Building the Internet

The internet was born out of a desire for computers to share data. This simple idea unlocked new forms of communication, allowing humanity to pool knowledge and computation to revolutionize virtually every aspect of our lives.

Beginning with Trust

The earliest internet networks were only accessible to highly scrutinized and trusted individuals like military officers and academic researchers. As time went on and the technology evolved, more people got access to the data-sharing network, including a growing number of incompetent and malicious actors. These bad actors have since forced humanity to reconsider how we design systems not just for efficient data-sharing, but for security as well. It wasn’t always obvious where this technology would lead, but looking back, it’s clear now that in order to have the maximum number of participants in a data-sharing network, we must strive to minimize our reliance on trust.

HTTP

The internet began with the advent of ARPANET by the US Military in the 1960s. Not long after that the US Department of Energy developed a similar data-sharing network, which was soon followed by a series of networks connecting university research labs. The Information Age had begun, but the benefits remained siloed in a series of disconnected constellation networks, similar to the state of Web3 technologies today.

These networks struggled to bridge and communicate with one another due to their rigid data formatting protocols, until, in 1990, when Tim Berners Lee introduced the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. This protocol established a generalized digital envelope for transmitting data packets. This technology empowered networks to route data packets to their correct destinations while being agnostic to their content, thus laying the foundation for the World Wide Web.

Notoros builds upon the idea of creating a generalized solution through an agnostic approach to content. Notoros is agnostic to the state of an application and its computation, and thus creates a universal mechanism for proving a sequence of events for any application or database across a shared global ledger.

Uniform Resource Identifier

After the start of the World Wide Web, data-sharing was growing at an exponential rate. It suddenly became critical to find a way to organize and reference the massive amounts of data spread all across the computer network. This prompted the creation of the Uniform Resource Identifier, also known as URI.

A URI is a string of characters that refers to a resource on the internet. URIs come in two types: URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) and URNs (Uniform Resource Name). URLs identify the location of a resource, and URNs specify the name of a resource.

When a user wants to access a resource on the web they typically start by entering a domain name in their browser, which connects to a DNS service that routes the request to a particular IP address. This request is performed by a particular protocol, like HTTPS, specified by the URL, along with more granular directory information to locate the resource at that location. This is similar to a multi-dimensional address, like a city + street number, for locating resources across the internet.

Notoros uses this concept from the URI by employing a multi-dimenstional address for locating the resources across its distributed ledger. In Notoros, the shard + slot are like the city + street number, and any authorized user may access them by specifying those coordinates.