I think we all tend to forget what an amazing development the internet is. On Friday, I was helping a colleague new to telecomms to get some networking basics under her belt. Firstly, we visited the centre's switch, computer room and test lab, where I pointed out the bits of kit I knew the names and functions of and glossed over those I didn't have a clue about. Afterwards, back at her workstaion, I was wanting to demonstrate how to ping a server. With my head full of customer issues and upcoming appointments, I couldn't for the life of me recall a reliable IP address to use. So, in a last ditch attempt to salvage my geekish pride, I entered this site's domain name so it would resolve to the IP address and give me some results to discuss.
"Oh, you have your own website, do you?" she said, in a neutral but polite manner.
"Of course" I said, or words to that effect.
It struck me later not just how arrogant that the comment must have sounded but also how we so take for granted the technology at our disposal. It is not even remotely remarkable that a teenager can, from the bedroom of their parent's home, establish and grow an online business that can make them a paper millionaire before a year is out. Earlier in the week, my father and I were having one of our regular phone conversations whilst I crawled home through the rush hour traffic. He recalled that, during the Great War, my grandfather, stranded on an ambulance train somewhere in France, would have only had recourse to a hastily written letter or, at the very best, a telegram, to send word to his worried family. Later on, in the 1930s, my father not only had to ask his father permission to make a telephone call but, having provided sufficient evidence to have his request granted, make that call from the one handset in the house, often in front of the whole family. Now, fast forward almost ninety years, to the present day where I can, from my home, post my opinions and comments to website that has a global audience and been viewed thousands of times. My children don't even think twice before sending an email or an SMS instantly to friends around the globe - friends they'd never have had the chance to meet in years gone by.
Not earth-shattering revelations, I grant you but ones that we shouldn't forget in this world-on-a-plate, take-it-for-granted world.
Footnote:
Mike Muuss, father of the original UNIX ping code (his 'thousand line hack'), stated that the following ping story was his favourite.
"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."
Full text at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html
Posted by bignoseduglyguy at October 19, 2003 12:29 PM | TrackBack
