Category Archives: History & Future

Moore’s Law and other eponymous laws

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Moore’s law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his paper Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,  published in the Electronics Magazine, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965. His prediction has proven to be very accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.

In 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the law cannot be sustained indefinitely, because transistors will reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels.

A list of more eponymous laws (named after a person) is provided at Wikipedia.

Internet archive, WayBackMachine, Alexa Internet and HTTP archive

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Last update : October 11, 2014

The Internet Archive (archive.org) is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and the American Library Association (ALA).

The most known service of the Internet Archive is the WayBackMachine that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed. You can browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. The company’s name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria, the largest and most significant library of the ancient world. In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com. Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users, the database served as the basis for the creation of the WayBackMachine and Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with Web crawls.

Alexa provides also the data for the HTTP archive created in 2010 by Steve Souders. The HTTP archive provides records how the digitized content of webpages is constructed and served. It is a permanent repository of web performance information such as size of pages, failed requests, and technologies utilized.

Other projects of the Internet Archive are listed below :

  • Open-Library : catalog of 23 million books, text of about 1,6 million public domain books
  • Education Resources Library : hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities
  • Archive-it : web archiving service that allows institutions and individuals to build and preserve collections of digital content
  • NASA images : more than 100.000 items of NASA’s image, video, and audio collections
  • Audio Collection : over 100,000 concert recordings from independent artists and other selcetd audio files
  • Text Collection : digitized books from various libraries around the world as well as many special collections
  • Software Archive : access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software
  • Moving Image Collection : thousands of free movies, films, and videos
  • TV News : more than 366,000 broadcasts

Internet Hall of Fame

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The Internet Hall of Fame is an annual awards program that has been established by the Internet Society in 2012 to celebrate it’s 20-year anniversary. The Internet Hall of Fame publicly recognize a distinguished and select group of visionaries, leaders and luminaries who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet.

The inductees are segmented in three groups : pioneers, global connectors and innovators. The Internet history revolves around four distinct aspects :

  • technological evolution (ARPANET and related technologies, current research about scaling, performance and higher-level functionalty)
  • operational aspects of a global and complex operational infrastructure
  • social aspects with a broad community of internauts working together to create and evolve the technology
  • commerzialisation aspects resulting in an extremely effective transition of reasearch results into a broadly deployed and available information infratsructure

The Internet Society convenes an Internet Hall of Fame Advisory Board of esteemed Internet industry professionals to vote on the annual inductees. Inaugural inductees were announced on April 23, 2012 at the Internet Society’s Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Internet Society is the trusted independent source for Internet information and thought leadership from around the world. With its principled vision and substantial technological foundation, the Internet Society promotes open dialogue on Internet policy, technology, and future development among users, companies, governments, and foundations. Working with its members and Chapters around the world, the Internet Society enables the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone.

Internet Evolution

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Last update : October 8, 2012
Where is there and how do we get there from here ? was the topic of a panel on Internet Evolution, organized by the Internet Society at IETF 81 in Quebec, Canada.

Evolution occurs as a response to a stimulus. The panel explored different paths that Internet evolution could follow:

  • Natural evolution – letting market forces prevail
  • Top-down regulatory – return to the telco regime
  • Clean slate – repealing the laws of Internet physics
  • Or ?

The following five questions have been answered by seven contributors : Kenjiro Cho, Alissa Cooper, Jon Crowcroft, Geoff Huston, Bill St. Arnaud, Joe Touch and Jonathan Zittrain.

  1. Internet and Innovation : The Internet itself was an innovation and it has served as an open platform for unprecedented innovations in networking, applications and services for years. The data provides evidence that the Internet is becoming ‘flatter’ (increasingly direct interconnection of content and consumer). Is this necessarily part of a trend towards a less-innovative platform ?
  2. P2P Traffic : Is the relative decline in P2P traffic volume indicative of the triumph of business models over technology ?
  3. Dominance of Application Protocols : What is your perception of the import of the increasing dominance of a handful of application protocols—simplification ? ossification ? something else ?
  4. Internet Evolution Trends : What do these observable trends in Internet evolution mean for the future of the Internet ?
  5. Impact on The Future of the Internet : Any other observations or interpretations of these reports in terms of impact and import for the future of the Internet that you would like to share ?

The following links provide further informations about the Internet evolution :

What will the Internet look like In 10 years ?

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The Internet Society engaged in a scenario planning exercise to reveal plausible evolutions of the Internet in the future. Based upon the two questions :

  • Will the world embrace or resist the open Internet model ?
  • Will the Command and Control or the Distributed and Decentralized model be more succesful ?

These two questions defined four quadrants, which led to four very different stories about how the world might develop over the next eight to ten years :

Internet evolution scenarios

All of these stories contain some elements of the Internet of today. The challenge for everyone is to contribute to help the Internet to evolve in a direction like the scenario called The Common Pool.

Web & Internet Definition

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Last update : July 23, 2013

On October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) unanimously passed a resolution defining the term Internet. This Internet Definition was developed in consultation with the leadership of the Internet and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Communities.

Internet refers to the global information system that :

  1. is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons
  2. is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols
  3. provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein

Today, Wikipedia gives the following Internet Definition : The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve several billion users worldwide.. Thus, the Internet is a network of networks, defined by the TPC/IP standards.

The Web is defined in W3C’s Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume I, as follows: The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). Thus, the Web is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML. They have been written by Tim Berners-Lee.