ARPANET – which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network is the original computer-based mail and messaging that became possible with the time-sharing of computers in the early 1960’s. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked allot of them together allowing a common basis of interoperability.
Many of the universities in the United States were part of ARPANET, The aim was to enable software portability among its systems… so someone had what I like to call a “sit and think” and decided the smarter route to go would be to attach the function of email to software not hardware … I guess you can thank them for the constant alerts on your device….
Over the past 8 weeks, we’ve discussed some of the different ways technology has impacted our lives and the physical mediums that move electronic bits and bytes around the globe. We’ve chatted about a variety of topics From WANS, VPNS, ENCRYPTION, GPS AND COMPRESSION TYPES – and as I’m sure you know – barely scratched the surface of any of these.
When you start really disecting where and why things exist and how they came to be, its pretty fascinating.
Steve Jobs famously said “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
I think that one of the casualties of the 24 by 7 always “on” culture is that our headspace seems to have shrunk when it comes to research and investigating topics in more depth – I know that’s easy to say – so many of us are consumed with things that get in the way of the “sit and think” and we research the why’s very little these days.
But, rightly or wrongly, this world is run on technology …. however I advance the argument that technology doesn’t have to frustrate and consume you.
When you come up against something that doesn’t’ make sense, find a way to break down the information about it into smaller pieces to understand what and why that technology exists.
Technologically, I think we are at a tipping point around the world – heightened by this pandemic that we have all been living with the last 13 or more months, technology has been utilized more in the last year or so and at a greater speed than anytime in the last decade.
As historian and world renowned author, Yuval Noah Harari said “Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours during a crisis. ”
How many corporations around the globe changed the way they ran their business in a matter of a few short weeks once the world went into lockdown. Most of these changes were fuelled by the tech industry and, while there are some that are not proving out to be positive, many of them have allowed us to stay connected together while apart – certainly in ways that we wouldn’t even have envisioned in 2019.
There are many and varied technologies that we will explore together as we go forward but more and more I will be writing on the whys.
Don’t be hesitant to ask yourself a couple of questions as you live in the day to day technological world…
- Someone made this technical product and decisions around how it works – was it the right one for this time or could it be better? and
- Does it work for me and what I am trying to achieve
Next week’s Blog will wrap up the 10 part series we launched back in February with a look into AI – artificial intelligence.
We will start series two on June 1 and have more in-depth discussions and interviews with thought leaders around the impacts of global technology and breakdown what it all means to your everyday world.
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