Jay's Expose

Have you ever been in a conversation where you honestly had no idea at all what was going on? Well, that was my experience sitting in this seminar on Day One and I loved every moment of it. What originally drew me into this seminar was the idea of talking about the Internet, which is a tool I use everyday. I don’t think I truly grasped how little I know about the world of the Internet or computer science in general. Growing up, my dad worked at HP and I always thought of myself as a computer connoisseur because at school when other students would have a computer problem I could usually figure out how to fix it and I would go on to explain how I was so good with computers because, “I’d gotten it from my dad.” As I got older, I was still the person that could figure out how to get a computer to do what I wanted with a little bit of troubleshooting. I never realized the vast array of things that I don’t know about computers. I enjoyed hearing about a whole new world unknown to me yet so influential to my everyday life. Millions of people use computers everyday and have no idea of the history and innovation that is behind the entire concept of a society connected in a cloud.

There was so much information that I encountered in the two hours that we discussed a wide range of topics and it took me a while to get through the reading and to wrap my mind around these concepts that are new to me. Some of the highlights of what we talked about that I had little to no knowledge of included time sharing, net neutrality, SETI, quantum computing, heat sinks, what an IMP is, Moore’s law, resource sharing, redundancy, and theoretic limits. I did happen to know a bit about Alexa, but hadn’t heard of Cortana. I found it very interesting to look at the unlikely team up of Amazon and Microsoft. I had previously considered the competition between companies like Apple and Amazon with the product similarity, but I would have never suspected two companies with different main products to work together to increase profits; however, it does make a lot of sense.

What I gained from the readings was the realization that the idea of the Internet has been around for longer than I thought. It blows my mind that people (everyone before my generation) grew up in a time where the Internet didn’t exist, but it had been in the works for decades. I didn’t how heavily the motivations and need for communication stemmed from the country’s need to be on the national defensive cutting edge. It was interesting to see how many out of the box thinkers it took to develop, morph and grow the ways we communicate into what it is today. Years of perseverance and dedication to ideas was pivotal in making new ideas stick.

One last thought: the issue of digital preservation is one that sticks out to me. Today, if I wanted to watch an old VHS tape, I’d have to somehow get my hands on a VCR. If I wanted to listen to a CD, I’d have to find a CD player. Those are physical ways of accessing old audio and videos, and it is inconvenient, but still possible to find a way to view the content. However, the question is, what will we do when trying to look at old files in 30, 50, 100 years down the line when all of the photos and digital files are in the cloud. As technology changes and advances, how will people be able to go back and access old files when there isn’t a physical device they can use to pull up files from today? As things change and the oldest technology starts to become obsolete, how will we continue to preserve history that isn’t something we can hold in our hands?

Well, those are my thoughts from this first week, I’m excited and interested to see where this next discussion takes us.