The long arm of the internet reaches 5B devices

Yes, that header is correct — this month will see the five billionth device connected to the world via the internet Something to think about there. From the early days of ARPANET up to today’s World Wide Web full of commercialization, social media, viral video and everything else you can track down in the online world, human communication has gone through an honest revolution. A revolution I doubt very many of us would want to see rolled back.

From the first link:

Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.

On the surface, this second tidal wave of growth will be driven by cell phones and new classes of consumer electronics, according to an IMS statement. But an even bigger driver will be largely invisible: machine-to-machine communications in various kinds of smart grids for energy management, surveillance and public safety, traffic and parking control, and sensor networks.

Earlier this year, Cisco forecast equally steep growth rates in personal devices and overall Internet traffic. [See “Global IP traffic to increase fivefold by 2013, Cisco predicts“]

Today, there are over 1 billion computers that regularly connect to the Internet. That class of devices, including PCs and laptops and their associated networking gear, continues to grow.

Happy birthday web browser

Well, technically happy birthday almost two weeks ago on October 13. The browser turns 15. Yep, if the web browser — that digital tool so old it’s losing teeth and has hair growing out its ears — couldn’t even get a driver’s license if it were a person. Innovation is fast and furious and little things like this bring that point home every once in a while.

First came ARPANET back in the late 1960s, which led to the internet leading to the more user friendly subset of the internet known as the World Wide Web and those easy-to-use GUIs and the dawn of the age of the web browser. And now we’re about to be browsing sites written in HTML5.

From the very first link:

The Web browser turns 15 on Oct. 13, 2009 — a key milestone in the history of the Internet. That’s when the first commercial Web browser — eventually called Netscape Navigator – was released as beta code. While researchers including World Wide Web inventorTim Berners-Lee and a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created Unix browsers between 1991 and 1994, Netscape Navigator made this small piece of desktop software a household name. By allowing average users to view text and images posted on Web sites, Netscape Navigator helped launch the Internet era along with multiple browser wars, government-led lawsuits and many software innovations

50 years of DARPA

Here’s a cool NewScientist article on 50 years of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Just in case you didn’t know, you owe DARPA for the ability to read this blog. The earliest version of what has become the World Wide Web was a DARPA project, ARPANET.

(Hat tip: KurzweilAI.net)