"Then as it was, then again it will be
An’ though the course may change sometimes
Rivers always reach the sea
Blind stars of fortune, each have several rays
On the wings of maybe, down in birds of prey
Kind of makes me feel sometimes, didn’t have to grow
But as the eagle leaves the nest, it’s got so far to go

Changes fill my time, baby, that’s alright with me
In the midst I think of you, and how it used to be"

(Plant/Page, grande Led em "Ten Years Gone", que saiu no "Physical Graffiti")


Lembrei o som do Led logo que vi o tema de capa da Wired de Agosto: "10 Years that Changed the World". Ela tá comemorando os 10 anos de vida da Internet como a conhecemos. Não pode passar em branco né? Acho que todos que chegam aqui (aqui!) lembram-se de 95. Já tinham algum contato com computadores. Lembra? Lembra como era sua vida antes da Internet?



Eu completava 10 anos de carreira quando tive meu primeiro contato com a Rede. Maluco (em Vga), cheguei a assinar um provedor aqui de Sampa. Paguei uma bela $ em ligações interurbanas. Mas logo veio o ET, e o 1o provedor.. hehe. Sacanagem: o provedor chegou antes. Fornecendo um "kit" de conexão que parecia 'manha' de videogame. Não importava. Que mundão novo era aquele? O olhar do caipira-usuário brilhava. O do caipira-programador era de susto. Caramba, como se programa esse bicho?

Temos formas e formas. Cada vez mais legais. Mas o Kevin Kelly (autor do artigo "We Are the Web", da mesma Wired) acabou de me mostrar que estamos todos PROGRAMANDO esse bicho. Que ele chamou só de MÁQUINA. Cada clique, cada busca, cada post... tudo que fazemos 'conectados' tá alimentando um grande cérebro. NOSSO GRANDE CÉREBRO COLETIVO.

[break:: quem acha que eu viajo muito precisa conhecer melhor minhas 'fontes', hehe]

Saca só alguns trechos fantásticos (aconselho a leitura do artigo inteiro, mas alerto que são 5 longas páginas):

The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable, so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: 'It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.' Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: 'THE INTERNET? BAH!' The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: 'baloney.'

...

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.

...

Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.

But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible.

...

The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The network is the computer." He was talking about the company's vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.

Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.

This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.


Wow...