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When Voice Became Data
Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you." — Alexander Graham Bell, 1876, over a circuit that guaranteed his timing
An instrument course · 1876 → 2026
Every layer of WebRTC is a scar from a specific failure. Learn the wound and the machinery explains itself. 42 lessons, each one built on instruments you drive yourself — one variable at a time, from a reserved copper circuit to a thousand-viewer cascade.
The eight failures, in order
Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you." — Alexander Graham Bell, 1876, over a circuit that guaranteed his timing
SDP was a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. Thirty years later, the flyer is a load-bearing wall.
NAT saved the internet's addresses by repealing its founding promise: that any host can reach any other.
Google paid $68 million so the web could say hello.
Compression is the art of discarding what the brain would have discarded anyway — and for twenty years, that art was fenced with patents.
The network is reliable." — Fallacy #1 of distributed computing
March 2020: every mesh-topology product melted at four participants, and the architecture that won can read your media.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.