World War 3 and The Man Who Gave The Internet Away

Here is a much-slimmed down version (to half-size) of the piece I read out at the last workshop (for which I apologise!) I think it is much better and, hopefully, easier to understand. (If anyone would still like to see the over-stuffed version, let me know.)

It is a blisteringly hot afternoon in Colorado. The temperature is over 100 degrees in the shade. One place where there is lots of shade is deep within Cheyenne Mountain. Under the sleeping mountain is the eye that never sleeps. This is where the North American Aerospace Defence complex has its headquarters. If you wanted to leave the United States defenceless, this is where you would start – by taking out the headquarters of the Defence complex. And the Cold War is about to get very hot indeed.

Unbearable tensions have arisen between the two Superpowers, not known since the Cuban missile crisis. Fearing an attack, someone in the Kremlin orders a pre-emptive strike. NORAD is designed to withstand a thirty megaton hydrogen bomb within one nautical mile. However, multiple strikes explode over Cheyenne Mountain, vaporising it and its fortress of computers, communication links and staff. The US is blind and defenceless. Only revenge attack is possible. And World War Three has begun.

Or, at least, it could have been like that, and you and I would not be sitting here. But it hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to happen, all because of a very simple idea.

Telephones use wires in circuits to connect a caller. You are, for the duration of your call, given a whole circuit, just to yourself and your friend, to have a conversation. This arrangement is known, for hopefully obvious reasons, as circuit switching. It’s fine, but it does have its limitations, such as someone pulling the plug or blowing the exchange up. This was the problem that faced the United States when it wanted to build a defence system against possible Soviet missile or bomber attack. One big telephone exchange would have been a tempting target.

The Norad Defense system uses a lot of computers and computers can talk to each other in messages that can be chopped up and addressed separately in little packets. This is like sending a book through the post to a friend, one page at a time. Each packet can pick its own route as it feels fit, depending on the circumstances at the time. When all the pages arrive, you can stick them back together as a book.

This idea is known as packet switching, and it makes World War Three much less likely. And here’s why.

If you have enough alternative routes – a network of cables and computers, not unlike a network of cross-country roads – it’s very hard to find one choke-point where you can set up a road-block and stop all the packets getting through. In fact, if you make the system clever enough, so that it can re-route things on the fly and also keep sending copies till one gets through, it’s virtually impossible.

The rules for sending messages in packets are known as protocols. By having all the computers connected together sharing the same rules several things happen. For one – and importantly for stopping a world war – the system is tremendously resilient – you can’t break it easily. If you can’t smash the defence, you’re much less likely to attack. For another, any computer can talk to any other computer because they share a common language. And no one computer is boss. Again, no obvious big target.

Everyone knows that The Internet was invented in the Nineties to give something for teenagers to stay in and play with when they weren’t out wearing hoodies and beating up grandmas. Wrong! The Internet was a network of computers that used a family of protocols called the Internet Protocol, that was first fired up on New Year’s Day 1983. The network got its name from the name of the protocol, not the other way round.

The problem now, once The Internet broke out from its cradle of the Cold War and became available to civilians, was that it was still not very friendly – you had to be a bit of a computer whizz to use it. Fortunately, two people were about to come to the rescue.

Steve Jobs, of Apple Computers, borrowed an idea from Xerox, the photocopier people, to control computers by using a pointer to click on commands on a screen, This was known as a Graphic User Interface, with a pointing device called a mouse. Text you could click on to give a command, such as: "Load a file," was called hypertext.

A few years after this had caught on, the hypertext idea reached an English scientist called Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, the European nuclear research organisation. He thought it would be a neat idea if you could click on hyperlinks made of hypertext to get documents from any other computer anywhere in the world. The Hypertext Transport Protocol was born, and the mish-mash of links around the world’s computers became known as the World Wide Web. It’s so easy to use, even children can navigate it.

The Web makes information accessible via The Internet to a vast number of people, currently estimated at 1.2 thousand million. If Berners-Lee had patented his idea, he would surely now have been a billionaire. But he chose not to. He just wanted to enable people to get at information. He gave the World Wide Web away, free.

Then again, becoming a billionaire is still a small prize compared with preventing a nuclear war.

The End