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Vint Cerf on the Future of the Net
johnd writes "The internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf, and he should know what he is talking about. Not terribly in depth, but an interesting read all the same."
As long as most (older) people I know have a 56k or 64k internet connection, and have to pay per minute online time, VoIP and the like will not become mainstream soon.
It is not that those people do not want a broadband connection, it is just not available at an affordable price in a lot of places.
And in order to make something successfull it should be available to (almost) everyone.
Troll: Large Giant, 63 hp, AC 16, Usually chaotic evil.
The dot com bollocks happened because too few people asked "where's the business plan?". That's all. A bit of common sense is all that's required.
QUALity eQUALs eQUALity
The Arpanet came before the net and demanded that all computers that connect to it do so with the same hardware and software.
I was really disappointed to read this in the article. First, it wasn't true. There were a lot of such restrictions in the early implementations, but by the time that TCP was spec'd, there were already cases of interconnected hardware and software from different vendors. TCP was a (pretty good) attempt to codify what had been learned about how to do this.
But more important is the point that such single-source restrictions were exactly why ARPA started funding what became the Internet. It was, to a great extent, a response to ongoing problems with electronic gadgets that couldn't talk to each other. The military (and ARPA was a military research agency) wanted this problem solved. What good were all those fancy-schmancy electronic thingies if they couldn't exchange data?
If you look up the early docs from the ARPAnet, you'll see pretty pictures all over the place showing large numbers of electronic gadgets, obviously from a lot of different manufacturers, with lines between them showing the comm links. It's obvious that interconnecting hardware and software from different vendors was a major goal right from the start.
There have been a number of comments on why ARPA gave their development money to universities rather than to commercial vendors. A number of military types were open about this from the start: They had learned that military contractors simply couldn't be forced to work together. Most attempts to get them to cooperate with data comm were pretty much dismal failures. They were competitors, after all. They would pretend to be cooperating, while doing everything they could to fix things so their competitors couldn't cooperate. This is still a problem, of course, and probably always will be. Commercial vendors sabotaging standards is a very familiar process.
So ARPA took the approach of funding an independent gang of academic hackers. Give them equipment and money to pay students to hack away. Fund a few overseers to attempt to coordinate this herd of cats. When they seem to have something working, buy them some fun new hardware and challenge them to incorporate it with the old stuff. Try not to let them get lazy and develop a monoculture of equipment from a single vendor. Watch what they do, and carry off anything they produce that seems useful.
But the intent from the start was to make all electronic gadgets talk sensibly to each other. If the early setups didn't achieve this, it was simply a case of "We're not there yet". The intent was to get there.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We should all ask ourselves: The internet was not designed for this, wouldn't it be better to use something that was?
The Internet was not designed, period.
The Internet grew into what it is now from a large variety of smaller networks. The protocols that make the Internet as we know it work were designed, to be sure, but most of them weren't even designed together. DNS, for example, is an essential factor in today's Internet, but it was designed independant of TCP/IP. The same can be said of SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc. These things came about to fill needs as they arose.
And the Internet will continue to grow and evolve. Even IP, the net's fundamental building block, will change as IPv6 is implemented.
The Internet is a fantastic example of the power of bottom-up design. Implicit in your comment is the notion that we'd be better off usign a top-down design, where we sit around and think up all the things we want the net to do, and then try to design a big system that has facilities for all those different things. I think that if we did that, we'd either fail miserably, or we'd end up with something that looks very much like today's Internet.