In the realm of unicorns and uses, Rossotti’s is a rarity. This beer garden in the center of Silicon Valley has been standing on the exact same place since 1852. It’sn’t tumultuous; it doesn’t scale. But for more than 150 years, it’s done one thing and done it well: it’s given an excellent location to get intoxicated to Californians.

Today it’s called the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, and the clientele stays as motley as ever. There’s a wild-haired guy who might be a lunatic or a professor or a CEO, scribbling into a laptop. In the parking lot is a Maserati, a Harley, and a horse.

It doesn’t look a likely place for a major action of initiation. Over plastic cups of beer, they demonstrated that a peculiar notion called the net could work.

The web is formless and vast that it’s difficult to envision it being devised. It’s simple to imagine Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is not difficult to visualize.

This characteristic of the web makes it look incredibly complicated. Definitely something so omnipresent yet undetectable must demand heavy technical sophistication to comprehend. The web is basically straightforward.

The people that devised the web came from all around the globe. Without Arpa, the web wouldn’t exist.

As a military enterprise, Arpa had a particularly military motivation for creating the web: it offered a means to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had constructed a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at defense contractors, government agencies, and universities around the state. Arpanet grew rapidly, and contained almost 60 nodes by the mid-1970s.

But Arpanet had a difficulty: it wasn’t cellular telephone. Now’s standards giganted the computers on Arpanet, and they conveyed over fixed links. That might work for research workers, who could sit at a terminal in Menlo Park – or Cambridge but it did little for soldiers deployed in enemy territory. It had to be reachable everywhere on earth for Arpanet to be useful to forces in the arena.

Then visualize these nodes in a wireless network thousands of miles away. This is the vision of a networked military using computing power to conquer its allies and the Soviet Union. This is the dream that made the web.

Making this vision a reality needed doing two things. The first was constructing a wireless network that could relay packets of information by satellite or radio among the widely spread cogs of the US military machine. The second was connecting the wired network of Arpanet and those wireless networks that multimillion-dollar mainframes could serve soldiers in battle. “ Internetworking the scientists called it.

Attempting to transfer information between networks was like writing a letter to someone in Mandarin who just understands Hungarian
Internetworking is the trouble the web was invented to solve. It presented tremendous challenges. Getting computers to speak with one another – networking – had been difficult enough. But getting networks to speak with one another introduced a completely new set of problems, because foreign and incompatible dialects were spoken by the networks. Attempting to transfer information from one to another was like expecting to be comprehended and writing a letter in Mandarin to someone who just understands Hungarian.

In response, the architects of the web developed a sort of digital Esperanto: a common language that empowered information to go across any network. In 1974, two Arpa researchers named Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn released an early pattern.

These rules had to reach an extremely fragile equilibrium. On the other, they needed to be loose enough to adapt all the various ways that information might be transmitted.