p2pnet.net News View:- It’s always complicated when you try to find an internet-related anniversary to commemorate. October 29th, for example, marks the 35th anniversary of the transmission of data on the ARPANET, the research network that was the forerunner of today’s internet.

Back in 1969 the second network node, at the Stanford Research Institute, was commissioned and data could pass to and from UCLA, where the first node had been running for a month with nobody to talk to. But 35 doesn’t normally get a celebration – we prefer factors of ten in our calendars.

The world’s first permanent cybercafe, Cyberia in London’s Whitfield Street, opened its doors and keyboards to the public ten years ago and was duly celebrated.

But how do you commemorate something as vague as the emergence of e-business in the UK? First, there’s the problem of definition – does emailing my credit card number to a second hand bookstore in

1993 count, or do we only include secure web-based transactions?

Second, few of us were paying much attention to the needs of future historians back in the day, so I doubt that there’s a hand-written log saying ‘received first website order’ from any of the businesses around at the time, even those that have survived until today.

So we should be grateful that NOP World and e-consultancy are willing to stand up and claim that it all got started ten years ago in 1994, and that early October is the right time to celebrate it.

The exact date may have more to do with local politics – after the party conferences but before Parliament reassembles, so a good time to get a Minister along for the bash – but the hundred or so net pioneers who gathered at a smart London hotel for the reception weren’t going to quibble over the champagne and canapes.

As it happens the Minister couldn’t make it, so net stalwart and Labour MP Derek Wyatt stepped into the breach with his usual mix of deadpan humour and self-deprecation. And after looking back and remembering old times, he ended his talk by imagining what the online world will look like in another ten years.

Rather than steal his ideas, I spent the journey home thinking about the question myself. Derek had prefaced his remarks by admitting that we can’t see the future, but when it comes to technology I think he’s wrong.

As the author William Gibson puts it, ‘the future has already arrived.. it’s just unevenly distributed’. When it comes to technology, the stuff that will be in shops and homes in five years time has already been invented – and the stuff we’ll be using in ten years time should be vaguely visible in the labs.

But if we’re very lucky then the internet, computers and all the rest of the technologies won’t be on view at all. They will be embedded in our lives, physically as part of every object we handle or use, and every machine we build, and socially in the ways we use them.

Access to the network will just be there, just as electricity and water are there. We will barely notice it, although we will notice the things we do with it. And access to processing power will be there, whenever it’s needed, but it won’t be found only in plastic boxes on our desks, however well-designed they may be.

Both the network and the processing power will also have crept out of the industrialised West and into the rest of the world. There is a good chance that by 2014 we will finally have an internet for the next five billion people, the ones who have probably not even seen a computer never mind surfed the web.

It will be a regulated, managed and controlled net, not the simple data conduit that we have today, and many of us will miss the old ways of working. But the benefits for the many will outweigh the conservatism of the net old-timers.

The mere fact that everyone is online will change the way the world works, of course. But the way we use the processing power available will shift too.

A lot of it will go on making things talk to each other. I have my laptop, my mobile phone/PDA, my digital music player and all sorts of other technology in my briefcase at the moment, and if I was willing to make the investment I could have a 3G card and be online even as I type this on a train journey.

But these devices don’t talk to each other very well, and they don’t really talk to other people’s devices at all. I think the big change we will see in the next ten years is that programs will get better at acting independently and communicating over the network without our intervention.

Cars will book themselves in for servicing, hospitals will consult online diaries before scheduling an appointment, and fishing boats will sell their catch at market before reaching port, all thanks to these software ‘agents’.

Of course this brings with it massive risks, and poses threats to privacy and social life which will worry many of us. But we’ve proven able to absorb the impact the net has made since 1994, and I am optimistic about our ability to do so in future.

A wired world carries with it the potential to achieve a much greater measure of social justice for all in the world, simply because it could help us manage resources, be aware of natural or human disasters more rapidly and deal with the enormous complexity of the world more effectively. It is not an unalloyed good, of course, and producing computers and running networks has its own environmental cost. But I believe that the balance is tilted firmly in favour of the greater use of computer technology, and that the benefits to come from it will help us all.

Bill Thompson – andfinally.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 16th, 2004 at 1:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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