Licklider. He comes in. He heads up the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which we'll talk about in a second. It's this really cool American defense agency. Bloody Licklider. So anyways, he starts thinking we should come up with, he calls it a galactic network.

He writes this paper in 1962. He's starting to tell people, you know, we need to think about ways to bring computers together. And then around the same time, there's someone at the Rand Corporation, which is another one of these American defense think tanky things. And he's thinking about, you know, how are we going to communicate during a nuclear war? And so he starts thinking about the way networks can work. And he says, you know, we've got centralized networks, which would be like, you've got one hub in the middle, everybody's connected to it like you know imagine a train network there's

one station every train has to go to that station if that central station gets destroyed the whole network collapses and he says there's decentralized networks that'd be like an airline hub network you know there's lots of different hubs but you kind of always end up in chicago or denver newark new jersey or houston like you've got some major hubs that connect to each other in little parts but there's there's still some centralization it's decentralized but there's still hubs and then he comes up with the idea of a distributed network which is like a grid um so imagine it's like a road network in a city you can do a lot of damage to a road network in a city and you can find a way to get around

that city because there's so many intersections, there's so many connections, et cetera. And then finally, there's another guy, 1965, Bob Taylor. And I like this story. He's working for the government. He's got an office at the Pentagon. He looks around his office, and he has three computers on his desk. And each of them has their own commands. Each of them computers on his desk and each of them has their own commands each of them has their own community each of them has their own system

and they don't talk to each other at all and he sort of has i think a basically a light bulb moment and says hey if i've got three terminals there's got to be some way that we can get these systems to talk to each other and so those are the folks that come up with the sort of backbone the nuts and bolts of the internet and then later on there's there's groups the folks that come up with the sort of backbone the nuts and bolts of the internet and then later on there's there's groups of people who come up with that standard protocol which is something called the transmission control protocol internet protocol or tcpip and that's basically the lingua franca that becomes the internet and that's where i mean jim mentioned it becoming free along the line they decide we're not going to monetize this.

It becomes part of an operating system in the eighties. It becomes free in 1989. You've got this free standard. Let's all the computers talk to each other and then you're off to the races. So it's a lot of people all working together throughout the sort of back half of the 20th century that make the internet possible. And then they went to charge us the bastards. How did,

how did Al Gore al gore get included in the conversation because that's always the running thing is that al gore invented the internet i people always say that but is he involved at all he is like uh you know the very crucial way of a lot of this early early development process required a lot of money required a lot of money to academia a lot of money to these kind of networks. And Al Gore was an influential politician in the US Congress that was able to push legislation forward that made it happen.

Gotcha. There's truth to it, right? He financed the internet. So you could argue that we had radio, right? Radio was a way of connecting us through airwaves and the sky and then we had morse code right morse code was you know was that the original internet because like it's sort of like a thing sending messages through a wire through a you know what i mean yeah i i what's what's the big difference like i remember i had I had a cousin that had a CB radio in his bedroom

and I used to think it was the coolest. And he's like, I can just talk to anyone anywhere. I just like – Like a ham radio? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was talking to truckers at like 16 in his bedroom, like breaker, breaker. And I thought he's got it made in the shade.

He'll never be lonely. Yeah. freaker and i thought he's got it made in the shade he'll he'll never be lonely yeah yeah i mean i mean to me i think of the internet like it's sort of like the printing press revolution you know i think of the printing process this big leap forward that lets people somewhat democratize production of ideas but you know you still need a printing press right whereas the internet and even the early radio type mostly most radios outside of a handful of people who get into cb radios and ham radios most of our radios radios just receive information you turn it on you get your you hear the broadcast but you're not talking back and what i think the internet the big change is it really really lowers the barrier to production like any of us starting by the late 90s when the internet becomes cheaper and the web becomes more accessible anybody can create their

own website and now i can go on twitter and i can say anything that pops into my mind and for better or for worse you know hopefully it's still around when this airs but for better for worse you know everybody can see my inane and or profound thoughts and that's the big change to me but that's the worst thing about the internet is fucking everyone bloody checks in everybody has an opinion that needs to be heard oh god we're a nauseating fucking species of people but yeah but you know when you mentioned the the radio like i think that's a good metaphor that it's basically since we start doing cave paintings people want to communicate yeah and then really quickly we say hey there's got to be a better way to communicate faster than the speed

