A poem helped keep the internet from choking

A closer look

The entire internet relies on a traffic control system invented by a woman who literally wrote a poem about it. Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to stop network bridges from sending data in infinite, catastrophic loops. Before STP, local networks were basically digital cul-de-sacs where lost data packets would multiply until the whole system choked to death. Perlman cracked the algorithm in under a week, casually wrote a rhyming poem called "Algorhyme" to summarize it, and cemented the foundation for modern web routing.