After winning the prestigious Turing award, Bob Metcalfe likes to look back and think about everything that brought us to this point – – including the principle of connectivity, and the quick and dramatic rise of new technology within our lifetimes…
There’s almost something mystical as he talks about it all – the old Chinese proverb about roadbuilding, the early forays into ARPANET, and later, our modern world, where data flies around at the press of a button. Suggesting that the principle of connectivity is central, Metcalfe invites us to ponder the how and the why of things like packet switching – and how digital transfer might interact with the physical transfer of materials, tissues, cells, atoms… you get the picture. Connectivity is primal, integral, ubiquitous, and takes on many forms.
One way Metcalfe explains the progression of technology in the age of Moore’s law is with the early ideas that came to constitute the modern Internet. He’ll point out that the whole thing started with telnet, where people wanted access to other people’s servers, and then FTP, to actually get their own data onto other servers, and then email, which he dates to around 1973, and everything else.
Looking back to building networks and his time at Xerox, with speeds like 10 characters per second for data transfer, you’re talking to Bob, you get a sense of just how fundamental that time was – and how other things came along layered on top of that early work.
Metcalfe also often mentions Ethernet as a cornerstone technology – not just Ethernet, either, but other advances like the mouse (attributed largely to Doug Engelbart) and the early network, with the involvement of people like Bob Taylor (check out his 2017 obit at Wired for more on how these individuals worked together to build what we now use every day).
It’s also, as he points out, an enduring one – rather than becoming supplanted by something new, the Ethernet, semantically, has incorporated other new technologies. That’s interesting, because so many other names have been relegated to standposts on the march toward the future.
Anyway, that mystical principle of connectivity can be seen in Metcalfe’s chronicling of the modular approach to Internet evolution. There’s the founding of Cisco in 1984, when, as he says, “the scale began to reveal itself,” and the way that web 2.0 formed out of the original World Wide Web. But it hasn’t been an entirely smooth ride, either.
Another interesting thing that Metcalfe brings to the table is a look at some of the challenges and obstacles that have accompanied the Internet’s lightning-fast evolution.
He sometimes calls these “pathologies.”
We can group them into two different sets – the ones that cropped up early, and others that arrived later, basically, now…
When we talk about early pathologies, we’re often primarily talking about hacking – the warfare between external parties, and the targeting of other people’s systems, which so many people have compared to physical robberies in many different ways.
Then there’s pornography, which, as Metcalfe notes, has devoured large swaths of the Internet, revealing some of the most retrograde parts of human nature.
But it’s interesting to think about one of Bob’s other points: that the early founders of the Internet didn’t want it to be used for advertising!
Of course, that ship has sailed…
So what are today’s pathologies?
Well, they include censorship and misinformation, not to mention disinformation, and let’s not forget compromising data privacy. Now our data is marketed on the dark web and elsewhere, and we have to think about how the endless free flow of information can, in some cases, lead people astray.
So what you get from Metcalfe’s ruminations is a balanced view of something that seems to happen in the blink of an eye – the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to the Internet, and what’s coming next.
Now we’re in the AI age. We’re contemplating all of these brand new capabilities, and how they will shape our future. In some senses, it’s all about – connectivity. Understanding this better can help us to chart a path forward.
Read the full article here
