HUA HIN, Thailand - This week marks the 40th birthday of the Internet,
depending on which source you believe should take credit for its invention. On
September 2, 1969, the first link was created between two computers and data
was exchanged over a network for the first time.
Computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California, Los
Angeles, was working on a government-funded research project called Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). The first actual message was sent
the following month on October 29, when he tried to communicate with another
computer at the Stanford Research Institute.
Other theories on its birth involve the US military's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was another division of the
same project.
Within a year the network had expanded from a few west coast colleges to the
east coast and by the mid-1970s it went international. The first e-mail was
sent in 1971 by engineer Ray Tomlinson who used the "@" symbol to separate the
user name from the host computer because "it seemed like a neat idea". The
first commercial online services were launched by CompuServe in 1979; users
paid a subscription fee to read news or financial information and the first
virus was unleashed by accident in 1988 by Robert Morris, a graduate student at
Cornell.
The World Wide Web as we know it was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, a
British scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research
(CERN). He was also responsible for the birth of hyper-text markup language
(HTML), and thus married hyper-text to the Internet. Berners-Lee also developed
a Universal Document Identifier which later became known as the Uniform
Resource Locator (URL) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). So the
actual Internet as we know it today is really only a teenager.
Since the mid-1990s, we've seen the birth of Yahoo, Netscape, Google, Amazon,
Wikipedia, Blogging, Social Networking and YouTube. On the flip side, we have
also seen an online explosion in the dark side of the human exploitation of
technology; spam, viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, malware and phishing. The
big question now is what does the next 40 years hold?
E-mail
Google has proved that it is not the perfect oracle of online technology that
many praise it as being, as it, too, is not immune to mistakes. Gmail services
suffered an almost two-hour outage this week, leaving millions of users in the
dark wondering when their e-mail inboxes would be returned to them. The
company, in true online service provider fashion, offered very little in the
way of an explanation during the failure, aside from a "system capacity
miscalculation", better known as server overload.
What really happened was that Google took a couple of Gmail servers offline for
routine maintenance and made some changes to routers that control traffic flow
in an attempt to improve reliability. These routers soon became overloaded and
diverted traffic to others, which caused a cascade effect and the eventual
complete loss of the service.
Google has since apologized and released a number of statements on the company
blog, such as, "We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing
these and other Gmail reliability improvements ... remains more than 99.9%
available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's
notable for their rarity."
The company has spent a lot of time and money this year in promoting Gmail to
business and enterprise clients, and mistakes like this could prove costly
especially if they increase in frequency. A few hours downtime is not the end
of the world for the majority of Gmail subscribers, who simply use the service
for personal e-mail, but it may make corporations think twice before
transferring their entire existing e-mail infrastructure into Google's hands.
Industry
With the imminent full release of Windows 7 on October 22 rapidly approaching,
Microsoft has teamed up with chip manufacturer Intel to ensure that the
operating system gets the most out of today's multi-core processors.
In a press conference this week, the companies announced a collaboration with
claims that Windows 7 will offer far better processor performance and battery
life than its predecessors. Microsoft and Intel have engineered their products
to work together more efficiently and demonstrated performance using a number
of benchmarks on multi-core 32 nanometer CPUs.
The average PC user who sends the occasional e-mail, does a little
word-processing or spreadsheet work, and surfs the net, is unlikely to
experience the full reward of this new platform and technology. It only really
stands apart when it is under heavy load, such as video encoding, graphics
processing, multi-tasking and playing the latest graphic-intensive games.
Laptop users on the other hand will get instant benefits from the power
consumption enhancements that Microsoft has added to Windows 7.
Another interesting detail is that this is the first time Microsoft has not
doubled the hardware requirements for a new operating system release. When
upgrading from XP to Vista, users were required to have faster processors and
plenty of memory, whereas Windows 7 will run on older hardware and net-books.
Both companies are relying on each other to boost sales in what has generally
been a slow year for the industry.
Browsers
Google has made its first deal with a computer manufacturer to boost adoption
of its fledgling web browser Chrome. Sony has agreed to ship Chrome with select
new computers, but details on what they get from Google were unavailable from
company representatives.
It is likely that the search giant will approach other PC makers to tout
Chrome, which it plans on morphing into an operating system in the not too
distant future (see
Google's Chrome shines with hope, Asia Times Online, July 11, 2009).
Sony did not rank in the top five PC vendors for global shipments in the second
quarter, according to research company IDC. Chrome, a year old this week, also
lags behind its competitors at number four in the browser market, with a 2.59%
market share for the month of July, according to Net Applications.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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