a super-stimulus system optimized to fulfill our desires.

The reason to constrain yourself to the protocol standards is the power of building something that works with everything else that does the same. The protocol wasn’t just a useful software invention — it was a worldview.

They called the grammar that computers used to talk to each other a protocol . Each protocol would consist of a formal procedure, a standard for interacting with a system, which anyone could adopt. For instance, just as mailing addresses have their own protocol, ARPANET would create protocols for addressing objects in the network.