From IEEE Spectrum, October 27:
Dr. Mallik Tatipamula is CTO at Ericsson, Silicon Valley, with a distinguished 35-year career spanning Nortel, Motorola, Cisco, Juniper, F5 Networks, and Ericsson.
Dr. Vinton Cerf is VP and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google and the co-inventor of the Internet with Robert Kahn.
The Internet, born as an experiment meant to connect teams of researchers, has grown into a planetary-scale infrastructure that has reshaped society. Over the course of six decades, it has advanced through—by our count—three phases: first connecting computers, then mobile devices, and later all devices. But that’s just the start. Because just ahead comes new frontiers of connected intelligence and then, later, perception. Last, we suggest, represents a kind of global or ubiquitous connectedness, and finally connectedness even down to the quantum scale.
Through every phase, connectivity has been the unifying principle, although with every successive phase also comes new forms of connection. The story begins with connected packets of data across fixed networks of big machines. Then comes mobility, along with broadly connecting all manner of machines—not just mobile and fixed computing devices. Having already progressed through the first three Phases of the Internet (and having now entered the fourth), the world today has seen the steady expansion of human potential, while unlocking new industries, and reshaping how everyone connected to the Internet lives and works.
With a nod to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, what follows is our sketch of the Internet’s 7 Phases. However, unlike the Bard’s “7 ages of man,” each of the Internet’s eras do not come to an end when the next one starts. The Internet’s 7 Phases, in other words, are not sequential but rather additive. Each phase builds on and extends the previous, in the process setting the foundation for what is still to come.
Phase 1: The Internet
The original Internet was conceived in the 1970s to interconnect computer networks. Its groundbreaking aspect lay not only in its architecture but also in the principle of openness. By adopting common protocols, diverse networks could connect regardless of their location. The Internet has transformed isolated systems into a “network of networks,” enabling unprecedented collaboration across institutions and borders. Early applications such as email and file transfer demonstrated that connectivity could democratize access to information.
In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web introduced a unifying framework: URLs as addresses, HTTP for communication, HTML as a common language, and the browser as a universal interface. Between 1991 and ‘93, the Web transformed the Internet from a research network into a global platform for information exchange, paving the way for broader adoption.Phase 2: The Mobile Internet...
....Phase 7: The Quantum Internet....
....MUCH MORE
