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In the kingdom of apps and unicorns, Rossotti’s is a rarity. This beer garden in the heart of Silicon Valley has been standing on the same spot since 1852. It isn’t disruptive; it doesn’t scale. But for more than 150 years, it has done on |
在应用程序和独角兽游戏领域，罗索蒂露天啤酒店具有独一无二的地位。自从1852年，硅谷中心地带的这家啤酒店一直坐落在那里，它没有扰乱周围的秩序，也没有扩大规模。但是，150多年以来该酒店做了一件事，而且做得出色：给加州人提供了一个理想的醉酒场所。 |
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During the course of its long existence, Rossotti’s has been a frontier saloon, a gold rush gambling den, and a Hells Angels hangout. These days it is called the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, and the clientele remains as motley as ever. On the patio out back, there are cyclists in spandex and bikers in leather. There is a wild-haired man who might be a professor or a lunatic or a CEO, scribbling into a notebook. In the parking lot is a Harley, a Maserati, and a horse. |
在罗索蒂露天啤酒店漫长的历史中，它一直都是一家前卫酒店、一个淘金客赌博的窝点和地狱天使摩托帮聚会的场所。当今，该酒店被称为“阿??尔卑斯露天啤酒店”，前来光顾的客人仍然像以往一样，鱼龙混杂。后面的露台上坐着自行车骑手和摩托车驾驶员，他们分别穿着弹性纤维服和皮革服装。有一个头发蓬乱的人正在匆匆地在笔记本上记录着，他有可能是一名教授，或者是一个疯子，也有可能是一位执行总裁。在停车场上，有一辆哈雷摩托车、一部玛莎拉蒂轿车和一匹马。 |
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It doesn’t seem a likely spot for a major act of innovation. But 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at on |
这不像一个能够做出重大创新行动的场所。但是，在40年前的8月份，一个科学家小组在一张露天的餐桌上建立了一个计算机终端，并且进行了一项非同寻常的实验，他们用塑料杯喝着啤酒的同时，证明了被称为“互联网”奇怪想法能够行得通。 |
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The internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. |
互联网如此庞大无形，很难想象怎样去发明它。托马斯·爱迪生发明灯泡是容易想象的，因为灯泡容易显形，你可以将其拿在手中，从各个角度去审视它。 |
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The internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we on |
互联网有所不同，它无处不在，但我们只能对其有瞬间的感知。互联网就像圣灵一般：它在屏幕上占有像素，因而显示网站、应用程序和电子邮件，这些都能够使我们知道它的存在，然而其实质部分总是在别处。 |
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This feature of the internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success. |
互联网的这一特性使其看起来非常复杂。你会认为：这样一种无处不在、无形无影的网络，肯定需要具备很高技术精度才能理解。然而，事实并非如此。互联网从根本上来说是简单的，而认识到这种简单性是获取成功的关键。 |
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The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer networkCyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) –and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist. |
发明互联网的人来自世界各地，他们曾经的工作场所很分散，如：法国政府资助的Cyclades计算机网络项目处、英国国家物理实验室、夏威夷大学和施乐公司等。但是，使互联网得以诞生的研究机构是高级研究计划局及其许多承包商。高级研究计划局得到了美国国防部的大力资助，后来该局改名为美国国防部高级研究计划局。如果没有高级研究计划局，互联网就不会存在。 |
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As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mid-1970s. |
作为一个军事机构，高级研究计划局对于创建互联网有着明确的军事动机：提供一种途径，把计算机的运算带到前线。 1969年，高级研究计划局已经建立一个被称为“阿帕网”的计算机网络，该网络连接着全国大学、政府机构和国防事务承包商的主机。阿帕网扩展很快，到20世纪70年代中期，已经包括了近60个节点。 |
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But Arpanet had a problem: it wasn’t mobile. The computers on Arpanet were gigantic by today’s standards, and they communicated over fixed links. That might work for researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park – but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For Arpanet to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world. |
