Some of the great articles and news on internets and bandwidth.. please find some time to read this.. we are in 1999 and this will help you overcome the problems that many have to be struck in time capsule of 1929...
Top Computer Execs Beat The Drum For Internet
By Jeff Franks
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - To hear top computer executives tell it, the Internet is not just a convenient place to get information or make an occasional purchase, it is the future, the promised land and a new era in human history all rolled into one.
Somewhat akin to television evangelists seeking converts -- and their money -- some of the industry's biggest names relentlessly beat the drum for the Internet this week at a conference for Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL - news) customers.
In speech after speech, the pronouncements could hardly have been more sweeping.
''We're really talking about the death of time and distance,'' said Cisco Systems chief executive John Chambers. ''The Internet changes everything.''
Dell Computer founder Michael Dell said: ''The Internet is provoking a profound revolution in business that is far greater than any revolution that has ever been seen. It's bringing about the demise of brick-and-mortar retailers.''
When words were insufficient, the speakers brought out numbers.
Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) chief executive Craig Barrett said there were 150 million to 200 million ''connected'' computers in the world today, but that number should be 1 billion in five years.
Sales via the Internet -- or ''E-commerce'' in the industry parlance -- could rise to $1 trillion in the United States alone over the next two to three years, up from zero just a short time ago, Barrett said.
''We're talking about a big, big change...we all have to take advantage of it or get steamrolled by it,'' he warned.
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) chairman Bill Gates pointed out that 50 percent of all U.S. homes now have a personal computer, to which Dell added that 90 percent of those machines were used to surf the Internet.
Of the Fortune 500 companies, Dell added, only 2 percent did not now have Internet sites.
The advantages of E-commerce were many, the executives said, including lower costs of service, direct connections to customers and the ability to customize products to suit each individual buying on the Internet.
E-commerce, of course, requires computers, lots of them, meaning the computer industry stands to make a bundle from the revolution it is busily touting.
Barrett, for example, said in his speech that the projected increase in connected users and E-commerce would create a demand for ''tens of millions'' of servers over the next five years.
''We have roughly only 5 percent of the server backbone in place today that we'll need five years from now,'' he said.
And by the way, Barrett added, Intel would be coming out next year with a new 64-bit processor that should be just perfect for those servers.
Amid all the hype, there were a few moments at the Dell conference when the reality of the present brought the future back down to earth, if only briefly.
Embarrassing software glitches interrupted a couple of demonstrations of Internet wizardry, showing that the road to the wired world still had a few potholes.
In another instance, an attendee left the voluble Chambers speechless when he asked how the Internet was going to affect his business -- trucking.
''You've tested the limits of my knowledge,'' Chambers admitted.
The moment was instructive because, despite all the high- faluting talk about a coming ''sea change'' in human existence, it raised the question of how much the Internet would actually affect the day-to-day life of the average Joe.
That question has yet to be answered.
Rocky Road To Information Superhighway
By Michael Miller
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - It started out 30 years ago as a rocky, unpaved road full of potholes and ended up as the information superhighway known as the Internet.
The Internet celebrates its 30th birthday Thursday with a special conference of its proponents at the University of California at Los Angeles, especially those pioneers who can remember its first days, when it was known as the ARPAnet and users logged in rather than logged on.
While ''WWW'' now stands for World Wide Web, during those infant days the acronym might better have meant wild, wacky and who-knows-what's-going-to-happen-next.
Indeed, the forerunner of modern e-mail went wrong the first time around when there was a system failure during the first ever attempt to link two computers, according to UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, 65, the man largely credited as being the ''Father of the Internet.''
In an interview with Reuters, Kleinrock said that on Oct. 20, 1969 a group of computer scientists at UCLA were about to make history by getting their computer to talk to another one at the Stanford Research Institute in northern California.
''We had a guy sitting at the computer console at UCLA wearing a telephone headset and a microphone, talking to another guy at Stanford. When everything was set up he was going to type the word 'log' and the Stanford computer would automatically add 'in' to complete the word 'login.'
''So our guy typed the 'L' and asked his counterpart at Stanford 'Did you get the 'L' and Stanford replied, 'Got the 'L.' Then they did the same for 'O,' and then the whole system crashed!'' Kleinrock said.
