Putting the Internet in perspective
TONY WALTHAM
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| Google News: Mirroring a connected world |
Any story about the remarkable evolution of the Internet must acknowledge the brilliant engineers who designed the enduring technology that underpins the billions of packets of data that traverse the Net's copper and fibre optic cables today.
And yet the ability to connect computers in a scalable, robust way may not have been as significant as the achievements of the Internet's early promoters, the advocates who had to overcome regulatory resistance and, in many cases, the vested interests of telecommunications cartels to push this network out to the far corners of the world.
But, I'm not going to delve too much into early history or examine telecom monopolies here, but rather try to put a perspective on the phenomenon of this amazing network that over one billion people around the world now have access to.
That the Internet happened was a combination of inspired design principles and the fundamental fact that the ability to communicate with others is compelling to the human psyche. Communications is like a drug and bandwidth has indeed been likened to opium - we can never get enough of it.
Unlike any mass communications medium before it, the Internet is a two-way medium and more and more people are seizing the opportunity to have their say, with over 70 million weblogs (blogs) now estimated to be out there.
Most certainly, the greatest Internet-enabled economic, cultural and social changes still lie ahead and will probably appear out of the relatively-new phenomenon of social networking as this evolves, helped along no doubt by new interfaces, more sophisticated mobile devices and greater bandwidth for faster uploads and downloads.
Last year has seen a remarkable growth for social networks, with MySpace signing up 250,000 new users each day during the first quarter of 2006, according to O'Reilly Radar.
Nor will we have to wait very long to see more innovation as the pace of change is accelerating. Video site YouTube.com's rapid rise in popularity underscores this, soaring from nowhere at the official launch in November 2005 to being acquired by Google for US$1.63 billion in less than a year. Indeed, in a few short months, YouTube became the fifth most-popular web site as rated by Alexa.
Communications and networking have been integral to computing from the early days, with AT&T introducing the first commercial modem in 1958, although the Hayes Micromodem introduced in 1979 was more significant.
During the mid-1980s and 1990s, when the Internet was primarily an academic and government network that came nowhere near Thailand, Bangkok's computing enthusiasts had set up electronic BBSes (bulletin board systems) with which they could communicate with one another.
The first dial-up modem that I used to connect to the BUG Board (the Bangkok User Group's BBS) ran at 300 baud (bits per second), but it wasn't long before I had upgraded to 1200 baud, then 2400, 9.6 Kbps, then 14.4Kbps and on up to 56K - which seemed fast at the time (that was before broadband).
In the early 1990s there were literally dozens of BBSes in Bangkok (Post Database used to publish a list with telephone numbers) and between 1990 and 1997 we ran our own two-line "Post Database BBS" offering free dial-up access to anyone with a modem, with discussion groups and free downloads of freeware and shareware programs.
We had no idea at the time, but these BBSes would be a precursor of "the real thing," (the Internet), and the Post Database BBS was retired after a hard disk crash in 1997, by which time many ISPs here were offering inexpensive Internet access that had made its services largely redundant.
My own first Internet experience was as one of a small pool of journalists at the Bangkok Post who dialed into Unix servers at Thammasat University with the latest news stories during the tense May 1992 uprising.
We used Unix commands and its ftp program to send these text files to the university system which, in turn, was polled twice a day from Melbourne University in Australia where modems would make long-distance calls to Bangkok and retrieve these stories for posting to Internet newsgroups.
A permanent Internet connection for universities here would come soon after that and it wasn't long before the National Electronics Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) had servers up and running with which it generously offered free access and email services to the public for research purposes in 1994.
The email client in those days was called Pine and Lynx was the text-based browser; "who needed fancy graphics to slow things down?" I thought then. Initially, modems were slow and text was just fine and I remember surfing yahoo.com and many other sites using the text interface.
There were also Gopher and Archie sites that we could visit for information as well as newsgroups such as soc.culture.thai to browse using the command rtin (read the Internet news). I also recall my "Internet moment," which was the first time I used Lynx to follow links from a Thai university to one in Cambridge, England, and then to a Harvard web site in Massachusetts, and then to Berkeley, California.
Wow! Immediately, I had to show this ability to some of my colleagues in the office. "This was the future!" I said excitedly that day in 1994.
But it is surprising how quickly we have come to take the Internet almost for granted, with sites like Google News allowing us to search hundreds of publications for a story about a particular topic.
If I stop and think back, when a major earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area back in 1989, I telephoned a Thai friend living in Sunnyvale, asking him to send paper clippings from the San Jose Mercury News to us by post, just so that we could cover the impact to IT companies based there for Database readers.
It was thanks to the vision of some Internet pioneers at universities here, notably Dr Kanchana Kanchanasut, Dr Thaweesak Koanantakool, Trin Tantsetthi and Dr Yunyong Teng-amnuay and with the help of Nectec led then by Prof Pairash Thachayapong, that Thailand was among the first countries in Southeast Asia to get Internet access.
This pioneer work translated into commercial Internet services in early 1995, first offered by Internet Thailand, while KSC Commercial Internet would soon follow.
Competition had begun. These and other ISPs that were soon to follow enabled early Net users here to follow the evolution of the web, making the transition from a text interface to the Mosaic graphical browser and then to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0.
Here at Database we have been tracking this progress in stories while our Site of the Week has been keeping readers updated with outstanding or useful web sites every week since August 1996.
Today, 10 people may enter an Internet cafe, sit down at a terminal - and each of them could engage in a completely different activity on the Web.
One might use MSN Messenger to engage in instant messaging or have a video chat, another may hook up with friends on a social network such as MySpace.com, Facebook.com or Linked-in, while a third might be editing a blog, watching a video or listening to a streaming podcast.
The list goes on: others may enter virtual environments like Second Life; go shopping; explore interesting locations on Google Earth; download a movie or a music album; use Skype to make a long-distance phone call; do research using Wikipedia (which grows larger by the day - I know, I just updated an entry myself); take part in a multiplayer game; or edit a document or spreadsheet - not to mention responding to email.
And, very often, they'll be doing more than one of these tasks concurrently. All these activities are or can be web-based and they may have peer-to-peer components or other technologies seamlessly woven in to them. In many cases, these are found at Web 2.0 web sites, a term used for a new generation of sites characterised by user participation, openness and that take advantage of network effects.
Increasingly, PC applications are moving out onto the web and instead of buying a CD or downloading and installing an app, we can just visit a Web 2.0 web site where you'll find an application that is usually free to use.
The Internet is changing so much of what is around us, the ways that we interact with each other, how we do business, how we buy things and do banking as well as how we keep track of developments around us that it is having an often subtle but very deep impact on our collective future, probably in ways that we cannot envisage today.
It will be fascinating to see how the Internet becomes an increasing part of our daily lives and we shouldn't overlook the fact that for every computer Internet terminal in the world there are already two mobile phones, while wireless Internet services are getting cheaper and faster and in some places, such as downtown Singapore, access is now free.
Post Database has been bringing you the latest developments around the Internet and data communications as they have appeared on the horizon for the past two decades: we first covered VoIP back in June 1999 (and we tipped you about Skype in October 2003), while we highlighted the Google search engine in February 1999. We recommended blogs in May 2001, Wikipedia we introduced to you in September 2003 while we warned you to beware of phishing in email shortly after that.
Here at Database, we look forward to continuing to keep you abreast of innovation, new products, trends and services as we track the exciting advances in the expanding digital world around us.
And to those pioneers of the Internet, the engineers and its advocates, especially those who brought the technology to Thailand, may I say a big "thank you."
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