THIS FERRARI

The Interplanetary Internet

Some food for thought as we all ponder the ridiculousness of seeing Pluto for the first time.

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) was designed to enable standardized communications over long distances and through time delays. At its core is something called the Bundle Protocol (BP), which is similar to the Internet Protocol, or IP, that serves as the heart of the Internet here on Earth. The big difference between the regular Internet Protocol (IP) and the Bundle Protocol is that IP assumes a seamless end-to-end data path, while BP is built to account for errors and disconnections — glitches that commonly plague deep-space communications.

Maybe it's like the moon landing. You watch that old footage of people sitting in front of staticy TV sets and think, "wow, I bet that really blew their minds," all the while realizing that the year you were born they launched the second space shuttle.  The idea that humans can explore space is natural.

Just so with the internet today. I remember when there was no internet, but more importantly I remember what discovering the internet felt like. There were no real rules, there was no road map, and while the technology was primitive compared to what we've got now, it was magical. The very idea of links held a power that's unimaginable - you can click on this, and it will take you...somewhere. Unless you knew the ins and outs of a browser or the basics of HTML (which, unless I'm way off base here, not that many people did in 1997), you were at the whims of the website, you went where it took you. There was no concept of a standard practice, you didn't expect anything in particular. You clicked, you typed, and you saw what happened. If all went well you were amazed.

These days we're hampered with ideas of best practices and have grown accustomed to the web's usual ebb and flow. You hover over a link, you submit a form, and there are preconceived notions of naturally what will follow from these actions, how the web will react to your contact with it. This obviously makes interaction easier, and it's a sign that the internet has become a user friendly and functional place to live, but the dynamic of exploration unencumbered by expectations is something that I miss the from those early days before there was a sense of expected website behavior.

Which is why, when I discovered event.preventDefault() I felt a certain ominous twinge. Default behavior is what allows things to work seamlessly, more quickly, more efficiently. It provides a baseline of experience and expectation, but when relied upon it also hampers creativity. The idea that a simple method could break out of that box of expectation, my mind expanded a little bit, and I was granted a new tiny sliver of perspective on the future.

Growing up I was friends with a kid named Mark Smith. Mark came from a large family of brilliant misfits who all lived in a huge house that to this day I still believe to be haunted, near the lake, a motorhome parked in the driveway. The Smiths were some of the first people I knew to buy a computer. At age 8 I knew nothing about that world. Computers were a thing you used at school maybe once a month to play lame math games. All I really cared about was my NES. But when I asked Mark about this new computer, what it could do, were there games, he floored me with the idea that not only were there games, but you could use this new thing, the computer, to actually make games yourself.

How did this work? Well, as Mark put it, "if you write enough, you can make a game." I've always liked writing, I've always liked games, I've always liked making things, and at 8 probably even more so. This was a revelation. The idea was you write enough, you write, like, a long novel, which in my mind at the time was probably like 80, maybe 100 pages, and you get, I dunno, "Sonic the Hedgehog". What? I was in.

It wasn't until a few years later, having rampaged through a Tandy 386 and landed in the world of Windows 3.11, that I actually picked up "QBASIC for Dummies" and started putting code together, but the impetus then was more or less the same. Friends and I were bored, we liked fooling around, we were geeky to varying degrees, programming felt like a way to have a few laughs and creatively kill some time when we got bored with Magic: The Gathering or it was too rainy for roller hockey. The programs we made, with the exception of Greg's incredibly deep and incredibly buggy text based RPG, "Temple Traveler", never really amounted to anything more than jokes - stupid internal speaker melodies, non-sensical quizzes, and one particularly memorable fake virus that freaked Chris's sister out so much that we ended up - and think of how rare a thing this actually is - rolling on the floor laughing.

While what we made was purely for our own amusement, the idea of tinkering with the workings of a computer was fascinating. The principle and allure of "write enough, and you can create something amazing" still applied, and the seed was planted that someday I would see this through, someday maybe I'd finally sit down and write the Great American Novel, but by then it'd be the 21st century and that novel would be a computer program.