As Internet turns 40, barriers threaten its growth.
Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people on-line.
Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
Call it a mid-life crisis.
A variety of factors are to blame. Spam and hacking attacks force network operators to erect security firewalls. Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders. And commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals, particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.
"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop - more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."
Few were paying attention back on Sept. 2, 1969, when about 20 people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable.
That was the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah did by year's end.
The 1970s brought e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which allowed multiple networks to connect - and formed the Internet. The '80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixes like ".com" and ".org" in widespread use today.
The Internet didn't become a household word until the '90s, though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation.
"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it," Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to kind of take root."
Even the U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development as a military project, largely left it alone, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls that today treat unknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/200...D9ADCOL00.html
i remember about 30 some years ago when the first apples were sold in stores. also having a IBM clone with dual 5 inch floppy's and no hard drive and 2 mg of ram with a turbo switch. it didn't even have a modem . and playing pong on a small 9 inch green screen monitor. even a calculator was loaded by inputing dos and then imputing a floppy disk with a 4 function basic calulator. it take eon's to use it seem at todays speeds of a computer. i remember selling Timex and commodore 64 computers in places like Sears and montgomery wards. gee how time flys by .
hell i was thinking and i know im wrong my clone had know were close to that 2 mb of ram onboard . that was my first 486dx2 that came with 2 mg of ram and that was huge at the time for a unit to use .
say Happy 40th to the Internet
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say Happy 40th to the Internet
the Last time I was Talking to myself . I got into such a heated argument . that is why I swore I never talk to that guy again. you know what it worked now no buddy talking to me. 
