30 years of Internet

The Internet, a revolutionary and cheap communications system that has transformed the lives of billions of people across the world, turned 30 on Tuesday. The celebration was so quiet that I missed that and noticed it one day late. But even one day late it is worth to mention.

Thirty years ago this week, Vint Cerf began “a great adventure”. On January 1, 1983, he and his colleagues switched on the internet. January 1, 1983, was an official ‘flag day’ for the ARPANET, which became what we know as the Internet. On that day the collaborative operators of the existing networking hardware turned off the old networking protocol, NCP (network control protocol), and the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)-based Internet became the norm.

30 years of the internet – but the best is yet to come article tells that we’ve been strapped to a rocket for three decades. Wheeeee! What’s particularly fascinating about the net is that the innovation doesn’t appear to be slowing down. The constantly connected tablets we take for granted didn’t even exist three years ago, and the mobile web was pretty horrid as recently as 2007. 30 years of Internet has enable remarkable progress but there are side-effects must be tackled: The most serious problem is the leak of personal information, which leads to violations of privacy.

The Internet should be prepared for another successful 30 years. The Internet Will End in 30 Years! article mentions the latest doomsday scenario that the internet will stop working in thirty years! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems in the year 2038. I don’t think that this bug will realize in wide scale because by 2038, it’s likely that many of the susceptible machines will have been decommissioned before the critical date occurs. However, legacy systems and embedded systems could still be affected.