of a horse it's like this long history of different ways from more communication is is taught us is that everyone's horny for people that don't live in their town Since the dawn of time right as soon as the post office started opening up people got pen pals and they conversed with some woman Oh, whatever vice versa the Queen was conversing with Prince Philip Who's not around annoying since he was years old, pen pals back and forth. And then I remember in the late 1990s, I remember a few people in my life fell in love in chat rooms where I'm going off to Denmark to meet this person.

And it was like we weren't even tindering up and like swapping photos at this stage. No. People were just in love with that person. Chat's nice. Yeah. I had like 19 online boyfriends when I was like 13 years old. I'm sure they were all really old, but they looked hot in their pictures.

Wow. Yeah. So I remember it must have been like 20 plus years ago. They built this giant building in miami downtown miami it has no windows has like all sorts of stuff on the roof and stuff too and they said it was some sort of hub for the internet or something because like where does there's got to be these big structures that like kind of like the same way electricity works right where all the electricity goes to a transformer station and gets distributed like those have to be built right yep so yeah there's

big you just never find out where they are normally because they're highly secured locations but there's central hubs all over the place big cities you know one of the it's kind of a downer story but um you know near 9-11 actually near the world trade center there was one of those big centers that went offline and i know in my own teaching, we've used that as an example of like, you know, how does the internet react when you do have a massive, one of these massive switching nodes gets taken offline?

And it was like the big impact for the internet when that goes down in lower Manhattan is like people in Italy and people in Africa are seeing degradations in their service just because of the network being all connected together. Oh, that is terrible. I'm worried after 9-11 the Italians weren't sending emails faster. That's why Milan wasn't selling fast enough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a computer hacker that can shut the internet down, rendering all of our bank accounts empty, rendering all of our, you know, all of our online things gone is there a world where that could happen i'm not a cyber security expert but i would say no you know but i think that's that's the sort of thing that keeps everybody awake at night in every organization around the world is making sure that networks are secure could i just go into one of these facilities with an ax and fuck things up? No,

but like the magic of the internet is because it's this decentralized network that it's not vulnerable. It's not like an old network, you know, like say you're on a university campus, you might have a central hub where if you knock that out, the whole internet might go down on the campus. It really is decentralized. So if you

came in and you destroyed one of a major center in you know in in your city the rest of the internet would adapt and traffic would flow around it it would continue to work it's the resiliency that really makes it special why didn't the soviet union invent the internet uh jim said they were given drago steroids yep all right yeah and i i like this so there's a great book by this uh historian ben peters on how not not to network a nation um and to me it's like the iron or irony right of the united states primarily develops the internet but it doesn't do so because of the miracles of the free market capitalist economy competition. It does so because it has massive state-supported defense and research establishment. It really is the epitome of big government creates the internet in the

United States. And so the flip side is you'd look at the Soviet Union and you'd say, hey, if the US can develop the internet through the power of big government, surely the Soviet Union with the giant power of big government could have done it. And the story there is really interesting. So they do try to create an internet. They want to coordinate their economy because it's all about how many tractors should you build here? How much toilet paper will we need here? They've got ledgers. They're doing their whole economy. And basically there, because of trust issues issues nobody wants to network their computers together because no one wants people to see how much information they have no one wants to know how many tractors you actually could make how many rolls of toilet paper you could actually produce

because you don't want your managers to know that you want to set your targets lower so that you're not going to end up you know know, bad things happen to the Soviet union. Um, so it's one of these, just a neat story of like the U S or all its vaunted power of this big, massive free market capitalist economy develops the internet through the power of big government and the Soviet union, which is big government basically can't do it because all the factories are competing. So it's a sort of ironic story of why the internet happened here is there anywhere on earth that still doesn't have the internet

no i'm pretty sure you could go to any corner of the earth and find a i mean there are places that are internet deserts right there's places where remote communities where your internet's not fast enough you can't access school you can't do remote work but the internet is pretty much everywhere but what about like North Korea? So North Korea is just limited internet. They have their internal internet, do they? That's a good question. I don't know.

