The Internet: yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Wikipedia says that the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. What you see in the title image taken from The Opte Project, is just a fragment of a much larger internet map. Obviously, it is impossible to map all computers connected to the internet. Thousands of them go down every day while new ones replace them. The fact remains -- internet is growing.

It is also virtually impossible to determine the "birthday" of the internet. A simple search on Google will give you plenty of different opinions: some say that it is over thirty years old while others argue it is more like twenty. And yet, for the purposes of this article, let's just say the internet was born on 6th of August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee has introduced his idea of the World Wide Web at CERN laboratories in Switzerland. After all, to many casual users the whole complex structure of the internet is reduced to daily typing-in those three magic letters into their browsers -- WWW.

Let's go back and see what people thought of the internet before it was born. Interestingly enough, it seems that people cared about e-commerce more than they did about information sharing. The first video is from 1969 and it rather accurately describes the idea of e-commerce. Of course, the way it is visualized looks funny to us, but the concepts are accurate:

Article with videos you can find in blog (resource box)

The second video is a bit more recent -- it's a news report from 1981 talking about this great new (still pre-internet) invention of reading the newspapers on your computer screen. This one is not a concept but rather a report on existing technology. Still, it serves as a great example of how fast everything evolved:

So what does the internet look like today? Well, you can take a look at the visualization again, but that doesn't help much, does it? How about some numbers then?

Asa Dotzler, the founder of Mozilla's Quality Assurance and Testing Program, did some very simplified calculations. He says:

The chart is a mash up of about 40 different data sources from usage, to market share, to installed base, for browsers, internet connected computers, and operating systems. Working through all that data, I was able to come up with something that I think approximates the Web's user growth and browser changes over the last 13 years.

Probably most "real" statisticians would dismiss these kind of calculations right away, but this chart does not become any less interesting because of that. So here it is for your judgment:

What does this chart tell us? Well, first of all, there are around 1.2 billion (almost 1.4 based on Wolfram|Alpha) internet users world-wide. This is around 20% of the whole world's population. Also, it is rather interesting to note that while Firefox and other browsers were gaining popularity, it wasn't really at the expense of Internet Explorer. IE's usage simply slowed down, meaning that new internet users chose alternative browsers such as Firefox more often. However that's not what this article is about, so let's just leave it here.

In just under fifteen years the internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. As we have said before, nowadays the internet is (re)defining every aspect of our daily lives: form economy, to social life; from the way we do business, to the way we have fun. Most of us probably do not imagine going a day or whole week without internet access. To some of us it has become an <a onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addictioneating this disorder alongside with gaming and computer use addictions.

So what awaits us in the future? It's hard to predict, but there are some things that we are quite certain of. Obviously there will be an even bigger spread of internet-enabled consumer electronics. Having a tablet PC, PDA, or internet enabled phone is nothing new today, but what about internet enabled toasters and refrigerators? True, all this technology exists already, but it's not that wide-spread.

Technologies, enabling us to connect to the internet will evolve for sure. At the very least, existing technologies such as Wireless-N protocol and WiMax will become more popular.

And maybe, just maybe we will finally see a true smart-house: symbiosis of artificial intelligence and internet connectivity powering and controlling every single aspect of the house. Why maybe? Well, it's possible today, but the problem is that several kilometers of wiring is required to connect everything. So until we have wireless electricity or some other alternative, it remains just a "maybe"...