Hello. Welcome to internet history, technology and security. I'm Charles
Severance. And I'll be your instructor for this course. So let's start right away.
Like, who do I think should take this course? And the course the answer is you,
You should take this course. Because everyone should take this course. The
network that we touch and use is with us pretty much all the time. Obviously, if
you're watching this lecture. You're watching it over the internet. How does
all this stuff work? Who made it? You know this didn't just grow on trees.
People built this, right? And we're gonna talk about a highly technical thing.
Perhaps the most complex engineering task humanity's ever undertaken, maybe. But
we're not gonna talk from a math perspective, and we're not gonna talk from
a programming perspective. I mean, really, were not going to, we're not gonna push
you on that stuff. We gonna talk about really cool technical things, we're gonna
meet some really cool people, but it's not a technical course. It's a course about
listening and understanding and thinking critically about the people who made the
internet what it is. So it's, we are going to explain some things and ask you to
reflect a bit. So. This is going to include a bunch of oral history. Oral
history that I've gathered. And my co-host on my television show, Richard Wiggins
gathered. Starting in the. In the 90's. Through the, present day I
continue to gather this. And continue to keep asking people who've done amazing
things on the internet. Like, what did it take? How did it work? What were you
thinking? What was innovative. What, what went wrong? Real history's a bit messy.
Real history is not. As simple as a 30 minute PBS special would like it to be
sometimes. Those are actually sort of fun television. We are actually going to hear
from people listen to them a little bit longer. We aren't going to try to collapse
everything into two minute segments. We are gonna listen to these people . Then
we're gonna ask some critical questions about what do we think about the way folks
talk about these innovations. And then the second half of the class we'll really dig
into to how the Internet works. Still avoiding any programming or any technology
or anything complicated. We are just gonna sort of from a. A simple set of metaphors
as we can possibly come up with understand the architecture of the internet and
you'll be fine. You'll be surprised at just how much you understand. So, I always
like to start the first lecture talking a little about me, so you get to know me. I
am a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. School of
Information studies a lot of things. It studies social science like things. Data
and information and technology so we like to say School of Information studies
connecting people information and technology in more interesting ways. And I
as a faculty member have written several books. And I am on the web and you can
follow me on Twitter and I do a lot of traveling. Who knows maybe. Maybe during
this class I'll end up in your country or in your town, and, and who knows, we can
do something. So, if you want, feel free to stalk me on Twitter. I'm, I'm always on
Twitter. So. A big feature of this class is. Videos, particularly the first half
where we're talking about the history. And I was really fortunate in 1995. Really
most people would say that the, the internet and web took off in the, outside
the academic sector in like 1994. And in 1995, I had a television show. It was
sponsored by, TCI CableVision, which is a cable company that no longer exists because
it, because it got eaten by I think AT&T ultimately. But through 1995, from 1995
through 1999 my, me and my co-host Richard Wiggans We would run around with cameras,
and go to conferences and do whatever. Put cameras in people's faces, famous people
who had done things. Now back in the mid 90's, the internet wasn't nearly as fancy
and as important as it is now, so it was really easy to find these people and they
were always happy to talk. So, we got in their own words, the kind of innovation.
So, the people on this slide... On one side here, we have Tim Berners-Lee. Tim
Berners-Lee is the inventor of the world wide web and we'll meet him later in the
history lecture. Right now, we're gonna take a look at a fellow named James Wells.
He was one of the founders of the real audio. And just to kind of give you a
sense of the kinds of things that led me. >> It really inspired me by some of the
people doing some really kind of amazing thinking in this internet was just, first
getting started, so here's, here's James Wells of RealAudio. >> We have sort
of over 700 thousand people who have downloaded the player in a last six
months at a rate of 250,000 per month, so if we just do the arithmetic you will imagine that over
the next six months, there would be many millions of people listening and tens
of thousands of people producing. It allows the idea of what we call narrow
casting. That is to take information in a very inexpensive way and get it to very
specific points of interest and targets. Another large user of, of, of RealAudio
is education. >> Mm-hm. >> You know, distance learning. The ability to, to
provide a learning environment. Over time, and over space.
So that was James Wells of RealAudio. He's got big ideas. One of the things you saw in that video was a
modem. You saw little blinking lights, well that's data moving back and forth.