I'm not an expert on North Korean internet. I'm sure they have their own internal network of a sorts and with very limited connections to the rest of the world. Because I read an article in Wired Magazine about Cuba and they don't have, they have it. Well, this was four years ago, so maybe it's there,

but they had an internet, but it was only within Cuba and they had all these wide, basically wires running around the whole country that were, it was like a, almost an illegal internet. They had hotspots where you could get it. It was really crappy. Yeah.

But they had this, like these wires that would run all over the country and they'd take like literal hard drives and download like all the stuff from that they got illegally from people coming to cuba they download like netflix like like they had their own versions of facebook and stuff and they like create still created an internet in cuba but it was only within cuba it was but it still was an internet so it was like it was interesting it's in a wired magazine i don't know if that's what they're still doing there, but yeah. So, yeah.

And sometimes it's one thing that might be cool to look at is like submarine cable maps. You can see where all the sort of, it's like spaghetti connecting the world. The holidays aren't a slave IDK. Um, and some of those islands, you know, only have one connection and that limits we run wires underneath the ocean? How do we do that? I, I'm not an expert on that, but I would imagine, I know a little bit about

the first transatlantic cables, you take boats and you sink cables and you have all sorts of monitoring software. It's pretty impressive stuff. So there's not like divers underneath there. No, no, it's off a ship, but you're saying, so some islands only have like one cable. Yeah. Yeah. They'll have one cable and then that that's a vulnerable you know you could be about satellites but satellites really aren't going to you know take the backbone of internet traffic

i thought satellites did all the heavy lifting it's underwater cables i guess underwater cables i just looked them up because they're they they're big I mean obviously they'd have to be like this uh like this oh that's not that big I was saying way bigger Jay I assume that as well but no they're like I mean they're not your average plug obviously they're like a cantaloupe yeah about what a rock melon for you Australians listening what is ARPANET system so ARPANET and probably I know the next question was, why was ARPA founded? So perhaps I should weave the two together if that works. So ARPA, you know, the story of ARPA itself is cool.

So it's this agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it gets set up in 1958. And it gets set up because in October 1957 1957 the soviet union launches sputnik and they launch the first satellite into space and it terrifies the united states at first they're not worried because they say we've got a rocket coming it's not going to be a big deal basically two months after sputnik launches the first american big rocket they're attempting blows up on the pad and suddenly everybody goes we have a real problem we're going to fall behind in the space race we need a new organization and so in february 1958 they set up this agency called the advanced research projects agency or arpa and what arpa is cool about is that it's basically this r&d research and development enterprise that is set

up to have minimal bureaucracy so you can just kind of pitch an idea and run with it rapid response you can go to your boss and say i want to fund something you get funding like that day and they have visions of the future so they do like mad scientist work like they've got ideas where they're gonna you know they want to set up something like they want to stop incoming nuclear weapons they they have this mad scheme of like launching nuclear weapons into the sky to create a force field that's going to knock down other nuclear weapons. It's this apocalyptic vision of shooting nukes into the air and blowing them up so other nukes can come down. They come up with spaceship ideas where spaceships are going to drop nuclear weapons and ride that explosion shockwave to Mars. They just basically start thinking of these big ideas.

And then the Cuban Missile Crisis comes along in 1962, and people realize, oh my god, this is complicated. We're living in a world of mutually assured destruction. If the Soviets or the Americans make a wrong step, we could end up destroying the world. And so they realize that in the course of the Cuban Missile Crisis that we have this really complex, we have a high stakes operation, there's too much information, nobody has enough information, and they say we need to have some way to communicate better in a crisis. And so that kind of leads into the overall context of setting up the ARPANET,

which is the ARPANET, the network that they're coming up to get. And they basically are working on several projects. They're working on projects that they can share computers. How can you take one big computer and let lots of people use it at the same time? They work on something called packet switching. I won't go into the details, but it's basically how can you send messages through lots of computers without getting broken along the way? And the solution is to take a big message, chop it into, say, 100 parts, send those 100 parts, and then reassemble it at the end. It turns out to be much easier to send information. And then crucially, as I talked about at the start, the common communications protocol, like some way that all computers can

