I watched the talked hosted by the Jepson Leadership Forum on September 27th online. This was the first in the series named “Truth and Representation in the Internet Age”. Katie Hafner was the speaker discussing the history of the Internet and how it emerged. She was on the staff of the New York Times for ten years writing about technology, healthcare, and society. Throughout her life, she had written many books and her most prominent one being “The Origins of the Internet” which she had written with her late husband.
She first started off the talk by showing the audience a graph of the number of hosts on the Internet. Before 1995, the slope remained relatively constant and then spiked from the years 1995-2000. As of now there are about 150 billion hosts on the Internet. She then debunked many of the myths, one being that the Web and the Internet were the same thing, which I though so. One name that I felt frequently came up was Paul Baron who invented packet switching. Packet Switching is the idea of taking a message, dividing it into packets, sending them away on a network, and then they reassemble at the destination. Throughout the talk she used different technology terminology that I had never heard of before and she did a really good job of explaining what it was. Katie brought up how everything seemed to have aligned to create the perfect situation for them to create the Internet. This reminded me of the idea we talked about in class of leaders being born in the right place at the right time.
Katie ended her talk with a quote from her interview with Larry Roberts. She had asked him what he believed the biggest problem with the Internet would be. He replied that in 2018, he believed that the biggest issue would be network security and that it would take a lot of work to solve this problem, which currently does not have a solution.
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