WASHINGTON (voa) – This week marks what many consider the 20th birthday of the Internet. The truth is, the Internet has many important dates in its development. But January 1, 1983 is perhaps the most important in the growth of the dot-com world.
On New Year’s Day 1983, the Internet switched to a new set of what are called protocols. Protocols are the “languages” computers use to speak to one another over a network. Under the old language, fewer than one-thousand computers were able to communicate with each other. The switch to the new protocols allowed for the huge world-wide growth in the number of Internet users. But the beginnings of the Internet date back some 40-years. In its early days it was a U.S. Defense Department project called ARPANET.
The Internet has changed much in the two decades since it came into existence. It was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before LANs existed, but has accommodated that new network technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame switched services. It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more recently the World Wide Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers, and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars of annual investment.
One should not conclude that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain relevant. It is now changing to provide such new services as real time transport, in order to support, for example, audio and video streams. The availability of pervasive networking (i.e., the Internet) along with powerful affordable computing and communications in portable form (i.e., laptop computers, two-way pagers, PDAs, cellular phones), is making possible a new paradigm of nomadic computing and communications.
This evolution will bring us new applications – Internet telephone and, slightly further out, Internet television. It is evolving to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband residential access to satellites. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.
The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. So, if you happen to be surfing the Internet this week, take a moment to wish it a happy birthday – of sorts.
