Future History Of The INTERNET

History of the Future
The Internet was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client/server and peer-to-peer computing, and the net-
work computer.

It was designed before LANs existed, but has evolved to accommodate LANs as well as more recent ATM and frame-switched services. It was envi-sioned as supporting a range of functions—from file
sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned email and more recently
the Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars invested annually.

One should not conclude that the Internet is complete. The Internet is a creature of the computer, not the traditional networks of the telephone or television industries. It will indeed it must continue changing at the speed of the computer industry to remain relevant.

It is now changing to provide such new services as real-time transport, supporting, for example, audio and video streams. The availability of pervasive networking that is, the Internet itself along with powerful affordable computing and communications in portable form(e.g., laptop computers, two-way pagers, PDAs, cellular phones) makes possible a new paradigm of nomadic computing and communications.

This evolution will bring us new applications. Internet telephone and, further out, Internet television. It will also permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies with different characteristics and requirements from broadband residential access to satellites.

New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications that in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself. The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. Internet architecture has always been drivenby a core group of designers, but the form of that grouphas changed as the number of interested outside partieshas grown.

With the success of the Internet has come aproliferation of stakeholders now with an economic aswell as an intellectual investment in the network. Wesee, for example, in the debates over control of thedomain namespace and the form of the next-generationIP addresses a struggle to find the next social structure
to guide the Internet. However, that structure is moredifficult to define, given the large number of stake-holders.

The industry also struggles to find the economic rationale for the huge investment needed forfuture growth to, for example, upgrade residentialaccess to more suitable technology. If the Internetstumbles, it will not be because we lack technology,vision, or motivation but because we cannot set a direction and march collectively into the future.

                                              Mkessa Patricia
                                                BAPRM 42618