>>However, it looks like I covered too soon on QCOM. Dropped another 5 points in the last 30 minutes.. <<
Ps
Oh No! Not from Palo Alto again!
>>
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 1 (Reuters) - Scientists who figured out how to get computers to talk to each other 30 years ago had no idea their work would evolve into the highly commercial, user-friendly Internet of today. For that, many people, including Vice President Al Gore, have claimed credit.
This week the spotlight turns to the University of California, Los Angeles, where professor Leonard Kleinrock is hosting a 30th birthday party for the Internet. Kleinrock describes his work back in 1969 connecting a computer to a switch, or router, and later to another computer, as the infant Internet's "first breath of life."
It would be years, however, before the concept took off in academic circles, and more time still before the general public grasped the potential of a worldwide computer network to exchange everything from serious research to light conversation, software, stocks and porn.
As the Internet revolutionizes society and the economy, the list of individuals, corporations and research centers seeking a place in its history will only continue to grow.
But who really deserves credit for the Internet as we know it today? That depends on whom you ask.
Microsoft Corp.<MSFT.O>, for example, says that much of the credit goes to -- who else -- Microsoft.
"In recent memory, it was Microsoft's decision to ship Internet technologies in Windows 95," says Dan Rosen, general manager of new technology at Microsoft when asked about some of the big milestones in the development of the Internet.
Rosen says Windows 95, which was released to software developers as early as 1993, helped create a universal standard for creating Internet software, which "unleashed a whole wave of creative people doing interesting things on the Internet."
Others argue that the young companies that have appeared recently were the real shapers of today's Internet.
"Several small new players have had a fairly large impact," says Eric Brewer, a co-founder of Internet search engine Inktomi Corp.<INKT.O>, which was formed just three years ago.
Brewer cited the Internet community Geocities as one of the young companies that wielded disproportionate influence. Geocities, an "Internet community" that was acquired this year by Yahoo! Inc.<YHOO.O>, set up a system that let individuals post content online and draw visitors to their own sites.
UCLA's Kleinrock notes, "There are so many people who have created the applications" for today's Internet that it is hard to list all of them. One of the foremost, he says, is Amazon.com Inc.<AMZN.O> founder Jeff Bezos, who created the first widely used model for shopping online.
Of course, before it was possible to set up an Internet store, there needed to be modems for consumers to connect to the Internet, networking to link disparate systems, software to facilitate the transfer of material, and a graphical browser to make the system accessible even to the computer illiterate.
"Everybody associated with the (early Internet) is surprised by what it has become," said Don Nielson of SRI International, the Menlo Park, California, research institute that was active in the early development. "In those days, the idea of a commercial Internet was anathema."
Among the people who changed that are Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1993 invented the World Wide Web at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN. His work was critical in automating the many steps involved in exchanging data online so that users could search for material, retrieve it, store it on their computer hard disks and open it with a single command.
Around the same time, Marc Andreessen and a team at the University of Illinois were building what would become the first commercial Internet browser.
Their work replaced a lot of arcane computerspeak with simple icons, like the little hand that instructs the computer to open a document. It was later commercialized at Netscape Communications Corp., now part of America Online Inc <AOL.N>.
Going back further is Ray Tomlinson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer engineer who went on to develop e-mail in the early 1970s. While Tomlinson offered an early glimpse of what the Internet might become with an invention that remains one of the most common online applications today, he is something of an unsung hero.
And speaking of unsung heroes, most of the early researchers agree that the federal government was one of them for the way it aggressively funded research.
"The commercial Internet just would not have existed without this very long-term investment in research by the federal government," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Computational Science Alliance at the University of Illinois, which was partly funded by the National Science Foundation.
Which brings the discussion back to Al Gore. For all the ridicule he received earlier this year for a statement in which he suggested he invented the Internet, many prominent researchers say he was not so far off the mark.
"He did contribute, you know," said Kleinrock. "He was very, very supportive of networking technology while he was a senator, and he helped generate funding for the information superhighway. He was an early proponent who helped spread the word." <<
This PR was actually written by John Doerr.
16:57 09-01-99<< |
