The Past:
The original ARPANET connected a computer at each institution together: a computer at Harvard with a computer at MIT with a computer at Stanford with a computer at Berkeley. In ’83 a big change happened — the rollout of the TCP/IP protocol — that changed the basic structure. It was connecting a network at Harvard to network at MIT to a network at Stanford to a network at Berkeley. And, therefore, somebody within Harvard at their desktop could talk to somebody at Stanford at their desktop.For most of us in the business, January of ’83 was the beginning of the Internet, per se. The term had been used before that, but the ARPANET wasn’t connecting networks together as much as it was connecting computers.
The Future:
The biggest potential for negative change is governance, so it’s nontechnical. On the other side, the change brought about in the last half-dozen years by the smartphone is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking to us in the U.S., where it’s really just been augmentation. In much of the world, the smartphone is the Internet. It’s the only Internet they’ve got. That kind of empowerment of billions of people — particularly in parts of the world that do not have the infrastructure to support regular Internet — is going to be really mind-bending.
- Interview with Scott Bradner here
The original ARPANET connected a computer at each institution together: a computer at Harvard with a computer at MIT with a computer at Stanford with a computer at Berkeley. In ’83 a big change happened — the rollout of the TCP/IP protocol — that changed the basic structure. It was connecting a network at Harvard to network at MIT to a network at Stanford to a network at Berkeley. And, therefore, somebody within Harvard at their desktop could talk to somebody at Stanford at their desktop.For most of us in the business, January of ’83 was the beginning of the Internet, per se. The term had been used before that, but the ARPANET wasn’t connecting networks together as much as it was connecting computers.
The Future:
The biggest potential for negative change is governance, so it’s nontechnical. On the other side, the change brought about in the last half-dozen years by the smartphone is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking to us in the U.S., where it’s really just been augmentation. In much of the world, the smartphone is the Internet. It’s the only Internet they’ve got. That kind of empowerment of billions of people — particularly in parts of the world that do not have the infrastructure to support regular Internet — is going to be really mind-bending.
- Interview with Scott Bradner here
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