Needles, the Internet and Maybe Some News

Firstly, to the reader who asked how I was doing and asked not to have their comment published. I am doing better, send me your new e-mail address in a comment.

Today I had another doctors appointment and am being a good little Pimpernel. As with all doctors appointments it ended with me getting blood drawn. I had a lovely young Phlebotomist who did a fine job. I met with a specialist in blood who said they were testing me to see if I had a genetic disease; but, he agreed that I probably do not and just have sleep apnea. He did however make sure to chastise me for smoking and tell me how bad my cholesterol was. I don't believe the two are related.

So, I picked up food, went home and am resting. I decided to read some stuff on the net and for whatever reason began looking up the history of the net. While doing so, it occurred to me that it has now been 20 years since I first got online. I was online before there was America Online and still have a Compuserve Account. I was online as part of the first ten million people in the world, my; but, I am getting old.

I first started using computers in 1972 when I was in Junior High. By the time I was in college I was using a mainframe to write statistical programs. I never sought out these things, wrong place at the wrong time and a passing interest. In 1989 I was one of the first people to use a personal pc in my organization. Again a fluke; but, I decided to be an early adopter and must say it has certainly been a part of my career. In 1992 or early 93, I was asked to investigate this thing called the internet because most of the systems people were not interested and were more focused on mainframe applications. Out of about 1,500 I had the only pc that even had access to the outside and one of about 40 for the whole organization.

I am telling you these things to explain the history of the internet as I saw it. In 1993 I decided to go online from home. I started trying out Prodigy and then Compuserve, AOL didn't come online till the end of the year. I would surf on Internet Bulletin Boards. Basically, you would direct dial into peoples servers that were shared with others. FTP was still primary and the everything was textual unless you downloaded it to your computer. By 1994 I decided to join an independent Internet Service Provider that had just opened locally. It was cheaper to have a local provider because back in the day you paid for long distance and used land lines, local calls were free. The local provider was a startup in a garage by a couple of Nasa employees for them and their friends. I ended up beta testing the original Microsoft Internet Explorer and showed the Nasa guys how to configure it for their server and then teaching some of their friends because everyone else was using Mosaic or Netscape browsers.

As part of my job I ended up learning to make web pages for my organization and was responsible for figuring out where this whole internet thing was going. I would go to seminars that seemed like Amway meetings where people tried to explain why the internet was going to be the next big thing; but, the reality was that nobody really knew what it was going to evolve into. At the time it was more of a social thing for the casual user and an academic and esoteric thing for those who had been involved in it for any real period of time.

In the beginning most web pages were all textual with maybe a picture or two. They looked like my blog but lacked a color background. Once AOL came online and people began using visuals rather than textual links, everything changed. The net became more and more visual and usage blew up. It also became more commercial, slowly at first; but, that grew too. As the internet grew, I did well in my career although I had long since stopped being directly involved in programming for it. I ended up being a high level administrator and managing, amongst many other sections, a systems section.

While I used to teach people how to use computers, it was always an aside and merely because I had been an early implementer that I even knew how to use them. After the internet became common place, I began asking people who owned it and nobody was ever able to tell me. Back in the day most people assumed that it was owned by AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve because they were the face of the internet on television; but, I had attended seminars and knew better. The internet was created and owned by our own Federal government. It was created by the precursor to DARPA and was still controlled by them. Well, the essence of it, the part that makes it function is controlled by them.

We used to call the internet the World Wide Web; but, it wasn't much. Internet usage was pretty much an American thing for it's first few public years. Being the jerk that I am, in 1995 I posted my own web page. It made fun of animal rights groups and I was quickly threatened with death. I kept it up anyways.

I never got into chat rooms; but, watched as they grew more and more popular. I never really used the social aspects of the net and didn't use it for financial transactions. I sort of just watched it change. It wasn't until about 1998 that I started using it for personal business, mostly e-mails because prior I didn't know many people who had e-mail.

Of all the things I have seen in my life, the internet has made the greatest impact. The internet has made bigger changes in this world than the computer did in and of itself. The personal computer gave people abilities that they never had before; but, the internet made people want to use the pc and made it easy. Smart phones are nothing more than small pcs with access to the internet. In the future, everything will be connected to the internet, they call this "the internet of things"; but, what does that really mean?

The internet of things means that everything you do will be monitored, assisted and managed online where it can be seen by anyone who is smart enough to. It means that you will be able to access and control every part of your life using your phone. Pluses and minuses to all technologies.

I had intended to write about ICANN and how 13 servers rule the world. Someone had written about how that is no longer true; but, they were either trying or were too young to really understand. The internet is still controlled by 13 root servers, those root servers now have slave servers; but, the essence remains the same at a time when it does not need to. Of those 13, only a few are truly public. All of them are still under contract with the federal government.

That is my boring history of the internet, now, let me tell you why it matters. Yes, the government can see everything that happens on the internet. When people used to have individually owned servers running bulletin boards that were not connected to the world wide web it was different. Those days are not likely to come back.

YouTube - CBC Archives: The Internet 1993

YouTube - 1993 The Internet The Computer Chronicles

YouTube - The Internet As It Was In 1996

Yahoo - The Internet as seen in 1997

Iana - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - Root Servers. If you really want to understand the fundamentals of the internet, this is the website. Just go through their links. Look at how boring a page they have visually, just like my blog. As you go through the servers, you will discover one of the thirteen was controlled by Nasa at the Ames Research Center. I wonder if that is where the guys from Nasa that I knew when I got my internet account worked? I will never know as I lost touch with them years ago.

Wikipedia - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

IANA is nothing more than another government contractor, just like the one that Snowden worked for. ICANN is nothing more than another government contractor just like the one Snowden worked for. The internet is controlled by 13 servers and one of them is a secret. Younger systems people that think they get it will tell you that there are more than 13; but, they don't understand how each of those sets is still controlled by the 13. The government can shut down the whole internet and is the only group that can restart it. That mean they have a copy of everything that is and has been on the internet. It was the whole purpose of the thing when it was created.

For anyone who has read my blog for any period of time, it should be apparent that I keep a sharp eye on technology. I am not a systems person officially and gave up on programming a long time ago; but, I understand organization and infrastructure and I understand the internet and computers. One of the most fundamental things that systems people get wrong is that they think in a paradigm that is by definition wrong.

Computers are really just a series of numbers. The numbers are 0 and 1. It is a logical assumption that every choice can be either yes or no; but, that assumes their can be an absolute 0. There cannot be an absolute 0 because there is a 1. If I know for a fact that there is one thing in the universe then there cannot be a nothing in the universe. The act of being aware of this means that there can be more than one thing. This is sort of philosophy 101. All computers assume that there can be an absolute 0 which means their base programming is incomplete and can never be fixed. In simple terms, systems people assume that there is such a thing as an absolute 0 and base all their calculations on that possibility and therefore can and must be flawed in their understanding.

Let me put this in a theological manner. Nonexistence is not a possibility in the universe because you exist. To attempt to prove that you do not would be completely illogical, to try and prove that you could not has the same consequence. The only thing one is left with is to attempt that they can cease to exist; but, it means others could. The same cannot be said of the material world. Quantum physics cannot prove that we live in a material world. Nope, they keep proving that we do not. I can prove that if one exists, two can. I cannot prove that if nothing exists anything can, that is the philosophical problem with the big bang theory.