Chapter 1: Introduction

I cannot get my sleep to-night; old bones are hard to please;
I’ll stand the middle watch up here—alone wi’ God an’ these
My engines, after ninety days o’ race an’ rack an’ strain
Through all the seas of all Thy world, slam-bangin’ home again.

—Rudyard Kipling, writing on the importance of 24/7 availability
under load, “McAndrew’s Hymn,” 1894

The Big Internet

The Internet is Big. (Annoyed Reader: “I paid you HOW MUCH to tell me that?” Royalty-Counting Author: “What, you mean, it’s NOT?”)

On its own, a desktop PC is boring, much as a single-cell amoeba is boring. Sure, you can use it (the PC, not the amoeba) to play a mean game of Solitaire and it won’t let you cheat (this is an advantage?), and Notepad comes in handy on occasion. But unlike the evolutionary value of the amoeba, the economic benefits to society of the stand-alone desktop PC have yet to be satisfactorily proven. It just can’t do that much interesting or useful stuff as long as its horizons remain limited to its own box. However, when you use the Internet to link your PC to every other PC in the world, and to every intelligent non-PC device (palmtops, refrigerators, and so on) as well, for essentially no extra hardware cost, fun things start to happen—just as when enough single cells connect and evolve to form the human brain, which can compose, play, and appreciate a symphony; fly to the moon; or obliterate its own species. Beats the heck out of Solitaire, doesn’t it?

Stand-alone PCs are much less useful than networked PCs.

The Web started out as a means for browsing boring physics reports and took off (understatement of the century) from there. It dramatically lowered the friction of distributing all types of data. Expanded content attracted more users to the Internet, and the increasing numbers in the audience drew in more content providers in a virtuous cycle that not only shows no signs of ending but is accelerating even as I write these words. Yesterday I used the Web to watch video highlights of a hockey game that I missed. After that, I used Kazaa to find some good music among 500,000 different songs (I only look at the legal ones, naturally) on 10,000 different users’ hard drives. Then I talked to my mother about setting up a video camera link so that she could look into her grandchild’s crib from her home 500 miles away. The Internet has made ours a completely different world from that of even 5 years ago.

The Internet continues to change society ever more rapidly.

Hardware for connecting to the Internet and bandwidth for transmitting data are cheap and getting cheaper. The Web camera that lets my mother watch my daughter cost only a couple of hundred bucks to install in my PC and essentially nothing extra to operate over my existing cable modem. Think what it would have cost 10 years ago, or even 5, to buy video hardware and lease a dedicated line from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. The prices of Internet hardware and bandwidth will soon fall to Cracker Jack prize level, if they haven’t already.

Internet hardware and bandwidth are cheap and getting cheaper.