share a common language when they're networking with each other. And so that leads, in 1969, the ARPANET comes online. You can Google a funny map, you know, first map of the internet, because the first ARPANET is really just four sites. It's at Stanford Research, UC Santa Barbara, UCLAcla and utah those four networks they those four computer sites they form their first network and then it kind of grows from there but you know if you look at the first map of the internet it's the arpanet 1969 four things on the internet really and that's the beginning of the internet basically that's basically yeah that's the moment where you got these four computers they're talking to each other they're communicating and really quickly it grows from there to start spreading across the entirety of the united states that's a long time for 1969 and then what does i don't know the answer is

any easier but what what is a url what does it stand for i know it's the url is the thing right the address yeah address but i don't know what it stands for yeah so it's a url is a uniform resource locator um which basically is like yeah yeah yeah i wouldn't have expected you to get that but everyone yeah i people say it every day almost or you refer to it the url or the yeah like yeah sure yeah yeah and basically it's it's a it's a PDF. Yeah, I know what it is. They're the only ones I can open up PDFs. I always go to Jack, I go, you got to change this. It's a doc something.

Make it a PDF for me. I actually don't know what a PDF is. I know what a PDF is, but I don't know what it stands for. You don't know what a PDF is. What does PDF stand for? Portable document format. There you go, portable document format. Portable document format. That makes sense.

But what a URL is cool. So it tells you exactly where something is on the internet. What's a YMCA? It's a fun song. Yeah, better than ABBA. So that whole thing, so you joked about the www. So when you've got something like http://www.website.com slash file.pdf, that's telling, that looks like a bunch of gibberish,

but it's actually saying we're going to use the hypertext transfer protocol. It's on the World Wide Web. We're going to go to this computer, which is example.com, and we're going to get this file, test.pdf. And it's basically just the coordinates. Like you're on a map or like you're looking at an old phone book, it's the coordinate

of that exact file sitting on that exact computer. And it could be anywhere in the world. And that's that common standard that's so cool. And then how does the World Wide Web differ from the internet? I thought it was the same thing. Yeah, so that's that common standard that's so cool. And then how does the World Wide Web differ from the Internet? I thought it was the same thing. Yeah, so that's a common misconception. Idiot first. Yeah.

I know, I'm a loser. Yeah, I don't think you should kick yourself for not knowing that. And in some ways, that's because the Web is so successful that for most of it, it's synonymous with the Internet. We use the Web, we use the Internet internet they kind of seem pert and parcel but the best way to think about it is that the web runs on the internet alongside your email alongside file transfer alongside other things and so the internet is lots of things and the web is just one sort of platform or program that runs on the internet. Oh, so like websites are on the web, but your email is on the internet. That's right.

Okay. And like, so iMessages are on the internet, but they're not on the web. That's correct. Yeah. It's all these different protocols and all sorts of things. Yeah. Just get to the page question. You're going to be disappointed with that one.

I don't know. How do you get five points? And so, and then who invented the World Wide Web? Guy in Scotland's son? The guy in Scotland? Why would he lie to me? You're getting closer. You're getting closer.

So not a Scotsman, but an Englishman. We're almost done. Yeah. Sort of the Commonwealth. I think I guessed Alan Turing, but I reckon that's right. We'll see. Yeah. So it's actually, in this case, we know there's one person who invents the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

So he wasn't a sir then. He becomes a sir because he invents the World Wide Web. Wasn't a CERN then. He becomes a CERN because he invents the World Wide Web. Basically, Tim Berners-Lee is a researcher at CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. And, you know, CERN is this too much information kind of place. It's on the border between Switzerland and France. It has the Large Hadron Collider, which is one of these just monumental billions and billions and billions of dollars of smashing particles into each other and see what happens. And what happens at CERN is that it's so confusing. You've got researchers from all over the world. They come there for six months. They come there for a year. They've got databases.

