The Threatened Net

“People don’t break into banks because they’re not secure. They break into banks because that’s where the money is,” said Abbate, author of “Inventing the Internet,” on the network and its creators. She added, “They thought they were building a classroom, and it turned into a bank.” (Location 134)

The network’s first “killer app,” introduced in 1972, was e-mail. By the following year, it was responsible for 75 percent of ARPANET’s traffic. (Location 156)

On Jan. 1, 1983, years of work by Cerf, Kahn and countless others culminated on what they dubbed “Flag Day,” a term that refers to the reboot of a system so total that it’s difficult to go back. Every computer on the ARPANET and other networks that wanted to communicate with it had to start using TCP/IP. And gradually they did, linking disparate networks together in a new, global whole. So was born the Internet. (Location 274)