The 1969 Big Bang
Friday, September 4th, 2009The rapid expansion of the universe is nothing short of amazing. It’s now everywhere, and the size is unimaginable. To be clear, I’m not referring to the universe that suddenly sprang into existence with the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, but the universe that was born 40 years ago in September of 1969, when two computers were connected together over a network for the first time. Shortly thereafter four nodes established the first Internet (I’m proud to say that one of them was my Alma Mater, the University of Utah… go Utes! Of course I was a whoppin’ one-year-old, but anyway, I digress).
Just as the early primordial soup of the expanding universe resulted in everything we see today, the Internet continues to engulf various forms of media, communications, social interconnections and applications. Today, we tweet, blog, google and sometimes SaaS. It has expanded beyond traditional computing into devices attached to us, and touches everyone in some way or another, from sports stars to presidential candidates and astronauts orbiting the earth. We make phone calls on it, we shop with it, we do our banking with it and we watch TV and movies through it. The Internet carries good news and bad news. It serves us, provides amazing value and yet it carries viruses and transports fraud. The far-red-shift pattern of the Internet probably means that it’ll keep going, and going. The next 40 years will be an amazing journey.