20 years in IT history: Connectivity

PS/2, NeXT and OOPs, Netware 3 Archie, Linux, Windows Mosaic, Spam and More, Convergence The Dotcoms, Distributed Compution, XML Wireless and Y2K, Millennial Change and Angst, Blogs Sarbanes-Oxley, Virtualization, ERP Hangover Multicore Processors, The Network, The iPhoneiPhone Alles zu iPhone auf CIO.de

But by 1990 the community was expanding rapidly and finding stuff was getting harder. That year three McGill students, Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch, attacked the problem with a program they called Archie (from "archive"). Archie worked by sending a message from your local system to each entry on a list of servers, asking for the public files available on that server. It would then combine the responses into a single master list on your local system, which you would then interrogate with "Find" commands. Archie was crude, but it illustrated two big points about networking.

First, connectivity is self-extending; it creates entirely new objects, which can themselves become subject to connectivity. And if you connect A, B and C, you can create AB, BC, AC, ABC and so on. These newly created objects might be more useful than A or B or C. The master list generated by Archie was the first step in the evolution of the Internet from a network of networks to a library of resources.

Second, on a network, digital resources can be reused, over and over, forever, at next to no additional cost. Put a search engine on that network and you allow this efficiency to scale without limit. This fact would turn out to have huge economic consequences.

1991: Linux Linus Torvalds parties at the University of Helsinki.