But on reflection 30 years later, he feels that the first message ever sent from one computer to another was symbolic. ''Put it into phonetics and you get (h)'ello, which is really quite appropriate,'' he said.
The vital first step in getting a computer to talk to another computer was taken on Sept. 2, 1969, when Kleinrock and his team succeeded in hooking up their computer to a refrigerator-sized switch, or router, known as an Interphase Message Processor. ''So at that time you had a computer talking to a switch for the very first time, and without that you could not have computer talking to computer,'' he said.
Although the UCLA conference honors Sept. 2 as the birthday of the Internet, some people think the date should be Oct. 20, the first time one computer had actually talked to another.
Kleinrock himself is not very sure. ''You could say that the Internet came to life on either of those dates,'' he said. Certainly, no record was made of the Sept. 2 event. ''No pictures, no nothing.''
The Internet, he said, was a child of necessity. Funded by the U.S. government's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), it was intended as a network to give researchers at selected centers the ability to use each other's computers.
''At that time, in the 1960s, ARPA was funding all kinds of research.... But with everyone wanting their computers to be unique to their own needs the cost was skyrocketing, so ARPA conceived of creating a network, so that if you had something in your computer that I wanted I would simply log on to your machine, thereby dramatically reducing the costs, hence the word ARPAnet,'' Kleinrock explained.
In retrospect, he does not think he and his colleagues created a monster. ''You can anticipate the computer-to-computer communications, you can't anticipate the human-to-human communications,'' Kleinrock said. ''When e-mail came on, that was the first clue that interaction between people was really the killer application.''
He added, ''You have to weigh the good against the bad. Is there something we can control? No. Pornography is a good example of that.''
Kleinrock stressed that he and his colleagues looked at creating the ARPAnet as a technological challenge, not an ethical one.
''Were we thinking about the impact and the ethics? No. Did we try to lay down some codification of how this thing should be used? No. Did we abrogate our responsibility to think about that? Yes.
''We did not think about the potential dangers,'' he said. ''We talked about bits and bytes and routers and switches. We did not talk about, 'Will little Charlie do his homework on it or will he look at pornography?'''
But Kleinrock has no regrets. ''Would I do it again? You bet.''
Internet Just Leaving Its Stone Age - U.S. Experts
By Michael Fitzpatrick
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Internet is just now leaving its Stone Age, scientists and entrepreneurs said Thursday at a conference to mark the 30th anniversary of the vast network that has launched incredible fortunes and changed the way the world communicates.
''We are now beginning to move out of the Stone Age of the Internet,'' the conference was told by Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is considered one of the fathers of the Internet.
It was at UCLA on Sept. 2, 1969, that Kleinrock and his team succeeded in hooking up a computer to a refrigerator-sized switch, a precursor to getting two computers to talk to each other the following month and a necessary condition for the explosive growth of the Internet.
''It was the year of a raging war in Vietnam, Woodstock ... we put a man on the moon, and the Internet was born,'' he said.
Or as UCLA said in a 1969 statement, ''Creation of the network represents a major step forward in computer technology and may serve as the forerunner of large computer networks of the future.''
Thirty years later, the Internet is seemingly everywhere. It has changed the way people communicate, shop and invest and has transformed business -- in the process, creating great wealth. Entrepreneurs said that was just the start.
''I think the Internet is about 20 percent invented, and we have about 80 percent to go,'' said Sky Dayton, chairman of Internet service provider Earthlink Network Inc. (Nasdaq:ELNK - news), who himself is younger than the Internet's beginnings.
''We ain't seen nothing yet,'' said Dayton, who recently formed an investment company to help create new Internet start-ups.
Consumers can expect to see the Internet spread beyond personal computers into a variety of devices with so-called embedded functions linked to the Web. ''Computing will change and it will change profoundly,'' said Dan Rosen, general manager of new technology at Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) .
As the Internet weaves itself more tightly into daily life, businesses will have to keep up with the change, panelists said.
''You have to move where the economy moves,'' said Ronald Whittier, general manager of content services for semiconductor giant Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) . ''We have to move where the action is. Today the action is the Internet.''
''Five years from now, there will be no business that doesn't have an Internet component,'' Microsoft's Rosen said.