但是，阿帕网有一个问题：它不具备移动性。用今天的标准来衡量，阿帕网的计算机是巨大的，这些计算机之间通过固定的连接点进行沟通，这样的网络可能会为坐在剑桥或门洛帕克的终端机前的研究人员提供帮助。但是，对于部署在敌人领土深后方的战士来说，阿帕网提供不了什么帮助。要想为战场上的部队所用，就必须做到使阿帕网覆盖世界的任何地方。 |
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Picture a jeep in the jungles of Zaire, or a B-52 miles above North Vietnam. Then imagine these as nodes in a wireless network linked to another network of powerful computers thousands of miles away. This is the dream of a networked military using computing power to defeat the Soviet Union and its allies. This is the dream that produced the internet. |
想象一下，扎伊尔丛林深处有一辆吉普车，或者越南北部数英里上空有一架B-52轰炸机。然后，再把这些想象成一个无线网络中的节点，连接着几千英里之外由功能强大的计算机构成的另外一个网络。联网的军队利用计算能力打败苏联及其盟国，这是当时的梦想，然而正是这一梦想导致了互联网的产生。 |
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Making this dream a reality required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of da |
要想使这个梦想成为现实，需要做两件事。首先，要创建一个无线网络，通过无线电或卫星能够在分布广泛的美国军事机器各环节之间转发数据包。第二，将那些无线网络连接到有线的阿帕网上，以便使耗资数百万美元的主机能够为战斗中的士兵服务。科学家们称之为“网际互联”。 |
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Internetworking is the problem the internet was invented to solve. It presented enormous challenges. Getting computers to talk to on |
网际互联是发明互联网时要解决的问题，这一问题给研究人员带来了巨大的挑战。联网相当于让计算机之间互相谈话，这在当时实在不易。让网络与网络之间相互谈话——进行网际互联，但这样又出现了一系列新的困难，因为各网络所呈现出的是奇特而不相匹配的方言。将数据从一个网络转发到另一个网络，就像用北京方言给仅仅熟悉匈牙利语的人写了一封信，还希望对方能够读懂。因此，这行不通。 |
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In response, the architects of the internet developed a kind of digital Esperanto: a common language that enabled da |
为了解决这个问题，互联网的设计师们开发了一种数字世界语——一种能够让数据在任何网络之间传播的共同语言。1974年，名叫罗伯特·卡恩和温特·瑟夫的两位高级研究计划局研究人员公布了一份初步计划。他们利用整个国际网络界进行的会谈，草拟了一份“简单而灵活的协议”，这是有关计算机应该如何沟通的一套通用的规则。 |
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These rules had to strike a very delicate balance. On the on |
这些规则必须要取得一个非常微妙的平衡：一方面，这些规则要很严格，以确保数据的可靠传输；另一方面，这些规则也要足够灵活，以涵盖数据传输可能需要的所有其他途径。 |
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“It had to be future-proof,” Cerf tells me. You couldn’t write the protocol for on |
瑟夫告诉我说：“协议必须是面向未来的。”你不可以起草适合某个时间节点的协议，因为那样很快就会过时的。军方将不断地进行创新，也会不断地创建新网络、开发新技术。瑟夫称：协议必须要跟上时代的步伐，一定要适用于“天量截然不同的、可能涉及非互操作的分组交换网络，”也要包括还没有发明出来的网络。这个特点不但会使网络系统不会过时，而且会使其具有潜在的无限性。如果这些规则足够健全，这种“集成网络”就能够无限扩展，将所有的数码形式吸收到它那不断蔓延的多线程网格中。 |
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Eventually, these rules became the lingua franca of the internet. But first, they needed to be implemented and tweaked and tested – over and over and over again. There was nothing inevitable about the internet getting built. It seemed like a ludicrous idea to many, even among those who were building it. The scale, the ambition – the internet was a skyscraper and nobody had ever seen anything more than a few stories tall. Even with a firehose of cold war military cash behind it, the internet looked like a long shot. |
最终，这些规则成为互联网的通用语言。但是，他们首先需要一遍一遍又一遍地推行、调整和测试。有关互联网的创建，不存在什么必然的结果。对于许多人来说，甚至在那些正在创建互联网的人来看，这似乎是一个荒谬可笑的想法。拿那种规模、那种雄心打个比方：互联网是一座摩天大楼，而大家都从未见过高于数层的楼房。即使在冷战期间有军事款项对此进行源源不断的支持，但是互联网看起来仍然是一个风险巨大的项目。 |
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Then, in the summer of 1976, it started working. |
后来，在1976年夏天，互联网开始运行了。 |
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If you had walked into Rossotti’s beer garden on 27 August 1976, you would have seen the following: seven men and on |