They've got information. And it's really, really confusing. And so Berners-lee is there he says there's got to be a better way to organize all of this activity and all of this science and as early as 1980 he starts developing these programs um this program that's based on the idea of hypertext and so hypertext is this idea it's been around since 1945 actually um and it's this idea that instead of reading information linearly we should connect words and ideas and documents to each other you know throughout so it's like when you're on wikipedia you can start clicking links and then suddenly you know 15 clicks later you're on some wikipedia page on some topic you never even knew existed because you're just following connections between information so berners-Lee thinks hypertext might be a way to

organize information. He works on it. And then actually in 1989, he writes a proposal. This is why academics like the history of the internet, because it's proposals and stuff like that. And he writes a proposal called information management. He says, I need money. I've got this idea to connect information. In this document, he lays out the basic infrastructure of what the World Wide Web will look like. His boss famously sees it and says, he writes vague, but exciting, tepidly funds Tim Berners-Lee develops the URL, develops hypertext transfer protocol, develops hypertext markup language or HTML, which is how we still design all of our websites today, launches the first web browser, and then suddenly the web is off to the races. So it really is like 1989, 1990, there's this moment where Sir Tim Berners-Lee develops this. And what did he call the first browser? Well, it wasn't very original. The first browser was called World Wide Web.

It wasn't Explorer. I had an internship with like a seagrass when I was getting my biology degree and it was a seagrass internship, counting seagrass stuff. And they asked me if I could make a website. When I was doing the interview for it, they were trying to choose who could get the internship and they said do you have any

experience building websites and i just really need the internship and i said yeah zero experience doing that and they go yeah we need to build this website for our seagrass uh research i said yeah so there was like a week where they sat me in front of computer and i go here you go this is what we need and they gave us a lot of stuff and i knew like how to do two things all i did was like put a picture of seagrass up there. I put seagrass. And I was like, yeah, I haven't gotten very far in this. Because I'm like, Cody, is there something wrong with this computer

or whatever? And then they were on to me. Now you can get away with that because you could just Google how to do it. I've got a Wix. I've got a Wix. They didn't have Wix back then. Yeah, I lied. Thanks, guys.

Thanks for giving me the job. So thanks to Sir Tim berners-lee you could get that job that's good yeah i lied all right what was the first thing put on the internet yeah what was the first image uploaded to the web and what was it uh was it alan turing it was not alan turing um would have been a good one though unfortunately that would have been a nice nod yeah you know he stopped titler from winning i'm just saying so so in keeping with the origins of the world wide web it's actually it's a pretty ridiculous picture it's a picture of a parody rock group at the european organization for nuclear

research they horrible cernets and it's uploaded in 1992 so it's sort of just what a parody research scientists that's what they chose like this they they'd had no foresight to be like all right guys this is gonna be very important you couldn't put it like i'm not religious but a picture of jesus yeah even a cat hanging from like a branch like hang in there or something like anything wow there's no there's no one small step for man, one large, it's just a picture of a parody rock group from the research group. Now the first page on the worldwide web was recently 1991. This is going to be good for sure. Was it mnms.com?

Again, I don't think they realized what they were doing when they made their first website. So the first website was a website about the World Wide Web. It goes live in December 1990. You are on the World Wide Web. Welcome. And it basically, like the trick is you set up this network and you need other people to build websites. So it does make sense that the first website is going to be, hey, welcome to the web. Here's how you can join the web too. And it's it's got instructions hey this is how you can set up your second site was porn probably they wouldn't have taken them long about the worldwide web i'm bored uh sorry and you were saying something no no no i just again now here we go jim i don't know if you're

right what was the first uh ever item sold on ebay was it pez dispensers no no so here i'm sad i'm sad i went to the bloody factory so so the the first ever item so i'll talk about the first item then i'll talk a bit about pez um so the first ever item sold on ebay is actually a broken laser pointer um it's not as good as a pen the beginning of the internet web sucks surprise that lasted it says here ebay grew from one man's idea i thought it was a woman ebay started in 1995 and as an idea for collectors to buy and sell Pez dispensers. Founder Pierre Omidyar began eBay as a favor to his girlfriend. But the first thing that was sold on it, broken laser pointer. Why?

Well, Ian's telling us. All right, he tell us. So this is a Canadian. So there's your Canadian content. Ooh, I got this laser pointer that's really stuck in my house. It used to entertain the cat for a while, but now even he's bored. I have to get rid of the clutter. So it's a Canadian.

