How the Internet Was Born

A short fiction about rural life, the way people related to one another, and how through those simple beginnings, our wonderful worldwide communications network beganl

HOW THE INTERNET WAS BORN

 

In the very early twentieth century, my father was a little boy who lived with his family in a little village outside a little town called Mangalore in India.  It was a tropical paradise, close to the ocean, with rolling hills, plenty of rainfall, coconut trees, rice, cashews, cinnamon and cardamom, nutmeg and many other spices.   There were mangoes and papayas and jackfruit and breadfruit.  The villagers were poor, but did not lack for basic necessities.   Between the hills were lush valleys studded with areca nut trees, and wrapped around the trunks of the trees were valuable vines that produced black peppercorns.  Rich streams separated the valleys; their waters were filled with fish that traveled to and from the ocean.  Only a few people in the village could read and write.  But there was love, kindness and wisdom. Life was good. 

Each village was small, perhaps half a mile or so from the next.   There were no roads, buses, trains, or telephones, and very few bicycles.  Kids would walk barefoot to school.  For most kids this meant walking down a hill, fording a stream, walking up another hill, fording another stream, and so on, braving snakes and sometimes tigers.  Some of the deeper streams had the trunk of a coconut tree thrown across them, a makeshift bridge that required you to balance carefully as you walked across it.    This may seem dangerous today, but then it was simply part of going to school.  Not long after they learned to walk, children would learn how to negotiate a coconut tree bridge.  Kids are kids; if you were a kid, you didn’t know any other life, you just lived with the one you’re given, so you were mostly happy. You often had fun as you crossed, maybe trying to trip up the person ahead or behind.   If you did fall, well, getting wet in those hot, sticky climes was no big deal.   You simply walked to school wet.  You did not carry books, so there was very little damage.  You lost your writing slate and your chalk got soggy, and maybe your lunch was ruined, but these inconveniences were a small price to pay for the entertainment on the spindly bridge.  The school itself had a makeshift blackboard, or simply a wall painted black. There were no desks, no buildings, no walls.   Kids sat on the soft earth in the shade of a cashew or coconut tree.  On rainy days classes were conducted under umbrellas if you could afford one.

My dad’s parents, like parents everywhere, worried about their kids.   They would accompany them to the top of the hill and watch anxiously as the kids made their way down the hill, cross the stream and make their way up the next hill.  Another set of parents would be at the top of the next hill.  When the kids were safely with the next set of parents, my dad’s parents would wave goodbye and go home.   In this manner a growing number of kids would herd together until the kids reached the schoolhouse.  When school was out, the process would be repeated in reverse, with parents posted at the top of each hill watching the kids until they were all safely in the custody of their own parents.  A school would cover perhaps fifteen square kilometers that included twenty to thirty villages dotted through this area. 

The villages themselves were self-contained, but often people had friends in neighboring villages, and it was not uncommon for a girl from one village to marry a boy from another.  As with many small societies, it was verboten to marry someone from outside the small cluster.  Or religion.  Or, obviously, race or ethnicity.  Small groups.  Small ideas.  Close-knit.  Not quite bigoted, but more like innocent and unaware.   If almost all of your life is confined to a small area, you grow up very provincial, protective of your own, and fearful of the world beyond.  Someone outside the circle would be as alien as, well, as a Martian.  It made sense, in a way.  You wouldn’t want your son or daughter to marry a Martian, would you?  Outsiders were unknown, feared, not to be trusted until proven otherwise.

Children wandered off to school, through hills and trees and streams, sometimes minding their own businesses, at other times meddling with others.  Their parents would pack a small, savory lunch for them, wrapped in coconut or banana leaf containers, a little rice with a dollop of dal, a sanna or two, maybe even a piece of fish or a small banana.  On festival eves, a few kul-kuls, a handful of plantain chips, a chakli or rice ladoo.  On these festival eves, a mom would sometimes include a few treats for a friend or cousin in another village.  The kid would take the treat down the hill and up again, until he or she encountered the right parent, and hand it over.  Perhaps in a day or two the cousin’s mom would reciprocate.   This practice caught on.   Families would start to send food not just for the child, but for the child’s family.   Every so often, a mom would, with the help of her child, write a thank-you note.  As with older people today, adults would even then be afraid of modern things, and it was often very hard for a mom to take upon herself to write a note.  Parents did not know how to read or write, and notes had to be written with the help of children.  What should it say?  How long should it be?  What if it is misconstrued?  What if my kid misspells a word and the note ends up meaning something different?  But notes did get written, and in time, people became more comfortable with them, much as texting is becoming more comfortable today.

The food, and then the notes that were exchanged, became more common, and began to be used for other purposes.  A note may say, “Sheela, thank you for the delicious mango pickle.  Did you roast or fry the mustard seeds?”  Next day, or perhaps the same afternoon, through this little self-propelled postal network, the child would bring home a reply: “So glad you liked it!  We use fresh green mustard seeds from our garden.   We use it without roasting or frying.  It’s the freshness that provides the zing.”

