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Tech-Op-ed February, 2020 SOUNDING OFF
By Michael Skinner Editor
Brainchild: The Birth of the Internet
T
of not having an internet connection can be impossibly frustrating. Born out of early packet switching networks in the 1960s, including
he internet has had a greater impact on culture, business, communica- tion, and technology than any other human invention. Today, the ease with which we access it is often taken for granted, while the experience
ARPANET, the NPL network and others, the first recognizable model of the internet was realized by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 in the form of the World Wide Web. The Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) originally
connected a 32-bit SDS Sigma 7 at UCLA to a 24-bit SDS 940 at the Stanford Research Institute. These early computers filled entire rooms with their banks of memory, secondary storage, tape punches and readers, and were booted from paper tape. The first message was sent by UCLA student Charley Kline to SRI’s Bill
Duvall on October 29, 1969. Leonard Kleinrock, a central figure in the devel- opment of ARPANET, recounts the story of that original message, which was supposed to say “LOGIN.” The two university teams spoke over the phone while sending the first characters. They made it through “L” and “O” before the “G” made the system crash.
Kleinrock says poetically that those two letters reminded him of the phrase “Lo and behold,” as if God had spoken through the machine. An hour later, once the system was back up and running, they were able to send the entire word.
In December 1969, the two-node network was expanded to four, adding
computers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. ARPANET then grew quickly, reaching the east coast of the U.S. by 1970. By 1980, there were more than 200 hosts, with a new one being brought online every 20 days. Kleinrock also claims to have committed the first illegal act on the inter-
net, when he sent a message asking about the return of a lost shaver after giv- ing a talk in England. At the time, using the internet for personal use was con- sidered unlawful. The concept of using an information system to connect people was imag-
ined as far back as 1909 by E. M. Forster in his short story “The Machine Stops.” In the story, humanity has retreated underground and is cared for by an omnipotent machine. Forster imagines a bleak future where information and technology ultimately render human life meaningless. Far from the cold future predicted by Forster, Berners-Lee created the
World Wide Web from playing with hypertext in a database of people and soft- ware as a contractor at CERN in 1989. Hypertext allows the linking of infor- mation from document to document at the whim of the user. In 1990, Berners- Lee distributed his proposal, launched the web on a NeXTcube computer at CERN, and changed the world. The ease of information sharing through link- ing and early web browsers caused the web to expand faster than anyone ex- pected. By 1993 there were around 500 known servers, which numbered 10,000 within a year. The mind-blowing expanse of the web overshadowed all other attempts at hypertext systems. In 1993, only 1 percent of two-way telecommunications traffic was on the internet, by 2000 more than half, and today, nearly 100 percent. When the web came in, ARPANET went out, decommissioned in Febru-
ary of 1990. An emotional time for some, including another founding father of the internet, Vinton Cerf, who commemorated it in his “Requiem of the ARPANET.”
“It was the first, and being first, was best, but now we lay it down to ever rest. Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears. For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years of faithful service, duty done, I weep. Lay down thy packet now, O friend, and sleep.” r
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
By Jacob Fattal Publisher
The Impact of 5G on Manufacturing
faster wireless speeds than 4G, along with much lower latency. They can also support a million devices per square kilometer, a tenfold increase over 4G. By the end of 2019, 5G networks had been rolled out in more than 30
W
U.S. cities. Chicago, where Verizon launched 5G, has seen cellular speeds of up to 1.4 Gb/s, which is blazingly fast compared with last-generation 4G speeds. In July 2019, Atlanta became the first city to offer 5G cellular service from the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. For manufacturers, the implications are far-reaching. With such an in-
crease in the number of devices that can be connected on a network, experts predict that 5G will connect billions of low-cost, low-power devices spread over vast areas. This enormous number of connected devices, a large portion of which will be cameras and various sensors, will need to be produced efficient- ly — great news for the electronics manufacturing industry. 5G is expected to have the most significant impact in the automotive,
healthcare and manufacturing industries. In vehicles, advanced driver-assis- tance systems (ADAS), aided by the speed and capabilities of 5G, will protect drivers and passengers from collisions and traffic violations, while providing high-speed, wireless navigation and entertainment. In healthcare, the speeds of 5G will offer more opportunities for remote
patient monitoring, as well as diagnosis and prescription. Enormous image files will be able to be transmitted quickly, augmented and virtual reality can aid doctors in performing remote checkups and real-time, reliable monitoring will be a reality. For manufacturers, the most significant changes will be in remote, real-
time control and system feedback. Safety will be significantly improved, by having less human presence near machinery and materials. Verizon has demonstrated the ability to use its 5G network to control a robotic arm, which transmits tactile signals to a human worker offsite through a connected glove. Imagine the implications for workers who risk their lives dealing with haz- ardous materials. Also, due to the speed of the network, greater production monitoring is
possible. Monitoring the absolute speed of the highest-throughput machines is a challenge with current technology. With 5G, errors can be enormously reduced, saving time, money and machine down- time. The electronics industry is poised to tackle 5G head-on, in the areas of both production and consumption. r
ith the recent rise of concepts like Industry 4.0 and the Industrial In- ternet of Things (IIoT), 5G networks are expected to be the vehicle by which these ideas are realized. 5G networks promise exponentially
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