And, you know, again, it's not the best story. He didn't want to buy a new laser pointer for $30. He saw that there was a broken one on sale for $15, said, I could fix that. He bought it. And then apparently 20 years later, so in 2015, he was still using it. So that was good. But the Pez dispenser story is annoying because that was the story of eBay. what that was the story of ebay and basically i think that ebay wanted to have a really good origin story that wasn't the first thing that we sold was a broken laser pointer um yeah you know

they they wanted a story and so much of even what i've been telling you today right is like people writing research proposals in labs developing this thing and i think ebay they said let's have a really good story. The Pez dispenser story is amazing where, you know, his fiance was collecting these things, wanted to trade Pez. So I created this platform. And, you know, I'm not an expert on the history of eBay, but I'm pretty sure it's convincingly shown that it was a fake story,

that it was really a marketing story. So did Omidyar invent it though? Because they say he's now worth $11 billion. convincingly shown that it was a fake story that it was really a marketing story so did omid omid yard invent it though because they say he's now worth 11 billion dollars so he must have had something to do with it oh yeah yeah he invented ebay he's he's the founder of ebay but the pez story was was not a true story what was he just like so he made the site and then then nothing is selling one bloke puts up the laser pointer? Yeah. And what does eBay mean? What's the name?

Well, this is actually, I was joking when I saw this question, because this is the perfect example of why history is never as fun as you think it's going to be. So Pierre Amadier had a company called the Echo Bay Technology Group. He wanted to call it EchoBay.com. Somebody else had taken it, so he called it eBay. And that is a perfect example of I wish I had a fun answer for you. eBay sounds better than EchoBay. He goes, eBay, or as it was

first known, Electronic Bay, began on Labor Day 1995. It was quite rudimentary by today's standards with no guarantees, no fees, no third-party interactions. So I don't know i don't know there's a lot of this says echo bay here it all says it's all on wikipedia it's all pez baby who who developed uh email um was it an australian in 1982

it was not um but you know what there probably was i'm a canadian uh you know the original internet was that fucking thing on the end of a bit of string that crocodile dundee swung around his head on top of the hill to make the original fellas know what was going on that that was the originally that was the original internet possibly you know i mean i think the development of email is a bit of a trick question there probably was an australian somewhere who did it because you know as soon as people network computers together people figure out how to leave files for each other right so people leave files for each other so you log into the

computer you leave your file a message to the next user, they read it. That's kind of how email begins to grow. But probably the main milestone in the development of email is the ARPANET. In 1971, there's a guy called Ray Tomlinson, and he developed a program called SendMessage. He invented it in 1971 and the the big thing that that's new about that is that's where we got the at sign so the at sign he says let's put user first then you have the at sign then you have the name of the computer i've never understood the at sign why are they trying to shorten at because you know you have to go control above the two it's much more difficult than writing at

well for this purpose it's assembly you need it to separate it yeah yeah i just write at i don't conform to your emails aren't getting there probably by the way i'm on ebay inc and on the our history tab it says a story is circulated that pierre created ebay to help his wife collect pez candy dispensers but later it's revealed that the story was a fabricated one so straight from yeah but that's big ebay trying to squish it so you go to the fucking pez museum they have a different story to tell yeah that makes sense still go to the pe PES exam. Still good times. Why is computer junk mail called spam? Is it because no one likes spam? You know what?

I'd give you part marks for that one. In short, it's because nerds are the first users of a lot of these networks. And what do nerds like? Oh, spam. And why do they like spam? Because nerds are unhealthy people who can't cook. So it's close. So nerds really like Monty Python.

Oh, spam a lot. Okay. Yeah. So there's a Monty Python sketch. You know, there's a spam restaurant and customers come in and everything is spam. And they keep saying spam over and over again. And it's annoying. But if you like Monty Python python i guess it's funny um and so if you're a nerd and you're a monty python fan and you want to annoy your other computer users you might write a script that

suddenly their computer begins filling up spam spam spam spam and you're all laughing because you're putting the word spam around so that's's basically where the nomenclature for spam email comes from is people would originally annoyed each other with messages that said spam just became sort of the way that you'd also describe any message that came in. I wonder whether Cleese knows. Next time I see John, I'm going to tell him. Yeah, you invented spam. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do like the first spam email I think arguably was sent in 1978.

