Friday, December 18, 2009

I Invented the Internet

I was at a client's site recently talking with the technical staff about features they hadn't been utilizing and some of the new features coming out soon. As we were talking, a gentleman with graying hair and weathered skin walked into the room looking quite disheveled. At a glance, you might pick him for the mail man, or perhaps a janitor. After introducing himself, he looked me square in the eye and said, "you know, I invented the Internet."

I thought he was doing his best Al Gore impression. After a chuckle, I realized he was still staring at me quite seriously, and our hand-shake had turned into a static firm grip. "Back in the 80's, we had our first computers, and I wrote a program so we could pass floppies around the office and collaborate on projects with a single point of data."

Floppies? He thought a floppy-disc sharing method was tantamount to the Internet?

I graciously congratulated him and quickly changed the subject. But, it's not an experience I will quickly forget. And, it all makes me wonder: what is the "wonder" of the Internet. This guy had one thing right--Berners-Lee and Cailliau weren't the first people to imagine how computers could expedite collaboration. But, is that the Internet?

In truth, what the man could probably had made a better case for was that he invented the World Wide Web, which is often used interchangably with the term Internet, but actually describes a separate solution. Of course, the floppy-sharing system is more of an "Office-Wide-Web", the principal was nonetheless advanced for its time. In either case, office-wide or world-wide, this web is the sharing of documents, ideas, data, etc. via some dispersed network.

The Internet, then, is actually that network--not the sharing itself. And, to answer the question, "what is the wonder of the internet," for my money you can't find a better wonder than the ubiquitous availability of the network.

The floppy-disc sharing program that made this man so proud lacked one thing that the Internet offers: a true network. People carrying discs down the hall does not qualify. The Internet connects billions of terminals onto one network simultaneously. And, lest that sound too impressive, don't forget that we have been transmitting data across oceans and continents for nearly a century now. It's not connecting the continents that's such a wonder, it's connecting the terminals.

Yes, the end-user computers, company servers, PDA's, ATM machines and slushy machines--getting to these locations is more impressive, I would argue, than the laying of the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Why? because of the endless unique switching that must occur.

It's called the "last mile" - and it is this last mile which the aforementioned floppy-disc system would have struggled to complete effectively. Just as it is easy to run a cable from London to New York, so it would be to carry a diskette that distance. It's getting replicas of that diskette to all 12 Million people in the region that would impress me. And, even with countless miles of copper cable, fiber optic, and GSM towers sprawling across the globe, the feat still blows my mind.

Hat's off to people like Paul Baran and Leonard Kleinrock. As for the other self-proclaimed inventors of the Internet, thanks for your ingenuity however grandiose it may have been.

Labels: "Internet infrastructure", I Invented the Internet, Internet, Last Mile, World Wide Web