"History
doesn't look like history when you're living it," John Gardner observed. As
we deal with the chaos, confusion and change that new network technology is
imposing on our business and personal lives, it is easy to miss the history of
this moment. We are experiencing a network revolution that ranks alongside that
which began with Samuel F.B. Morse's immortal "What hath God wrought" in 1844.
Two forces that
have been developing for decades – digital processing and digital networks - have
matured to make 2012 an historic watershed. Like the proverbial boiled frog,
these changes have been developing in full view, but incrementally so as to
hide their impact. Suddenly, the convergence of digital wireless connectivity
and truly mobile computing has created a boiling point. The result is changing
our lives and defining the patterns of future generations.
Electronic
digital computing has been evolving since John Atanasoff first assembled such
capability in the basement of the Iowa State physics building in 1938. The vacuum
tubed mainframes that followed ultimately yielded to silicon mini computers,
then to microchip-powered PCs, and now to pocket-sized mainframe computing power
dubbed smartphones. Last year this 70-plus-year evolution hit its inflection
point when smartphone deliveries outstripped that of PCs.
Portable
processing alone does not a revolution make, however. Since the days of the
early hunter-gatherers, the networks that connect us have been the forces that
define us. Coincident with smartphone sales exceeding the sales of PCs, the
network changed. The advent of LTE is more than the introduction of a new
high-speed digital wireless network. It is the digital partner to the pocket
processor, and their combination is synergistic
Four
years after Atanasoff's computer, George Stibbitz performed a parlor trick on
the stage of the American Mathematical Society's annual meeting at Dartmouth
College. Using telephone lines and a modified telex machine, Stibbitz took math
problems proposed by the audience and solved them on a mainframe computer in
New York City, 250 miles distant. It was the first network transmission between
two computing devices.
The
ubiquity of the telephone network, coupled with modems that allowed digital
information to be transmitted across the analog network, opened the door to
connected computing and ultimately propelled the early PC-based services. From
AOL to Yahoo!, networked computing power began to give a glimpse of the future
in which we now reside. The subsequent arrival of Internet Protocol (IP) and
its digital lingua
franca created the buzzword of the late
20th century: "convergence." Suddenly, voice, video and data were all
the same 0s and 1s. Networks that had been developed for a single purpose yielded
to common digital deliverables.
Yet
even as digital fever fueled new services and created new fortunes, the network
was still the boss. While early efforts at wireless data held the promise to
cut the digital cord, they suffered from the same constraints as George
Stibbitz's parlor trick - the realities of imposing digital information on a
network designed for analog voice.
That's
why the deployment of LTE makes this year an historic watershed. While LTE
means many things to many people - expanded throughput, lower cost, higher
speed - its real revolution is that it is a computer network,
speaking computer language, routing via computers, and connecting ever-smaller,
ever more powerful smartphone computers.
The
confluence of portable computing with an all-digital wireless network is a
cultural course-changer. For the first time in history the relationship between
networks and those who use them has changed.
Since
the beginning of history networks have dictated the terms of their usage. The
key power of a network has always been how it commanded the user to come to it.
From the time when primitive tribes settled along animal paths and waterways,
the networks upon which the human species relied have always been in control. History’s
dirty little secret about networks was that users could only enjoy the
network’s benefits on the network’s terms.
The
first high-speed network, the railroad, built new pathways and then commanded
that users come to the network to enjoy its benefits. The location of economic
activity became centralized along the railroad's path and at its junctions. The
same pattern held true with the first electronic network. Mr. Morse's
telegraph, and its successor the telephone, continued the centralizing history
of networks by specifying where a user had to be to send a telegram or place a
phone call.
For
the past 30 years wireless connectivity has gradually been introducing a new
network paradigm where the network came to the user rather than vice versa.
Starting with voice service and slowly progressing to data, wireless has
brought information to the point where it could be most productively consumed rather
than dictating how the user would have to behave in order to receive or send
the information. This year’s marriage of mobile computing with IP connectivity means
the previous slow evolution has exploded to a pervasive reality.
Information
and those who consume it have seized control from the network. The multi- millennia
centralizing power of the network has been stood on its head. The network is no
longer in control; the user is.
The
second year of the second decade of the 21st century is our living
history. As Yeats observed of an earlier time, “All changed, changed utterly.”
