Ray Tomlinson needed a character no one was using and found the at sign on his Teletype. The first word sent across the ARPANET crashed the far end after two letters. Then Bob Kahn took a harder problem to Vint Cerf, who had been hard of hearing since childhood and could lipread in three languages: how to join networks that shared nothing. They drafted the answer on a hotel floor in Palo Alto. Jon Postel kept the address book for thirty years, and nobody was in charge.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Ray Tomlinson, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Steve Crocker, Charley Kline, Jon Postel, David Clark, Sigrid Cerf
- The idea it builds
- Packets with a global address forwarded by gateways that read only the header, keeping the network simple and the intelligence at the endpoints.