The 40th Anniversary of the Internet

[jt60]

The 40th Anniversary of the Internet

September 15th, 2009


Catch our own John Taylor as part of a panel at UCLA’s celebration of the 40th Year of the Internet. The symposium will take place on October 29th at UCLA Engineering with John as a featured speaker along with Shiva Shivakumar, Thomas Gewecke, Mark Bregman, John Perry Barlow, Frank Pearce, Michael Morhaime and Arianna Huffington.

More information can be found here:

www.engineer.ucla.edu/IA40/

NAT

[jt60]

www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/how-40-years-of-the-internet-changed-111878.aspx

Oct 29, 2009 By Alison Hewitt

How 40 years of the Internet changed the world




The Internet's 40th anniversary conference had something the 30th lacked: a pop-culture panel. Panelists, from left: John Taylor, bassist in the band Duran Duran; John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation; and from World-of-Warcraft producer Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard officials Frank Pearce and Mike Morhaime. Photos by Todd Cheney/UCLA Photo.

At a campus conference on the invention of the Internet, some of today's top thinkers about the Internet veered from the obligatory Al Gore joke to a mock concern that settling arguments with an iPhone Google search would end bar fights everywhere. But when you get down to basics, they agreed, the Net is actually about building communities.




Professor Leonard Kleinrock outside the conference with one of the massive computers from 1969 that made the first node of the Internet.

The conference marked the 40th birthday of the Internet, which was created on Oct. 29, 1969, at UCLA when a team led by Engineering Professor Leonard Kleinrock successfully linked a campus computer at Boelter Hall with a machine at Stanford. Kleinrock predicted decades ago that the resulting connectivity would one day be a household product, like electricity, but said he never guessed that the Internet would be used to connect people to people, instead of people to machines.

"The infrastructure is easy to predict," he said at Thursday's conference. "The applications – that's hard. … The applications and services have constantly surprised us." E-mail, blogs, Google, social networking, video/music/photo-sharing and even the World Wide Web itself were all a surprise, Kleinrock admitted. Things have come a long way since the days when he literally knew everyone on the Internet.

The logistics of the conference itself revealed how far the Internet has come: Although 200 people attended in "real life," as speaker John Taylor from the band Duran Duran put it, the live webcast attracted more than 51,000 viewers, an uncounted number of whom submitted questions to the speakers via Twitter. Many more watched the conference via the online video posted after the event.

The speakers revealed how their early forays into web technology resulted in creating new communities. Taylor now blogs on Duran Duran's fan site. Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaine and Frank Pearce, Blizzard's senior vice president of product development, talked about how the first of Blizzard's popular World of Warcraft series of online games immediately resulted in fan sites where gamers connected and shared info, creating the Internet-enabled universe the game has now become.




The Internet's past, present and future: one of its fathers, Leonard Kleinrock; Arianna Huffington, editor of the popular online news site Huffington Post; and Issac Mao, co-founder of the Social Brain Foundation who spoke at the conference in support of greater Internet freedom in China.

Though the Internet seems almost omnipresent, it's not fully grown yet, the speakers agreed. It's more of a teenager, they suggested, and will become not only more prevalent — embedded in clothes, walls, maybe even our fingernails, Kleinrock said — but also more sophisticated.

"The Internet has not yet come of age in terms of governing," said Arianna Huffington, editor of the Huffington Post. U.S. President Barack Obama would not have won without the Internet, she said, but politicians have yet to figure out how to engage voters after an election.

Likewise, the intersection of online games like World of Warcraft with social media is only beginning to take shape, Pearce and Morhaine said. "The future of online gaming is more connectedness," Morhaine said. "Twitter and Facebook are just a glimpse into the future."

The Internet has changed the hierarchy and authority of pop culture, observed John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the speaker who earlier lamented that Google was killing bar fights. "Five years ago there were people who still thought that 'pop culture' was something they manufactured, for the 'pop,' the unwashed populace," Barlow said. "The Internet is pop culture. The Internet is where it's made. … It's not about dropping a product on the consuming populace. It's about a conversation between everybody."




Engineering Dean Vijay Dhir talks with Charles Kline, one of Kleinrock's former graduate students and the one who typed the now-famous "LO" in the first test of the Internet.


To illustrate how much the Internet has changed the world, the federal agency that funded the research that developed the Net used the UCLA conference to announce a $40,000 challenge this December. Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced that DARPA will station 10 large balloons around the country for two days starting Dec. 5. The first person, team or company to submit the latitude and longitude for all 10 wins, she said. Imagine completing the task 40 years ago, unsupported by readily available GPS coordinates and free cross-country communication, she said.

UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science also shared an announcement: Several of Kleinrock's former graduate students have teamed up to raise $500,000 to award him an endowed chair, pending approval by UC governing bodies. Dean Vijay Dhir announced that Kleinrock's equipment, used to send the first Internet message, would be housed in a laboratory-turned-museum at UCLA Engineering, and toasted "the innovation that changed all our lives 40 years ago."

"How important is it?" he asked the audience, both those at UCLA and those watching online. "You need only think of the panic that sets in when you want to connect — and cannot."

NAT

[turahlurah]

Wow its been 40 years! thats crazy!

[jt60]

Yes!!!!

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8347178.stm

Is the internet stifling new music?

The internet may have been a miracle for music fans, Duran Duran star John Taylor says, but instant access to decades of recordings and artists' inner thoughts is not all good.

In an extract from a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the first message sent over the internet, Taylor explains why the likes of Twitter and YouTube may harm future pop and rock stars.



Duran Duran (with John Taylor right) were among the biggest acts of the 80s


By John Taylor
Duran Duran bassist




I hated being a teenager, until I discovered just how powerful the world of popular music was. It helped me find an identity and find myself.

Not just the notes and beats, but the icons and the haircuts and the clothes and the liner notes. Music saved me in a way, or at least it gave me a sense of direction of how life could be.

I became a teenager in 1972. In 1972, I was listening to music that was almost exclusively made in 1972. Some of it had been made in 1971, but that was about it, with few exceptions.


The speed and growth of new technology has actually served to disguise how little real growth is taking place at the artistic level

Something the internet has most definitely done is bring more music from more places and more eras into the hearts and minds of us all, but young people in particular, which is great.

Most students I know have an extremely broad appreciation of music. Far broader than I did. Obviously classic rock is very popular, but so too are all sorts of vintage and world music.

My stepson is at New York University (NYU) and he was telling me how he's currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s. So the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible, and I applaud anything that can inspire interest or curiosity in anyone.

But this also means that those of us who before would have been looking towards the current culture for inspiration are now often to be found, like my stepson, in various backwaters of older music.

Creative recession?

This relative lack of need for current, innovative culture can cause, has caused, is causing - maybe - the innovative culture to slow down, much as an assembly line in Detroit slows down and lay-offs have to be made when the demand for a new model recedes.

And the speed and growth of new technology, which has been so heralded and so much fuss has been made of, has actually served to disguise how little real growth is taking place at the artistic level.

In September 1972, Roxy Music appeared on prime time TV in the UK. It was their first national TV exposure, a three-minute appearance performing their first single.

And the way they looked and sounded stunned me, and a generation of mes.

But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance again, however badly I wanted to. And the power of that restriction was enormous.

The only way I could get close to that experience was to own the song. I lived in the suburbs, so I had to ride my bike for miles before I could find a store that sold music, let alone one that had the record in stock. It was a small trial of manhood and an adventure.



I'm still buying copies of that first Roxy Music album, I'm almost embarrassed to say


But once I had that song, I could play it whenever I chose. I had to go on a quest of sorts to get it, but my need was such that I did it.

The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix. I believe there's immense power in restriction and holding back.

Fading star power

When artists today are asked to Twitter their every thought, their every action, to record on video their every breath, their every performance, I believe they're diluting their creative powers, their creative potency and the durability of their work.

And in the long run I believe they're also diluting the magical power and the magnetic attraction that they can or will ever have over their audience.

I wonder - if I'd had unlimited access to that first Roxy Music TV appearance, if I'd had unlimited access to knowledge of their personal quirks, if I'd been able to access film footage of every performance, every rehearsal, every interview they gave that year from around the world, then I believe the bubble of my obsession would have burst a long, long time ago and I'd have ceased being a fan a long time ago.

I'm still buying copies of that first Roxy Music album, I'm almost embarrassed to say - import copies on premium vinyl, anniversary CD copies, Japanese imports with paper sleeves, iTunes downloads when I'm on the road and need a fix. Such was the power of that initial strike.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Taylor originally delivered his speech at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on 29 October.

NAT

[BassEcho]

wow he has some very good points there

but its funny, its was supposed to be a celebration of the internet, and his speech was partly against it lol (in the long version of this)

[jt60]

It was his point of view... for music of course!!!

NAT

[BassEcho]

yes and i agree with him. I miss the large size artwork and the liner notes you get in an album. I don't pay as much attention to CD inserts and such, because they are so small.

[jt60]

Agree with him and you too...

nat

[simonsbedroomtoy69]

wow that's amazing