Design 4: Early Internet

Theme

I spend a lot of time on the Internet, admittedly more time than I should. I should touch grass more. In this puzzle, I wanted to briefly explore the history of the Internet starting in the late 1960s with ARPANET and leading to CERN’s decision to release the World Wide Web to the public in 1993. It’s interesting to see the progression from a very simple, but still technologically advanced, communication network to what the Internet is currently.

Grid

The previous Pioneers of Computing grid was not approachable. I wanted to rectify this for the current puzzle. I wanted the grid to look as non-intimidating and balanced as possible. The clue selection helped with this. Unlike names, many of the answers were relatively short and shared common letters. I did not deliberately choose clues that were easy to make a balanced grid, it just naturally happened given the theme and I'm happy about it.

I did notice that the grid looks a bit like a mushroom. I also noticed that the clue list only contained 3 Down clues compared to 10 Across clues. The distribution between Across and Down clues isn’t as balanced as I would like. That’s something to think about in future puzzles.

A hypothetical question I thought about was what if I created a puzzle with all Across clues, but I realized I wouldn't like that since the intersections are part of what makes a puzzle interesting. Intersections also help solvers solve clues using context clues.

Clues

I was a bit concerned about including clues like URL, TCPIP, HTML, and DNS even though these features are essential to the implementation of the Internet. These clues at first glance simply felt technical, basic, and boring. Admittedly on my first iteration of these clues they were technical, basic, and boring.

However, I realized that the answers were not what made clues boring but the questions attached to those answers. I realized that if I made the questions more specific and added anchors like dates, people, or institutions, it would make the clue more interesting.

A concrete example is the email clue. Originally I had this clue: 'Digital mail system using addresses separated by "@”'. Later, as I was solving the puzzle, I felt that this was too generic and did not add to the overall theme of the puzzle. This was a bit surprising since historically email predated the Internet and was the most important use case of ARPANET.

I then updated the clue to add additional historical context and credited the inventor. This is the current clue: '1971 ARPANET messaging system introduced by Ray Tomlinson using the "@" symbol in addresses'. It relates more clearly to the Early Internet theme and is much more interesting.

Tradeoffs

There were several back-and-forth revisions in trying to add historical context to clues, while keeping it clear and concise. For some clues, I wanted to add multiple pieces of context but realized that it may be too much information. For example for the CERN clue, I wanted to emphasize that they released the World Wide Web to the public for free which was a major decision. Without this decision, the Internet as we know it probably would have become far more privatized.

I also thought of including companies such as AOL and Yahoo but realized that although they heavily influenced consumer interaction with the Internet in the late 90s, early 2000s they weren't necessarily foundational to the overall development of the Internet like some of the other clues on this list.

Notes

I realize that one of the most time-consuming parts of the puzzle creation process is coming up with the list of answers. There is a lot of research deciding what to include or not. It’s important that the answers strongly relate to the puzzle’s theme. Once I have a list of answers, I work on the questions, then the grid.

The first website is: http://info.cern.ch/. It’s cool to see a notable inflection point in history still live and running.