Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Or, would have if a twist of fate didn’t intervene. I read an interesting article on New Scientist, about how one person presented an opportunity for another to develop a technology we now take for granted. The internet we know and love today may have ended up on the proverbial scrap heap, if the now almost defunct Gopher web protocol took the reins.

I remember Gopher, this was during the early 90s when I was still studying computing at a local tech college. It was mainly text-based with some image viewing, not very aesthetically pleasing but it was very streamlined and simple. It’s almost like the Teletext system we have in the UK, which is a text-based information service on our TV sets. At the time, the streamlining was needed to minimise overhead. However, the entry of Moore’s Law pushed the boundaries of technological breakthrough, and encouraged Silicon Valley to invent powerful microprocessors to do the job. Gordon Moore, perhaps inadvertently, created a race in terms of CPU manufacture, and it is still going. The players may have changed over the years (although Intel is still in the forefront), but the urge to cram more transistors on a single silicon chip continues.

In turn, with these breakthroughs, Tim Berners-Lee was able to utilise this to turn his idea into reality. The “Father of the Internet” won out over Gopher and if it wasn’t for these historical events our online experience may have been radically different. In a way, WWW was for the people and Gopher wasn’t. The user friendliness was lacking in Gopher and the potential cost for server implementation would have limited it’s adoption even more.

Who knows what the future may bring, ultimately Moore’s Law may eventually come to a close. Currently Intel is using the 35nm manufacture process and they are already thinking of new materials to use. Possibilities include Graphene, which I read up on last year as a good candidate, if it can be used on a larger scale en masse. The search continues though, we have roughly a decade before the limitation of silicon is reached.

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Tags: Gopher, Gordon Moore, Graphene, Moore's Law, Tim Berners-Lee

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.