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In the beginning, there were humans and those humans captured the power of the skies, put it into rocks, tricked those rocks into thinking, and called them computers. But, those computers are lonely. They can't talk to each other. If you want to move data from one computer to another, you write it into a magnetic tape, walk outside, get in your car, light up a dart, and drive it across town. This is called the Sneakernet and for about 20 years, it's the fastest network on Earth. Then in 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a metal ball that literally does nothing but keep and scare Americans. In a panic, the US government creates an agency named ARPA to ensure that they would never be big dorked again. A few years later, a guy at the RAND
Corporation named Paul gets handed a military problem. The Air Force wants to know how its command and control links could survive a nuclear first strike and stay alive long enough to order a counter strike. The phone network of the day runs on circuit switching where two machines reserve one dedicated end-to-end line for the whole conversation. Break any link in the chain and the entire connection dies. Paul is smart. He comes up with an idea. What if instead of a dedicated line, you slice the message into small chunks called packets, uh stamp each one with its own destination address, and let them scramble across the network
independently, each one finding its own route through whatever nodes are still standing before getting reassembled on the other end. He invents what will later be called packet switching and in 1969, ARPA actually decides to build the thing and they call it ARPANET. The first message is sent from a computer at UCLA, 350 mi away, to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. They try to type the word login. The system crashes after two letters. The next thing you know, by 1971, the network connects 15 computers and a man named Ray needs a symbol to separate humans from machines. He brings shame to his family by choosing the @ symbol and inventing email. But, there's another problem.
ARPANET is just one network, but it's lonely, too. There are other networks, but none of them can talk to each other. So, two guys, Vint and Bob, sit down and invent a universal language called TCP/IP. The TCP chops your data into packets and makes sure they show up, and IP gives every machine a numbered address, so packets know where to go. On January 1st, 1983, every machine on ARPANET switches to TCP/IP on the same day. They call it Flag Day, and the internet is born. But, now we have another problem. Remembering numbered addresses is hard. So, that same year, a different guy named Paul invents the Domain Name System, a giant global phone book that
turns human-friendly domain names into the IP address where the computer lives. So, now there's a global network connecting thinking rocks all over the planet. But, it's the last place you'd want to be, since it's only accessible to academics. Then, in 1989, a British scientist named Tim is working at CERN, a particle physics lab in Switzerland. Tim is a smart guy, and he has an idea. All these academics have information trapped on different computers in different formats, and there's no easy way to link any of it together. So, he writes a proposal to fix it. His boss reads it and scribbles three words across the top, "Vague, but exciting."
That proposal was the World Wide Web. Tim goes on to invent HTML, HTTP, and the URL, the first web browser, and the first web server on a computer with a sticky note begging people to not turn it off, because if they did, the entire internet would go down. But, the coolest part is that he then gives it all away for free, because he wants it to belong to everyone. For the next few years, the web is just an ugly wall of blue text until 1993, when a college kid named Marc releases a browser called Mosaic that can display images in line with the words. The browser shows promise, Marc graduates, moves to California, and turns Mosaic into Netscape Navigator, which quickly becomes the most popular
software on Earth. From there, the information superhighway becomes mainstream, and Bryant Gumbel asks, "What is internet, anyway?" on the Today show. Then, Microsoft wakes up, notices the internet exists, and panics. A horn dog named Bill declares war. Microsoft builds its own browser called Internet Explorer and bundles it for free with Windows, which is on about nine out of every 10 computers on the planet by this point. This gets them sued by the government for being a monopoly, but it kills Netscape, whose dying body is scattered to the open source gods and is eventually reborn as Firefox. Meanwhile, normal people are getting online for the first time through a company called AOL,
which carpet bombs the planet with free trial CDs through the mail that 7-year-old me thinks would be fun to microwave. It is. Oh, no. The microwave is on fire. Ouch. Hot. To connect to the internet, your modem dials a phone number, then screams into the line to make a digital handshake. The two modems negotiate a baud rate and modulate ones and zeros into audible tones over a copper line that was originally built for human voices. You top out around 56 kilobytes per second, which means it takes roughly eight minutes to download one song off Napster and give your computer AIDS. And because the modem is hijack line your telephone uses, the second anyone picks up the kitchen phone, their voice gets dumped right on top of the modem signal. The
two modems panic, fail to resync, and the download flatlines. Now, it's the late '90s. Everyone realizes you can make money on the internet, or at least convince other people that you're about to. Investors throw up billions at any company with a dot-com in the name. And so, companies lease OC-3 lines and stuff data centers full of Sun servers to handle traffic that never comes. One company sells pet food online and lights its entire wardrobe chest on fire for a sock puppet Super Bowl ad. Another offers to drive a single candy bar to your door for free. None of it is sustainable, but Wall Street doesn't care until March of 2000, when the bubble pops. When the Nasdaq loses most of its value and thousands of companies
vanish overnight. And sadly, a generation of young men on that Mama Coco have to move back in with their parents. But if you survivors manage to crawl out of the wreckage, the biggest being two guys named Larry and Sergey, who write an algorithm they call PageRank. The idea is to treat every hyperlink as a vote, then weight each vote by how important the linking page is, recursively. So, a link from a famous site counts for far more than a link from your blog. They take this idea, then wire it up to an ad auction, and turn it into the most profitable money printer ever built. Meanwhile, the browser continues to evolve, and some call it Web 2.0. Under the hood, a trick called Ajax lets JavaScript quietly
fetch data in the background with XML HTTP request and update a page without a full refresh. And so, a website can finally feel like an app instead of a pamphlet you need to keep reprinting. And now, it's 2007. Civilization has peaked, but we don't know it yet. A guy named Mark gives everyone their own printing press with a built-in backdoor for shareholders. Around the same time, a guy named Steve pulls a rectangle out of his pocket. It's a phone that runs a real browser with an always-on cellular connection. The information superhighway escapes from our desk into our pockets. And the good news is that we no longer need MapQuest to navigate around the world. But, the bad news is that it'll
eventually rot our children's brains. And that brings us to today. When you visit an average website, you must first accept cookies, decline the newsletter pop-up, dismiss the app download nag, wait for 10 MB of JavaScript download before you can even read the content that probably wasn't even written by a human. But, thankfully, two guys named Sam and Dario ingested the entire internet while tricking the rocks into thinking harder. And now, they're renting it back to us at a premium. But, while some companies are filling the internet with slop, others are trying to clean it up, which brings us to Code Rabbit, the sponsor of today's video. AI can write code faster than ever, but
reviewing 40 files of PR slop still feels like reading your codebase through a paper shredder. A Code Rabbit review turns pull requests into guided walkthroughs. It groups related changes into cohorts, orders them into layers, and adds AI summaries so you can move through the change in an order that actually makes sense. Instead of one giant flat diff, you get what feels like an IDE for your pull requests. Your comments and approvals still go back to GitHub natively, and when it helps, Code Rabbit can generate diagrams in line for call flows, state changes, or schema updates. Over 100,000 open-source projects like Bun and Nuxt.js use Code Rabbit, and you can try it out for free
with the link below. This has been the history of the internet in eight minutes. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
