This was an interesting post with background on the design of the original ARPANET protocols, and the layering architecture developed by its creators.
The IMPs (Interface Message Processors) were the key to interconnecting original four ARPANET sites with a mechanism to allow message interchange between systems that couldn’t speak the same language. They needed a “translator” to sit between each site’s system and the other sites to convert messages into universally-interpretable formats. The entire architecture of ARPANET was an interesting proto-network architecture that’s uniqueness (run by a single entity, BBN / ARPA) allowed it some rigidity in...
New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.
Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of...
Identity management on the internet has been broken for years. We all have 800 distinct logins to different services, registered to different emails with different passwords. Plus your personal data exists in a morass of data silos, each housing a different slice of your personal information, each under a different ToS, subject to differing privacy regulations, and ultimately not owned by you. You sign up for a user account on a service in order for it to identify you uniquely, providing functionality tailored to you. Service providers getting custody of your personal data is a side-effect that’s become an accepted...
The internet broadly lowers friction and barriers to entry. It’s a mantra so well-known in internet businesses that we think whoever hasn’t embodied it isn’t going to make it.
Alex Danco contrasts this perspective with gaming, where that market is these days seen as an innovation zone, doing things that other markets discover and adopt years later.
In gaming, though, friction is part of the deal. You don’t have games at all if you don’t present customers with a challenge. If there’s no challenge or achievement (a type of friction!), then no one ever plays games at all.
Byrne Hobart makes the case for Starlink’s business model:
The line between a vision and a sales pitch is always blurry, and Elon Musk is unusually good at using this to his advantage. There’s a reasonable case that Starlink is just a natural way to amortize the fixed cost of SpaceX’s investment in launch infrastructure. But a sufficiently compelling sales pitch has a way of coming true, and if part of the pitch of Starlink is that it’s a censorship-resistant communications medium that creates access to the global Internet, not individual countries’ more...
Reason Magazine has put together a 4-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement, the early-90s collective of hobbyist computer enthusiasts that believed in an open and free internet. Their philosophies influenced cryptography, bitcoin, and BitTorrent.
This is part 1, a well-produced piece on an important phase of internet history.
Investor Esther Dyson published this piece in her Release 1.0 newsletter in 19941. It’s a look forward at what the market for content and digital goods with the rise of the internet.
These were the days of CompuServe and AOL, when you had to pay by the hour for access to the net. Software was still sold in a box, still on diskettes, and effectively all media was still consumed in print. Even search engines were in their very early days.
Dyson is prescient here, with some amazingly accurate predictions about how...
Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology:
I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.
Ben Thompson posted this a few days ago, something I’m glad to see getting so many likes and retweets:
Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not just a social media account (which are great for promoting blog posts).
Even as it’s gotten so easy to publish your own content with Wordpress, Substack, Ghost, and even GitHub Pages, we live in a time when personal property on the open web is in decline. The...
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for “power users of the web.” Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle.
I’m a couple of weeks into using it and it brings an interesting new approach to the world of bookmarking tools like Pinboard or Raindrop, bothof which I’ve used a lot. Raindrop has been my tool of choice lately, but it’s heavy for what I really want,...
The winds of internet privacy1 shift all over the place. Certain technologies like encryption have given us important moves forward in security, but then big platforms like Facebook or a million small ad tech outfits have taken us the other way with invasive trackers and mishandling of data they shouldn’t have and most of the time don’t need. But the prevailing winds over the past few years have moved, on net, positively toward a focus on protecting personal data.
The nuclear options deployed by the pro-privacy EFF advocate to combat internet creepiness are...
Over the years with my RSS subscriptions I’ve gradually unsubscribed from a lot of “institutional” or corporate blogs and feeds in favor of individuals I’ve found with interesting websites and things to say.
In the early days of blogging it was common to have a “blogroll” in the sidebar to link to friends, colleagues, and your favorite sites, with a focus on other blogs rather than just your favorite websites or products. So I created one with my favorite internet destinations, with all flavors of topics I’m interested in.
A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a new podcast they’re doing together with a unique model: 15 minutes per episode, 3 times a week, only for paid subscribers. They launched with a dozen or so episodes in the can from over the previous month, so I’ve already gone through the back catalog.
As with the open web and individual creators running their own web properties (versus only creating for other platforms like Twitter or Medium), I love to see certain folks in the podcast space pushing for business models that allow them to...
Not that we needed another bookmarking utility, but Memex looks like an interesting take. It’s a browser extension focused on history, bookmarking, and annotation, but all stored in a local database. It has an end-to-end encrypted syncing service, as well.
In 1972 at Xerox PARC, Butler Lampson wrote this memo to the Xerox leadership making the case to produce the Alto computer from Chuck Thacker’s original design. Amazing to think how significant this piece of communication was in the subsequent progress on personal computers and the internet.
At this stage in ‘72, the ARPANET had only been live a couple years, and Bob Metcalfe’s ethernet design was still in the future. And the closest thing to a personal computer at this point was Wes...
The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:
PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was...
This tool lets you plunge back into computing history and read the RFCs published over the years since the early days of the ARPANET. I’ve been reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which tells the interesting story behind how RFCs came to be the medium for proposing standards on the internet.
A few notable ones:
Steve Crocker’s RFC 1 on IMP software (ARPANET’s “Interface Message Processors”, basically dedicated computers for network communication queueing)
Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:
The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.
With the recent Twitter team announcement of bluesky, a research effort looking at creating a protocol standard out of Twitter, this piece is a timely look at a topic on a lot of minds in tech on the risks of the mega platforms, and what to do about it.
There are some great details here explaining the differences between the two. The idea of newer communications platforms morphing into networks of disparate systems with shared protocol standards certainly gets my decentralization nerves tingling:
A protocol-based system, however, moves much of the decision making away from the center...
“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper meaning — a reincarnation of Thoreau’s idea from Walden. This podcast interview is about an essay Rao wrote last year that argues against this idea, a contrarian viewpoint considering the “right” or “intelligent” thing to do is considered to be disconnecting from the vapid, toxic environments of Twitter and Facebook. He makes a compelling case about a continuum of information-light vs. information-dense sources of data, and...
One of my favorite topics on Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, and one that underpins much of his Aggregation Theory, is the role friction plays in economies and cultural forces. Most of the pros (and cons) of internet companies can be tied back to the fact that they took existing businesses or customer demands and removed the friction. Whether it was shipping goods to your door, streaming movies, or communicating with friends, the internet stripped the friction from these interactions for good, but with some downsides that are only recently being realized and understood.