It's like a computer salesman who uses the ARPANET to tell people to come to his product demo. And I like this story because he sends spam. But, of course, it's the ARPANET in 1978. So like an Army major comes on the network and yells at him like, get off the network. Don't send, don't send junk mail. He replied all.

I'm going to say that John, I'm going to go, John, do you know why we have spam in the, on, on your emails? And he'll go, no,

I'll go. Cause nerds like you. What was the first live stream of? Was it a picture of a cat playing a piano no no i again the history is a little bit boring and history is a little bit annoying so probably the first live stream in 1993 somebody streams a movie over the internet um very clunky i want to say like two or three frames a second like it's a very slow janky video and they do it and then the big the big breakthrough in streaming what movie oh i i'd have to google it uh it's like a some long title it's a movie you've never heard of it's it's a movie science fiction movie developed for this purpose right um and then in 1995 the

i think the seattle seattle mariners and a new in a New York Yankees game gets streamed through Real Player, which is sort of an icon of the early. So that was like the first real legit. First like big commercial breakthrough of, you know, we could make money on this. Yeah. Why did Australia ban forwarding emails in 2001 and was it a privacy thing that's what jim thinks kind of so in some ways this is a false flag this was there was a media slap in 2001 in australia um where there was a fear that if you forwarded emails you would fall off all the foul of copyright law and so there was this big, you know, it was a media sensation, kind of went viral in 2001 saying Australia has just banned forwarding emails. And then I think

their attorney general clarified that really, if you were forwarding an email that was an original literary work, so if these were emails that were so profound and were like your novels and your intellectual property, if you forwarded that, you might be infringing their intellectual property. You might fall afoul of copyright. But of course, everybody continues to forward emails. And most of the stuff we forward on the internet is not at the level of an original literary work. So if you're in Australia, you can still forward emails and you don't have to worry about getting arrested. And then was it true that the first webcam was set up to monitor a coffee pot yes yeah basically it was a group of people they they said whenever we got up and left our desk

to go look get coffee and saw it was empty we were sad and so they set up a webcam and took a picture of this coffee pot and you could sit at your desk and time your your trip to the coffee room accordingly all the fun we had and then it was porn everyone everything devolved to porn eventually all right um now is a part of our show called dinner party facts we ask our expert to give us some interesting or obscure fact that our listeners can use to impress people about this subject what do you got for us so my favorite dinner party fact um i mean historians we don't get invited to many dinner parties um is you know people and maybe i'm dating myself so there's a meme remember series of tubes there was the late

american senator ted stevens and he said the internet isn't is a series of tubes and everybody made fun of him and said look at the old man he doesn't understand the internet he said, the internet is a series of tubes. And everybody made fun of him and said, look at the old man. He doesn't understand the internet. He said it's a series of tubes. What a joke. And so my dinner farty fuckers think, eh, yeah, he was right. The internet really is a series of tubes. Tubes that run under oceans, tubes that run underneath our parking lots, tubes that connect our buildings.

It's a useful reminder that well it seems like the internet is just out there it's the ether it lives in the air like the internet really is there there's computers there's cables there's power cans and string and the tin can and string metaphor is better than the cloud like if at least a tin can and a string actually don't fucking i'll never do a podcast in the cloud bloody Bloody clouds, useless fucking thing. I de-cloud as soon as I bloody stupid cloud. De-cloud it. No one understands it.

No one knows what's going on. Clouds are pain in the neck. How do you really feel? Dr. Ian Milligan, thank you for being here. You can find him at his website, www.htp.com. No, it's ianmilligan.ca. That's his website. And he tweets once in a while, at ianmilligan1.

Check out his book. It's called The History in the Age of Abundance, How the Web is Transforming Historical Research. Thank you for being here today. Thank you, Dr. Ian. If you're ever at a party and someone comes up to you and goes, ah, the internet's just a bunch of tubes, go, I don't know about that, and walk away.

Good night, Australia.