Part V – Networks, Web & Platforms

How computers learned to talk to each other: packet switching, the ARPANET, TCP/IP and DNS, email, and Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, which reached the public through Mosaic and Netscape. It continues with Wi-Fi and mobile networks, relational databases from Codd to Postgres, and the cloud platforms that now host most of it.

Networking Pioneers

• Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn — TCP/IP and Flag Day 1983
• Ray Tomlinson — network email as an unauthorized side project, the @ sign, Creeper and Reaper, and 45 years of declining to call it important
• Norman Abramson and ALOHAnet — the first wireless packet network (Hawaii, June 1971), the ALOHA protocol, 1/(2e), and the road to Ethernet
• Jon Postel: The God of the Internet — RFC editor for 29 years, IANA in one person, Postel’s Law, and the 1998 root redirect that ended the benevolent-dictator era
• David Mills and NTP — the blind engineer who taught the internet’s billions of clocks to agree on the time, then quietly maintained it for decades on almost no money
• Radia Perlman and Spanning Tree — the 1985 protocol that keeps every Ethernet network from looping itself to death
• Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web — “Vague but exciting”: the 1989 CERN proposal that became the web
• Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos — Cascading Style Sheets, proposed October 10, 1994, three days before Netscape’s font tags; CSS1 in 1996, the Acid2 test, and the cascade as a treaty between author and reader
• Marc Andreessen and Netscape — Mosaic, the Netscape IPO, and the first browser war
• Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia — Nupedia’s failure and the January 2001 side project that became the world’s encyclopedia
• Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive — sold two startups to fund the web’s memory: one trillion pages in the Wayback Machine, and the lawsuits that besieged it
• Dave Winer and RSS — blogging infrastructure, the enclosure element, and podcasting made possible

The Network

• ARPANET: Building the Network — Larry Roberts, BBN, and “LO” on October 29, 1969
• Louis Pouzin and the Datagram — CYCLADES, the stateless subnet, and the French network that lost at home and won in TCP/IP
• Hubert Zimmermann and the Seven Layers — the OSI reference model, the committee that built it, and the vocabulary that outlived the protocols
• The Connected World — from packet switching and ARPANET to TCP/IP and the World Wide Web
• The Domain Name System — Mockapetris’s 1983 solution to the HOSTS.TXT scaling crisis
• Top-Level Domains: Countries, Cash, and Ghost Domains — .arpa, .su, .yu, .tv, .ai, .io, and the 2012 opening of the root
• Email: The Killer App — Ray Tomlinson’s 1971 @ convention and email’s paradoxical survival
• The Browser Wars — Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the web’s front door
• The AOL Era — 26.7 million subscribers and the most disastrous merger in media history
• Hedy Lamarr and Frequency Hopping — Hollywood’s biggest star co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum with George Antheil in 1942
• The History of Wi-Fi — 802.11 and the standard nobody expected to dominate
• Bluetooth — from Ericsson’s 1994 cable replacement to 5 billion devices shipped annually
• Tor and Anonymity Networks — onion routing, Silk Road, and the technology that protects both dissidents and criminals
• PLATO and the Birth of Online Community — Illinois, 1960: plasma displays, touchscreens, message boards, chat, and multiplayer games years before ARPANET grew a culture
• Donald Bitzer — wrote the PLATO proposal in a week in 1960, co-invented the plasma panel in 1964 so the screens could remember themselves, ran CERL for 29 years, and got an Emmy for the television that followed
• Ray Ozzie — PLATO Notes rebuilt as Lotus Notes (1989), the first commercial public-key software, Groove, Gates’s successor as chief software architect, the 2005 disruption memo, and Red Dog, which became Azure
• Usenet: The Original Online Community — store-and-forward newsgroups, the FAQ, the troll, and the Eternal September
• BITNET, CSNET, and the Academic Networks — THEORYNET, Landweber’s CSNET, the IBM-mainframe BITNET and LISTSERV, EARN, and the NSFNET regionals
• IRC: Internet Relay Chat — Oulu 1988, channels and nicks, and the roots of Slack and Discord
• Instant Messaging: From ICQ to Signal — buddy lists, the XMPP federation that almost won, WhatsApp’s $19B SMS coup, and the encryption era
• Mosaic: The Browser That Made the Web Mainstream — the 1993 browser whose inline images turned the web into a mass medium
• The History of Web Design — nested tables propped open with one-pixel GIFs, CSS standardised in 1996 and unusable until 2000, the Zen Garden’s 218 skins of one HTML file, and a real layout system arriving in 2017
• Data Communication Prehistory: Telegraph, Morse, and Teletype — the 130 years of encoding, multiplexing, and store-and-forward that the internet inherited
• The Modem and the Carterfone Decision — radar data over phone lines (1949), Bell 103, Tom Carter’s 1968 FCC victory over AT&T, the Hayes AT commands
• The Fax Machine — Bain’s 1843 pendulums, Caselli’s Paris–Lyon service, Wirephoto, Rudolf Hell’s Hellschreiber, the Japanese-made Group 3 standard, Japan’s ministries refusing to give it up, and the Post Office’s Speed Mail
• Cellular Networks: From 1G to 5G — the cell concept, GSM and the SIM, CDMA, LTE, and 5G’s bandwidth-and-hype
• The Smart Card — Gröttrup and Dethloff’s identification switch, Moreno’s French card, Bull’s microprocessor card, ORGA in Paderborn, the SIM, and the Tron case
• GPS and Satellite Navigation — Sputnik’s Doppler shift, four satellites and a fourth unknown, Einstein in the engineering, and the day Selective Availability died
• The Cambridge Ring — Wilkes’s 10 Mbit/s slotted ring, two-byte minipackets, the Cambridge Model Distributed System, the Fast Ring, and why Ethernet won
• BGP: The Three-Napkin Protocol — Lougheed and Rekhter’s 1989 lunch in Austin, AS 7007, Pakistan Telecom and YouTube, Facebook’s 2021 withdrawal, and RPKI