The notes gradually became more complex.  “Would you like to join us for dinner next Diwali?  We can send over our bullock-cart.  Please say yes, and please bring any left-over mango pickle you have!”  Or, “Could we borrow that lovely kameez and dupatta that Sita used for the recital last year?  Kamalini loved it, and she’s now about the right size.  We just don’t have the money to spend, and the clothes would make our Kam very happy.  We’ll return it to you right after the Christmas party.  Kam says she’ll be careful not to ruin it.”  And, often as not, in this quiet, friendly community, the clothes would be delivered by child-courier the next day. 

Recipes, engagements, gossip, stories, household tips, even small items such as soap and brooms were borrowed and exchanged through the local network.   Other communities began to adopt it in their own fashion.  It became known as the Working Women’s Welfare Project, or WWW for short. 

The notes were not always friendly and nurturing.  Every so often, a note would read, “Have you noticed Bimala recently?   Has she gained weight, or could she perhaps be…?”  Or, “Those Kamaths!  They poke their noses into everyone’s business.  Just last week Mrs. Kamath asked me whether we’ve started eating beef again!”

Once the WWW became well-known in the village, a few people started using it less kindly.  A particularly offensive parent would stealthily send a bunch of notes to various parents, disguising the notes to keep their origins anonymous.

A note may say, “Do you think that Dilip Rao will stop drinking someday?  It’s impacting the entire village!” 

Or, “You may have won a lakh of Rupees!  The Lord is sure to bless you if you donate one hundred rupees to the Temple.” 

Or, “My uncle was the mayor of Coimbatore, but evil elements forced him to resign.  Fortunately, he was able to put away ten lakhs of rupees in a foreign bank.  If you deposit 500 rupees in the following account in the State Bank of Mangalore, we will make sure that you receive a check for 50,000 rupees in three weeks.”

Or even, “Please make sure to check the spot where Subhash sits in class.   If you find it is wet, please have him wait by the rice fields until it’s time to come home.”  Sheer malice.  Subhash had never wet himself.  Ever.

It was unfortunate.  People had started to usurp the lovely neighborhood network for ugly purposes.   The WWW folk called a meeting.  They began to realize that some people are mean and could threaten their wonderful network.   Some People Are Just Mean became the rallying cry against the offenders, and it was soon abbreviated to SPAJM.   The WWW began an aggressive campaign against SPAJM, and people started to encode their messages to make sure they could tell the genuine from the spurious.  It was partly successful.  However, despite the abuse, the WWW lasted for several years; and despite the coding, the discontents found new ways to send out SPAJM without being detected.   In time the ‘J” was dropped, and the malicious mail came to be known as SPAM.

My aunt Kamalini finished primary and middle-school - the first in her family to do so - then went to a boarding High School several miles away.   She went on to College, earning a degree in Mathematics.  People urged her to keep studying.   She was bright, with a penchant for study and research.  Several universities vied for her, and she ultimately chose Stanford.   At Stanford she got a Ph.D. in statistics.   She wanted to go back to India, but there were few jobs available in India for a person of her immense talent.  But several U.S. organizations were courting her, and she took a position with NACA, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics.  NACA, you may know, was the predecessor of the familiar NASA.  

At the university Kam had spent a lot of time analyzing the stock market and weather, developing algorithms that could predict with great accuracy what these two notoriously complex organisms would do, in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year.   At NACA she spent her time evaluating the practicality and likelihood of space flight, of planetary exploration and eventually, the prospect of humankind moving to colonize other planets.  These bold ventures needed far better communications systems than were available at the time.  She spent a lot of time mulling over what was needed; then one day, she remembered the simple communication network of her childhood.  Village people sending notes and information and things to one another.  People communicating in several patterns.  People socializing through messages.   People keeping informed.  The more she thought about it, the more she felt that she could help create a modern, larger system for open communication.   She presented her plan to NACA, arguing that with thousands, perhaps eventually millions of people and planes and satellites in the air and in space at the same time, there would be a massive problem with keeping track of everything and the likelihood of accidents would keep increasing.  She proposed a flexible, open-ended database, with electronic access and control, with multiple data storage sites, and so on.   She even proposed digital storage and retrieval, a concept largely unknown at the time.  While NACA management was skeptical, they liked her plan and her enthusiasm.  They gambled that no matter what she came up with, it would eventually be useful somewhere somehow.  With the aid of a generous grant, she began slowly, setting up a small system at her beloved alma mater at Stanford.  On rudimentary computers, she began to share notes and data with her friends.   When her superiors discovered that Kam and her friends seemed to be far better informed than their other colleagues, NACA decided to try the network on a larger scale.   Soon, the Inter-Office Network was adopted by all of NACA, and eventually by the U.S. Defense Department.  

Kam remembered her parents’ project of her childhood.  She remembered the wonderful times she and her friends had going to school, the snacks, the sharing, the adventures, the long walks up and down the hills, and the joy of crossing the streams along the way.   In tribute to her parents, her village and her friends, she decided to name the network with the same letters -WWW - as the network of her youth.    But it didn’t seem right to call the system the Working Women’s Welfare Project.  So she came up with the World Wide Web.  And it didn’t take long to abbreviate the Inter-Office Network to, simply, the Internet.  And, of course, Spam is in common use now to identify mail that targets and angers the innocent.

And that, my friends, is how the Internet was invented, by a brilliant member of my family.

Author's Note

Did I convince you? Let me know either way; [email protected]