And, and you know, in 1993 94 95 we used 28 kilobit modems. You know, when you,
when you have your fancy phone and it goes down to Edge. That is 128 kilobits and.
And you think that's terrible. Well. Back in 1992-92 we were using 28. Kilobit,
which is one-third, one-quarter of what Edge is today, and that was, was not much
bandwidth at all but even in that, James Wells has this imagination that we could
squeeze teaching down into little tiny audio and people can take audio classes
all around the world. Now this actually inspired me and it really has become my
research. So I started teaching, using technology much like what we're using
right now, except far less sophisticated. I created this thing called Sync-O-Matic,
and what it did in 1996 is that it sent both slides and audios. See that kind of
scary looking picture of me, that scary looking picture of me sitting there. Ahh,
that guy looks a little bit scary right there. That was my picture, we couldn't
send video. We could only send audio because the connections were so slow back
in 1996. But I sent slides. So I'd give my lectures, I'd record the audio, we'd flip
the slides and there was no drawing on the screen or no fancy things at all. And, and
then in 1999, I switched jobs, went from one university to another and I wrote the
next thing. And, this was a thing I called Clip Board and it's actually very
similar to what we're using today, other than the fact that what we're using today
is much more sophisticated but you can actually draw on, slide, and you could
flip the slide back and forth and you have a pointer and you can type text on the
slider make a blank thing. I had this thing working and I was trying to, To give
it to Apple. I built this on Apple hardware and I tried to give it to Apple
in 1999. And they didn't take it. But, there's now. Things like ScreenFlow and
Camtasia. And, whole bunch of other things that, That do this. And so. This, this
moment where I'm sitting on this television set and I see this guy talking
about the future of education is gonna be over the Internet it really triggered
me, to sort of. Go through a whole series of things to change my research. Area from
what was then high performance computing. So, I'm sitting, you know. Sitting on the
TV set, and I see that education might be a good thing. I immediately go out and I
invent this thing called Sync-O-Matic, and then I invented this thing called ClipBoard.
Click. So ClipBoard, that was sorta 1999 and then I, I couldn't get anybody to buy
into the idea of using this stuff. I mean now it's, obviously we're using it right
now, but I kinda got frustrated, so I decided that what I would do then is work
on a learning management system, Sakai. Some of you actually might have used Sakai
as your learning management system. I was the chief architect of the Sakai project
and instrumental, continued to work with the Sakai learning management system. And
then when I found that Sakai only had reached two or three percent market share. Then I
decided that I was gonna work on interoperability between learning
management systems with the kind of secret notion that I would plug material just
like my recorded lectures into these learning management systems. And so then I
spent a few years, 2007 through 2010, eleven, twelve, with IMS, which is a
standards organization that built standards. And so it's really kind of it's
kind of ironic to be sitting here, in effect, fifteen years later and teaching you
guys with this totally cool, and awesome technology. Called Coursera. Because it
really was. It was the vision that I had and some [inaudible]. I couldn't be more
excited. To be working with Coursera. And so I also have this alter ego Dr Chuck.
Most of my students call me Dr Chuck, the reason I call, I came up with this
nickname was, I got my PhD rather late in life, and I thought that it would be
Hypocritical if I stopped making fun of people with PhDs just because I had one.
And so I, I adopted the nickname, Dr. Chuck. For those of you who wanna go do
some research, the, it wasn't Dr. Phil or, or, Dr. Drew. It was, actually, Dr. Ruth
was the television doctor. So you can go, do some research on who Dr. Ruth is. And
so I got some pictures here about what some of my hobbies are. I play hockey. I
do a lot of travelling. Sakai does cause me to do a travel. I've been around
the world. That, I think, picture there, is like. Three or four years of my travel.
That's what those pushpins are. I ride motorcycles. Off-road motorcycles. On-road
motorcycles. I got--you can go see video s of that. I do karaoke. All of my pictures
of course are not of me doing karaoke, but me taking pictures of my friends when
they're doing karaoke. I wrote a book. Several books. And I also wrote a book
about my experiences in the Sekaya Project. And I'll close with.. A bit of
humorous video that I made that you might have heard of called the "iPad Steering
Wheel Mount." And if you haven't, go ahead and Google "iPad Steering Wheel Mount."
And it's a, a short video that I'm, that I'm curious what you think. So. Next we'll
talk a little bit more about the detail of how the course is going to work, and how
grading's going to work and other things like that. So see you in a bit.