Hello and welcome to our first real lecture of Internet History, Technology and Security. We're going to start, of course, with Internet history. And I'm Charles Severance. Not all the material is copyright by me, some of it is copyrighted, I put IEEE Computer Society, particularly the articles that accompany some of the video interviews that I produced for IEEE Computer magazine. Richard Wiggins, my television show host, co-host also has graciously given permission to use some of his video. And the Open Michigan folks, Dave Malicke have helped to do copyright clearance on content that is sort of my slides. So that's great news. So, it's going to take us a couple of weeks to go through history and we're going to break it down into some phases. We're going to start at the dawn of electronic computing. I mean computing started, you know, early with abacuses and humans but, we're going to start with the moment that electronic computing, in particular because it was the moment when computing and communication were sort of co-born at the same time. And communication before the Internet became normal. Then early Internet research and then the Internet itself that was academia and then of course for went out into the real world. And then the web, which really took all this connectivity and made it easy to use for everybody. It's really what our view now of this network is, very much through the web. And then from that point forward we look at sort of the commercialization of it and the ubiquity of it and the widespread use of it. So the first picture the first video that I want to show you is a little longer than most of the other videos. It is about Bletchley Park and there are many heroes at Bletchley Park. Of course this was a top-secret code breaking effort by the British government during World War II. World War II, I mean, if you think about it in history, perhaps there is no time in history quite like World War II. If you go back to, well what kind of technologies we were using in 1910 and 1920, to the technologies we were using in 1940, it's an amazing difference, you know, jet airplanes, radio, radar, so many things were invented and made usable and made production quality during that period of time. War, of course, is terrible but it does cause governments to fear for their lives and invest heavily, very heavily in research. And so we, in some sense, even though war is a terrible thing, we sort of benefit from the extensive research. They were trying to solve wartime problems, but they ultimately solved problems that have changed our peacetime world in wonderful ways. So Bletchley Park is north of London, between Oxford and Cambridge, in England. And it's it was a code-breaking effort and at one point there were over 10,000 people working on top-secret efforts to decode encrypted messages initially from Germans as they were using radio. So they called World War II a world war mostly because it touched geographically more than any other war had ever touched, since, before or since, really. You know, Alaska, United States, Italy, Africa, Russia, Japan, Philippines, you know, it, it just, it truly was geographically distributed and it was necessary to do unprecedented communications just to effectively pursue the war. And this meant that communications had to be wireless. And the problem with wireless is anyone can put up an antenna and listen to the wireless signal. There's no way to hide the wireless signal. Unlike a wire, that you could hide it, and if no one had access to the wire, you can't see what's in it. But if you are using wireless, in fast-moving armies and long distances, then someone can intercept the wireless signal, and they can. So the trick of course was to create an encrypted wireless signal so they could see everything you sent, but it didn't make any sense to them. It all sounded like gibberish unless you, of course, know the code. And so this was the, a key technology was building codes and code-making machines. A good example of this was the Enigma made by Germany, which is we'll talk about these in the last part, the very last part of the class, in the security part of the class, how these codes and ciphers work. But they scramble material in a way that's generally unintelligible. And, of course, the really bright folks at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, one of many really bright people at Bletchley Park used, you know, mathematics to, to say, you know, these codes may be more, more crackable than we think. There was folks from Poland who also informed the, them, to say, look, let's show what we did to crack it. Right before Poland was involved, they were working heavily on the mathematics of cracking. And so then they built these machines. And so, in this video that I'm about to show you, it's really, what I tried to do is, I tried to contrast the two machines. And one is an extremely fast mechanical computer, with relays and switches and things that spin and gears that move back and forth. That's a very physical computer that's that's looking for patterns. And as it's spinning it's checking for possible encoding combinations to try to just do a brute force checking of lots of different possibilities. And so it was a mechanical computer. The BOMBE was a mechanical computer. And then as the German encryption improved and they used different techniques with more sophisticated encryption, they just couldn't decrypt it with a mechanical computer any more. So they just were forced to build something faster, and that faster thing was the first truly powerful general purpose electronic computer in the world. Of course it was kept secret until the, certainly kept secret until the 60s and the 70s and much of it was still kept secret until even the 90s. And so its place in history is kind of a recent recent understanding. You can look at early history texts that talk about the first computer and they don't mention this one. Well that's because it was a secret until a long time. So the BOMBE was a powerful mechanical computer. The Colossus was a powerful electronic computer. But I have this picture, it was drawn by an artist for me. And in addition to showcasing, sort of, the moment where a mechanical computer, no matter how hard you tried, wouldn't work fast enough, and the electronic computer was sort of forcefully created out of a tremendous need What's also really interesting is the fact that Bletchley Park during this time, with 10,000 people, had all kinds of people. You know, language experts, mathematicians, engineers, welders, and it's a really cross-disciplinary activity. And they were solving a problem of decrypting German transmissions but they ultimately solved the problem in the pursuit of that, of electronic communications and computation. And so this picture is really trying to show how, you know, Alan Turing was really very critical, but there are other people like Gordon Welchman, Dot Keane, and, and the folks from Poland, that informed all of this. University colleagues, and this whole thing was very much a connected, collective group of really bright people. Highly motivated, well funded, and they created this. So so let me go ahead and and pause now, and let you take a look at, at this film.
