The web. We use it everyday. It makes this very presentation possible. The Internet. The Web. So few people even know the distinction. That’s okay. Today the distinction is largely irrelevant to our everyday lives even as our lives are embedded in the network. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How did we get here? How did the web get to this point? More importantly, where are we going? Where is the Web, the Internet, going. The 21st century Internet is really dependent upon the people born in the 21st century: a generation already in college. For them to define the Internet of the next 30 years, they need to understand the last 50 years of the Internet. Everything we use today on the net has a direct connection to events 50 years ago. This is not merely a history lesson. This is a lesson about today and the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we go back a bit more than 30 years, to the 1980s, when I was in college, there were no computers in the classroom. A few students had an Apple computer but most had just a typewriter. I remember the business office for the college had a desktop computer, sitting all alone on an assistant’s desk. The math department in the science building had a minicomputer, a much larger system, with a series of terminals with monochrome screens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1980s battle between Microsoft and Apple over the desktop computer was handily won by Microsoft, though now that’s a bit hard to imagine to a generation who have grown up using mostly Macs. The desktop computer, quite a bulky device, was a machine isolated in the home or office. It didn’t connect to anything else. Everything was installed by floppy disks, but the computer was a work horse for its time. Imagine it, sitting there on a desk doing its thing, with no other computer to talk to. Everything was stored on a series of floppy disks or on the quite small internal hard drive. The capabilities of the desktop computer in the 1980s was limited by the capacity of the hardware. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1980s, businesses increasingly took advantage of the ability to physically connect office computers into local area network (LAN). A cable would plug into the back of a computer. Originally, these cables were strung across the rooms, over the floors, and daisy-chained to each computer. Eventually, the cables were installed in the walls and computers were plugged directly into an outlet on a wall. You still see that today (look around the university for those Ethernet outlets), though the speed running through those cables are much greater than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The LAN was a great benefit to office productivity in the workplace. But you were still very limited to your local office environment in those days and even into the early 1990s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But let’s go back to the 1960s and 1970s and see what was happening in the research laboratories of universities and government. That’s often where the innovation starts before it gets commercialized on a large scale to the public. The remarkable achievement in telecommunications that makes the Internet possible is a process called packet switching<\/strong>. Watch the following video that discusses how packet switching was developed. Pay particularly close to attention to the opening when the scientist explains the example of sending every page of a Bible to someone. His description is the core mechanism that transmits everything over the Internet today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n