This evening, as an update on my laptop popped up asking me if I wished to update my software to the security upgrade 10.11.6 version, I thought back to the discussion we had today in my freshman seminar. From last week’s reading to this week’s reading of Hafner and Lyon’s book, we shifted our focus from how the ARPA network pioneers transformed hardware, to how they developed the software for their project to work. How would they program the software to make the host computers, IMPs and connections work? Nowadays, we update our computers once a week and it is amazing to think that, at the time the ARPA net was being developed, software updates in the system would happen several times a day as people were still trying to improve and fix the system – (imagine having to update your computer every day!!). Due to this, many of the host computers stopped working due to the updated in another given host computer.

Another topic discussed that sparked my curiosity was the RFC1 developed by the pioneers. The RFC1 (Request for Comments) was a sort of memorandum that described the methods for communicating between the host computer and the IMPs and it basically set out some rules on how to connect to your IMP. The interesting part for me was the way that the RFC1 was set out. People were “invited” to use the RFC1 to help them, as it would make it easier for them to write on how to communicate with their individual IMPs. They were not, however, obliged to endorse the rules on the RFC1, which had its “tentative agreements”. To interact with the network established, it was vital for a person to follow the rules in order to be able to communicate with this network and participate in this creation.

This brought me to think about the different approaches we can have to situations. Rather than making something an obligation, maybe a better approach would be to “invite” people to endorse your idea, by showing them how much they would benefit from it. This different approach could be used in various situations, from implementing rules to a network, to directing a high school or university.

The Finger command protocol was one that provided the status reports on a particular computer system and allowed one host computer to see who was online in another host computer. Our discussion about this command during the seminar made me really reflect about privacy on the Internet nowadays. To what extent would privacy on the Internet be beneficial? Would it limit how much information and knowledge we get from the Internet, not allowing us access to different opinions, mindsets and perspectives? Or would it be a tool to protect us from any harm that the Internet can bring? I believe this is an extremely debatable topic which many are discussing nowadays with current advances of the Internet.

To finish off today’s reflections, it is astonishing to realize how the Internet grew throughout the years. In November 1969, the first ARPANET link was established between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at Stanford and the ARPANET pioneers eventually formed their network to sustain 32 computers. 32 computers to us seems an extremely small number, as less than 50 years after this first ARPANET link, we find ourselves in 2016 with millions of computers available, all functioning, interconnected and vital in our day-to-day life. It was startling to hear, during the seminar, the recent example that the Internet in Gabon was shut down as their election protests grew, and the United Nations had to intervene to solve the problem as there were massive consequences due to the lack of Internet.