The Internet also means that the even big corporations have to worry about upstart rivals with new technology, said George Vradenburg, senior vice president for global and strategic policy at Internet service America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news) .
Asked to identify the biggest threats to an established Internet company such as AOL, Vradenburg said, ''It's probably the person we don't see.''
Internet Ready To Leave Home
By Dick Satran
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Now that the Internet has reached the ripe old age of 30, it's time to leave home.
Enter the era of ubiquitous computing -- the buzzword for the pervasive spread of the Internet beyond the computer motherboard where it has lived for its first three decades.
With ever smaller circuits and a rapidly expanding high-speed network, communications chips are being embedded in everything from refrigerators to Gameboys.
Internet browser-equipped mobile telephones are coming to market with the same processing power that mainframes had at the dawn of the Internet age, and 300 million mobile phone users worldwide will be able to link to the Web.
Ubiquitous computing is everywhere these days.
The largest technology companies are making networked computing their highest priority and scores of start-ups are looking for opportunity in building the devices and services that can be linked to the high-speed network.
Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), the world's largest chipmaker, said at the start of the year that the Internet had replaced silicon as the lifeblood of high tech, and that it was shifting its main focus to the network from the computer box
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) also have stepped up their development efforts to reflect the changing demands of the ''Post PC'' computing era.
But ubiquitous computing isn't all just about the bottom line. For emergency room physician Ken Zafren, in Anchorage, Alaska, it's about life and death.
Zafren's Alaskan Native Medical Center already relies heavily on the Internet and computer modems to reach patients over the frozen expanse of Alaska and the Aleutian islands. Telephone, fax and e-mail connect him to patients up to 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away -- but it's difficult to make sound judgements with the crude tools now available.
Zafren looks forward to a time when stethoscopes, thermometers and blood pressure gauges will be rewired as communications devices so patients' vital signs can be read over the Internet in real-time, and ''distance diagnostics'' can replace the crude art of ''telemedicine.''
One of the most important tools, he says, will be the simple videocam linked to a high-speed Internet connection. ''Just seeing the patient would extremely helpful,'' said Zafren, who needs to make snap judgements on whether to evacuate patients in distant locations for treatment in Anchorage.
The Alaska doctor worries how and when his financially limited health service, which relies on government funding, will get access to such services -- and in this he's not alone. But in Silicon Valley, technologists say dramatic price declines and a host of new services are on the horizon.
At the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research center, known as PARC, where many of the computer world's innovations were hatched, Roy Want, who manages embedded systems research, says, ''With new technology, we'll be able to transmit at even higher speed at lower power.'' Translation: It'll get cheaper.
The much-quoted Moore's Law, that computing power doubles roughly every two years, is just one of the factors at play. Network capacity, the bandwidth, a measure of speed and capacity of the Internet, is growing even faster than computing power. That means more data can be sent for less money.
''There's so much bandwidth becoming available, even with all of the multimedia coming online, we'll reach a point where there is still a surplus,'' said Want.
How all this bandwidth will be used will be seen over time. One use, Want says, will be an increased use of ''sensors'' hooked to the Internet: in cars, buildings and appliances, wherever they can be put to intelligent use.
The expanded use of voice recognition will also have an impact in making computers much more ubiquitous.
Picture driving home on a chilly evening and being able to get a readout of your living room's temperature and being able to raise it from the car with a voice command. Not happy with the result when you get home? ''Too hot; make it five degrees cooler,'' might be all you have to say to the wall sensors.
Business is already moving furiously to shift for the totally networked world, working to provide new products, but also trying to avoid getting blindsided by competitors using new technology to compete.
''The Internet is going to do more than anything to create an intense period of global prosperity,'' said Halsey Minor, chief executive of Internet technology company CNET Inc. (Nasdaq:CNET - news) ''We've only just seen the beginning of it.''
Not everyone, however, is sold on the idea of a global network that reaches everywhere. Some see an Orwellian nightmare with Big Brother's role played not by repressive governments but by techno-crazed marketers.
''People are becoming ambivalent about technology. The ubiquity of computing and communications is convenient at the time they want it but invades the personal space many times over,'' says Jason Catlett, of the Green Brook, New Jersey-based consumer advocacy group Junkbusters Corp. ''The more connected the society, the more interruptions it brings. Private space is disappearing.''
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