如果你在1976年8月27日走进罗索蒂露天啤酒店，你会看到如下情景：一张桌子旁有七男一女，他们徘徊在一台电脑终端机周围，那位妇女正在打字；两根电缆从终端机通到停车场，钻进一辆大型灰色面包车里。 |
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Inside the van were machines that transformed the words being typed on the terminal into packets of da |
面包车里有机器，这些机器将终端机上正在打出的词语转换成数据包。然后，面包车顶上的一根天线将这些数据包作为无线电信号发射出去。这些信号在空中 穿过发射到附近山顶上的一个中继器上，在这里信号经过加强之后继续进行转播。经过额外的加强，这些信号能够一路到达门洛帕克，被那里一幢办公楼上的天线接收到。 |
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It was here that the real magic began. Inside the office building, the incoming packets passed seamlessly from on |
正是在这里，真正的奇迹开始了！在办公楼里，这些接收进来的数据包准确无误地从一个网络传输到另一个网络：从分组无线网传输到阿帕网。为了实现这一跳跃式目标，数据包必须要经历一种微妙的变化——在内容不变的情况下必须要改变形式。想一想水吧：它可以是气态、液态或者是冰，但其化学成分仍然相同。这种神奇的灵活性是宇宙固有的特点，我们是幸运的，毕竟生命要依赖这种灵活性。 |
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The flexibility that the internet depends on, by contrast, had to be engineered. And on that day in August, it enabled packets that had on |
相比之下，对于互联网所依赖的这种灵活性，科学家们不得不进行改造处理。在八月份的那一天，科学家们只能将无线网络中以无线电信号形式存在的数据包转换成有线阿帕网中的电信号。值得注意的是，这种转换完好地保存了数据，数据包也完好无损。 |
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So intact, in fact, that they could travel another 3,000 miles to a computer in Boston and be reassembled into exactly the same message that was typed into the terminal at Rossotti’s. Powering this internetwork odyssey was the new protocol cooked up by Kahn and Cerf. Two networks had become on |
事实上，数据的完好程度极佳，完全可以再传送3,000英里到波士顿的一台计算机上，可以将其再次收集起来，跟在罗索蒂露天啤酒店键入的信息完全吻合。为互联网的这种长距离信息传输提供支持的就是卡恩和瑟夫制定的新协议，两个网络合二为一，互联网能够运行了。 |
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“There weren’t balloons or anything like that,” Don Nielson tells me. Now in his 80s, Nielson led the experiment at Rossotti’s on behalf of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major Arpa contractor. Tall and soft-spoken, he is relentlessly modest; seldom has someone had a better excuse for bragging and less of a desire to indulge in it. We are sitting in the living room of his Palo Alto home, four miles from Google, nine from Facebook, and at no point does he even partly take credit for creating the technology that made these extravagantly profitable corporations possible. |
唐·尼尔森告诉我说：“没有悬挂气球之类的东西以示祝贺。”尼尔森现在80多岁了，他当时代表斯坦福研究院（SRI）主持了罗索蒂露天啤酒店的那次实验，而SRI是跟高级研究计划局合作的一家主要承包单位。尼尔森身材高大，说起话来轻声细语，极为谦虚。很少有人拥有这样值得自夸的绝佳理由，有理由自夸而又不想沉迷其中的人就更少见了。来到尼尔森位于帕洛阿尔托的家中，我们坐在客厅里，这里距离谷歌公司四英里，距离脸谱网总部九英里，可是他始终没有提及创建互联网技术也有他的一份功劳，而正是这一技术使得这些极为有利可图的企业发展起来。 |
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The internet was a group effort, Nielson insists. SRI was on |
尼尔森坚持认为，互联网的创建是群体努力的结果，SRI只不过是研究互联网的众多机构之一。或许，那就是他们感觉不宜在罗索蒂露天啤酒店打开香槟祝贺的原因，为某一个团队索取太多的荣誉会违反国际网络界的合作精神。或许，根本没有举行庆祝活动的时间。戴夫·雷茨是在罗索蒂露天啤酒店进行互联网实验的研究人员之一，他说：他们非常在意实验能否成功，一旦成功之后，他们又非常在意下一步会发生什么。总会有更多的任务去完成：二网合一之后，他们又立即投入到三网合一的工作中——一年多以后，到1977年11月，三网合一的工作取得了一些进展。 |
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Over time, the memory of Rossotti’s receded. Nielson himself had forgotten about it until a reporter reminded him 20 years later. “I was sitting in my office on |
随着时间的推移，人们对罗索蒂露天啤酒店逐渐淡忘。尼尔森自己也忘记了这家啤酒店的事，直到20年后一位记者又使他回想起当年的实验。他回忆道：“一天，我坐在办公室，这时突然响起了电话铃。”电话另一端的记者听说了在罗索蒂露天啤酒店做实验的事，想知道此事跟互联网诞生有什么关系。1996年，美国人正在美国在线公司的聊天室里进行网络性爱，在地球城网站上建立极其丑陋的煽情主页。互联网的发展已经超越了军事的根本界限，已经成为社会主流，人们想知道互联网的起源。于是，尼尔森从自己的文件中查找出几份旧报告，开始回想互联网是如何开始的。他记得当时曾经想到：“事实证明，互联网是具有重大意义的。” |
