Very fast, very passable this world wide web thing. Well, who'd have thought twenty five years ago we'd be sitting here looking up the news of the day on our search engine of choice, browsing the shops from the comfort of our lounge, buying our favourite Chateau de Chassilier and having it delivered to the door the next day.
Well, yes, all those years ago, we'd have had to get the newspaper delivered in the morning, walk down the road to the corner shop for the wine. And it wouldn't have been Chateau de Chassilier, I can tell you. And if we wanted to know who won the cup in 1968, we'd have had to phone old Uncle Joe, who knows everything about sport. No good on Shakespeare, mind. No, you'd need to write to Aunt Joanna for that and you might not get an answer inside a week. Depending on whether she was busy booking her holiday down at the travel agent. That took quite a while in those days.
With apologies to the ageless and immortal Monty Python, it is indeed sometimes hard to remember what the world was like twenty five years ago. When a researcher at CERN had the idea of uniting the concepts of hypertext, domain naming and internetworking, connecting computers together wasn't new. The internet is a much older thing than that and originates in US projects, like ARPANET, to design resilient and self-routing networks across the country's important defence sites. Pretty soon, universities were joining in and connecting their computers together too. The UK's JANET was one of the first outside America. With the emergence of commercial Internet Service Providers, others got involved and the connected network expanded across the world.
Simply connecting computers together was useful, but provided limited features to users. Email was a fairly simple point-to-point system in its early days and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) systems were all that was available for transferring data from one computer to another. And you had to know how to drive them from the command line because GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) weren't widespread at all.
Once again, the impetus came from the academic and research community when Tim, now "Sir Tim", Berners-Lee came up with the concept of connecting information together by embedding links in visual pages downloaded from servers on the internet. We, who are now used to clicking away with merry abandon through masses of pages containing text, graphics, videos and sound, would probably not recognise his early web pages but it was the breakthrough which revolutionised use of the internet. What he developed became what we now know as the World Wide Web.
Suddenly, ordinary users were able to navigate through enormous amounts of information. At first, what was available may not have been particularly useful but many saw the potential. When companies started to catch on to the possibilities of the internet in the mid 1990's, progress accelerated at an astonishing rate. Suddenly, it was possible not only to research things, but to buy things, find things, connect with people, interact with government. All from the comfort of your screen.
Of course, it hasn't all been rosy. Who could forget the frenzy of the late 1990's when fools the world over rushed to invest rather than risk being left out of the new world. The eventual crash lost a lot of people a lot of money and injured a lot of pride but injected a healthy dose of reality. The web we have now is a very different beast indeed.
The defining characteristic of the internet has to be the way in which it has embraced the entire spectrum of human need and interest. As well as becoming a mighty commercial entity, it has become a huge force for good in the world. When I lived with my missionary parents in Uganda in the late 1960's, letters were the only way of communicating with family back home in England - and they took weeks to arrive. When I visited last year to help with some charity projects in western Uganda, we were able to post a daily blog (with pictures) every day to everyone. And that means everyone, not just a few family and friends back home, but everyone who wanted to read about what we were doing.
It has also become a key driver of technological development. In the early days, everything was connected by wires (who can remember connecting to the internet via a modem over a telephone line!) and transmission speeds were limited. Now, we can access the internet at incredible speed almost everywhere on the planet using a device which fits in a shirt pocket. The ability to use the internet on the move has been transformational - for the lost traveller, for the salesman needing sales data in the middle of a crucial negotiation, for the paramedic needing support in an emergency, for the entrepreneur seeking to connect with investors. Only this morning, I was able to transfer funds from my UK bank account to my son (who needs a deposit to rent a house, in case you were wondering) from a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. And it took less than two minutes.
ARM is proud to be part of that breakneck and transformational development in technology. From our key involvement in today's cellphones to tomorrow's servers, our designs have found their way into almost every part of the chain. I sometimes like to speculate how many ARM processors are involved every time I look something up on the internet (hint - it's more than you think!) and it's something I, for one, am proud to have been involved in.
But…tell that to kids nowadays? And they don't believe you! (And I looked up Monty Python on an ARM powered tablet in an airport lounge in Kuala Lumpur, typed this on an ARM powered laptop and sent it back to base from an airport in Hong Kong even before I got home - try doing that twenty five years ago!)
Happy 25th Birthday, World Wide Web!
who can remember connecting to the internet via a modem over a telephone line!
Indeed... the memory of the "pudong pudong screeech" modem negotiation is both fond and, well, thankfully just a memory! It's funny how we waded through treacle to make things work then... I don't know, kids today, don't know they're born