Chapter 1 — Creeper & Reaper (1971)
Washington D.C. The Pentagon. 1969.
The problem is this: the military needs to connect ships, submarines, and aircraft to a shared communications network. Phone lines are too fragile. A single bomb could sever everything.
The solution — fund a network with no centre. One designed to route around damage.
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network goes live in 1969. Four nodes. UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah.
The design philosophy is elegant and fateful in equal measure:
Trust the endpoints. Keep the network dumb. Route around damage.
Every packet finds its own way. No single point of failure.
This design will connect the world.
This design will also make everything that follows possible.
Bob Thomas & The Creeper (1971)
Bob Thomas is an engineer at BBN Technologies — one of the firms that built ARPANET.
In 1971, he writes a small experimental program. It copies itself from machine to machine across the network, leaving a message on each terminal it reaches:
I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!
It is not malicious. It does not steal data. It does not damage anything.
It is just... curious. An experiment to see if a program can move.
It can.
Ray Tomlinson & The Reaper
The Creeper is harmless. But it is also unstoppable — no one knows how to remove it.
Ray Tomlinson — the same engineer who will later invent email — writes a response program.
He calls it Reaper.
The Reaper travels the same network. Its only purpose: hunt down and delete every copy of the Creeper.
The world's first antivirus. Written before anyone knew what a virus was.
Under the Hood — The Original Sin
Cerf and Kahn formalise the network protocol in 1974: TCP/IP.
The choice they make is not technically inevitable. They could have built authentication into the protocol. They could have required identity verification at every hop.
They do not.
The network is designed to be open and trust-based. Packets do not carry credentials. Routers do not ask questions.
This is why the internet works. It is also why every chapter that follows is possible.
The open design is the invention. The open design is the vulnerability. They are the same thing.
Next: 1988. A graduate student at Cornell makes a mistake that takes down 10% of the internet overnight.
→ Chapter 2: The Morris Worm