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What made the internet a big deal is the feature Nielson’s team demonstrated that summer day at Rossotti’s: its flexibility. Forty years ago, the internet teleported thousands of words from the Bay Area to Boston over channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines. Today it bridges far greater distances, over an even wider variety of media. It ferries da |
使互联网具有重大意义的是，那年夏天尼尔森的研究小组在罗索蒂露天啤酒店所证实的那个特性——灵活性。四十年前，从旧金山湾区到波士顿，互联网传送了数以千计的词语，传送渠道跟无线电波和铜质电话线迥然不同。当今，互联网跨过了更远的距离，覆盖了更加??广泛多样的媒体。互联网能够在数十亿个设备之间传递数据，能够在瞬间将我们的微博和交际信息传递到多个网络。 |
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This isn’t just a technical accomplishment – it’s a design decision. The most imp |
这不仅仅是一项技术成就，这还是一个设计方案。尼尔森说：有关互联网的起源，最重要的就是要了解它来自军队。尽管高级研究计划局有着广泛的选择范围，但是该局仍须选择对将来赢得战争有用的技术开发项目。创建互联网的工程师们了解这一点，并据此调整了互联网的功能。 |
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That’s why they designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries around the world. It has hundreds of ships, thousands of warplanes, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles. The reason the internet can work across any device, network, and medium – the reason a smartphone in Sao Paulo can stream a song from a server in Singapore – is because it needed to be as ubiquitous as the American security apparatus that financed its construction. |
工程师们设计的互联网覆盖各地，原因是美国的军队遍布世界各地。在全世界70多个国家的近800个基地，都保留着美国的军队，美军有着数百艘军舰、数千架战斗机和数万辆装甲车。互联网可以在任何设备、任何网络、任何媒体上运行，位于圣保罗的一部智能手机能够顺利播放来自新加坡服务器上的歌曲，其中的原因在于：美国安全机构出资创建互联网的初衷就是，需要让互联网无处不在。 |
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The internet would end up being useful to the US military, if not quite in the ways its architects intended. But it didn’t really take off until it became civilianized and commercialized – a phenomenon that the Arpa researchers of the 1970s could never have anticipated. “Quite honestly, if anyone would have said they could have imagined the internet of today in those days, they’re lying,” says Nielson. What surprised him most was how “willing people were to spend money to put themselves on the internet”. “Everybody wanted to be there,” he says. “That was absolutely startling to me: the clamor of wanting to be present in this new world.” |
尽管互联网为美军提供帮助的方式并不完全像设计师们预期的那样，但是互联网最终将会对美军有用。然而，只有民用化和商业化之后，互联网才能真正腾飞起来。20世纪七十年代，民用化和商业化是高级研究计划局的研究人员从未料到的现象。尼尔森称：“坦率地讲，如果有人说，他们在那些日子里就能够想象到互联网的今天，那么他们就是在说谎。”最令尼尔森感到惊讶的是，“人们竟然如此乐意花钱去上网”。“人人都想上网。”他说，“这一点是绝对让我感到惊讶的：人们都争相置身于这个新世界中。” |
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The fact that we think of the internet as a world of its own, as a place we can be “in” or “on” – this too is the legacy of Don Nielson and his fellow scientists. By binding different networks together so seamlessly, they made the internet feel like a single space. Strictly speaking, this is an illusion. The internet is composed of many, many networks: when I go to Google’s website, my da |
事实上，我们认为互联网是一个独立的世界，我们可以“置身其中”或者“待在其上”，这也是唐·尼尔森和跟他一起搞研究的科学家们留下的一笔遗产。科学家们将不同的网络天衣无缝地接合在一起，使人们觉得互联网就如同单一空间。严格说来，这是一种错觉。互联网是由很多很多网络组成的：当我登录谷歌网站时，我的数据必须通过11个不同的路由器才能到达。但是，互联网是一位出色的织工，它把缝合线掩饰得极为理想，为我们留下的感觉就是一个无边无际、广阔浩瀚的数字宇宙——我们习惯称其为“网络空间”。四十年前，在帕洛阿尔托市外的小山上，这个宇宙初步形成，而且自那以后一直都在不停地膨胀着…… |
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