Web Platforms & Applications

• The JavaScript Revolution — Brendan Eich, ten days, a browser monopoly
• ChromeOS and the Browser-as-OS — Sundar Pichai’s project and the Chromebook’s K-12 dominance
• Digital Maps and GIS — Tomlinson’s 1963 GIS to Google Maps to OpenStreetMap: how cartography became a software feature and location became an economy
• The API Economy — Salesforce, REST, Stripe, and Twilio as invisible economic infrastructure
• The Browser Extension Ecosystem — Greasemonkey, AdBlock, uBlock Origin, and Manifest V3

Data & Cloud Infrastructure

• Edgar Codd and the Relational Model — the 1970 paper IBM ignored long enough for Oracle to read it
• Charles Bachman and the Integrated Data Store — the first DBMS, built at GE in 1963 to run a factory; the CODASYL network model; the OSI committee chair; the 1974 debate Codd won
• Leslie Lamport and the Science of Distributed Systems — logical clocks, Byzantine generals, Paxos, LaTeX, TLA+, and the 2013 Turing Award
• SABRE and Airline Reservation Systems — two Smiths on a plane, SAGE’s architecture for airline seats, PARS and TPF, and the 1984 rules against ranking your own flights first
• Jim Gray and the Transaction — System R, ACID, the five-minute rule, the fourth paradigm, and a disappearance at sea
• Michael Stonebraker and Postgres — Ingres, PostgreSQL’s origins, nine startups, and the war on “one size fits all”
• Jeff Dean and Google’s Infrastructure — MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, Google Brain, TensorFlow, and the “Jeff Dean facts” meme
• The Database Revolution — Codd’s relational model, SQL, Oracle, and the NoSQL challenge
• The Database Wars — Oracle’s monopoly, MySQL/PostgreSQL’s insurgency, and Snowflake’s record IPO
• The Big Data Revolution — MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, and more data than any database could hold
• The Cloud Wars — AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP: market share, pricing, and the AI infrastructure race
• Content Delivery Networks — Berners-Lee’s congestion challenge, consistent hashing, Akamai and Danny Lewin, Cloudflare — and the paradox of the centralized edge

Mobile & Cloud Era

• The Mobile Computing Revolution — from the Newton and Palm to the iPhone and Android
• Android: The Dominant Mobile OS — the camera-OS startup Google turned into the most-deployed OS on Earth
• The Cloud Computing Era — virtualization, AWS, containers, and the invisible infrastructure
• The Rise of the App Store — Apple App Store (2008), the 30% cut, and Epic v. Apple