Month: June 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

With a spare fifteen minutes and a few simple clicks of a mouse, the average Internet user can order dinner and have it delivered to his door, download the latest episode of American Idol, make his monthly mortgage payment, and take care of the weekly conversation with his in-laws. All of this done quickly and easily using www.wirelessinternet.net Internet services.

By comparison, it wasn’t until 1470, fifteen years after Johannes Gutenberg’s invented the revolutionary printing press in Mainz, Germany, that the city of Paris, France produced its first written work.

Even at its slowest speed, surfing the Web likely never took quite as long as fifteen years. However, it was only several decades ago that the seemingly instantaneous Internet of modern times was reduced to a sluggish search engine that could make sending an email an all-day affair.

The Seed that Sprouted into the Internet

Before there was “Tweeting,” “Facebooking,” and “Googling,” the Internet began with an idea.
In the early 1960’s various individuals, namely J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and soon thereafter, UCLA, and Lawrence Roberts of MIT, performed the initial thinking and experimentation that would ultimately give birth to the Internet.

The Idea: To develop a reliable technology that would allow people – particularly scientists and military personnel – to exchange information, experiments, and advances with other members of their fields who were located across wide geographical boundaries.  

However, it would be almost thirty more years until the cumulative efforts of scientists, engineers, electricians and countless other professionals resulted in a communications system that somewhat resembled the network used today.

The First of Many Firsts: ARPAnet

 It was in 1969 when the Internet, which at that time was known as ARPAnet, took its first steps. Computers at four prominent institutions – UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah – were linked together and formed the first real network sustained by a technology known as packet-switching.
–ARPAnet = Advanced Research Projects Agency Network

Other Notable Firsts

-1971: Electronic Mail (Email) was Invented
-1974: In a December proposal for a transmission control program, the term “Internet” was first used, thus beginning the transformation away from the artist formerly known as ARPAnet.
-1984-1989: The amount of hosts on the Internet increases by 100x, growing from around 1,000 to more than 100,000.
-1990: The call is answered for Internet dial-up when “The World” (http://www.theworld.com/) becomes the first commercial dial-up Internet supplier.
-1991: The first of what would ultimately amass to more than ten billion webpages by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century was generated. Continue reading »

Kids today have no clue how great they’ve got it. While teens used to have to actually make plans and arrange to meet and do things in person, “I’ll call you” or “I’ll text you” via prepaid smartphones have replaced this archaic method of trying to control the future proactively.

You can say what you want about how kids today are this and that, but you have to give them credit on a lot of fronts. They’ve learned more about technology’s role in creating a self-actualized lifestyle than most retirees have, despite having less than two decades of life experience.

When it comes to technology, nobody beats the teens of today. They actually think they need it, and for good reason. Let’s take a look at a few technologies that kids today think they couldn’t live without.

1. Mobile Internet

These days, the Internet is practically everywhere. From public parks to classrooms, and from cafes to some school buses, you can pretty much look up anything from pretty much anywhere you happen to be. Do you remember when you had to actually go home to look up things or do homework? Worse still, do you remember that semi-bronze age period of history when going to the library was actually useful for studying?

Teens today actually think they need the Internet everywhere they go. One tends to wonder how this impacts their critical thinking skills if they’re so reliant on one type of technology over which they have no control. Of course, you can’t blame them for wanting the Net everywhere.

2. Touch Screen Prepaid Cell Phones

Are you old enough to remember when your nearest lifeline to help or your friends was the nearest pay phone and the change in your pocket? Did you ever have a pager, which required you to find a phone and dial up the person who called you? Guess what — kids these days don’t have to use that much creativity in their communications.

According to a survey conducted in 2008, nearly half the teens who responded said that not having a cell phone would either cripple or totally eliminate their social life. It makes sense that they’d feel this way, considering how little time anybody today has.

Task lists that used to take a week now have deadlines of 24 hours or so as everyone struggles to put more effort into getting ahead. Your kid can be talking to you, texting their best-friend-forever, and searching for such important information as how many dimes it would take to stack up to the Moon. If you just did a search out of curiosity, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Continue reading »