Annie Jacobsen

So he was like maybe nine years old when the first iPhone came out.

And I had one, and he just thought it was so cool.

And I will never forget, he said at the dinner table, Mom, just to be clear...

When you were born, they didn't have these iPhones.

That's great.

Just to be clear.

Remember?

I mean, try telling your kids about an answering machine.

How about dial phones?

Okay, are you ready for this trivia?

Why, one of the reasons why you could argue that computers became so important to the Defense Department back in 1961 is because during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is like, I have seen these documents at the National Archives.

JFK was so worried about that exact movement you made with your finger, the dial phone.

There was a true red phone that would be used in a nuclear crisis for him to call Nikita Khrushchev.

And he became worried that that wasted too much time to get through.

And so he hired a guy called J.C.R.

Licklider to develop computers that could move faster.

And at the time, the computers were the size of this room in the Defense Department.

And there were these old mainframes.

And Licklider...

is he's called the Johnny Appleseed of the internet.