The Effective CIO

Welcome! December 28, 2007

Well, this should be interesting…

(Or not…)

I find myself in the position of being among the very first to the party that is the web, and perhaps the last person on earth who isn’t writing some sort of blog.

I was fortunate enough to be in R&D back in the early 80s, when this whole internet idea seemed to be getting some traction.  Of course, back then it was ARPAnet, and the number of hosts on earth numbered in the hundreds.  There was no DNS, just a file of host names and IP addresses that we FTPed among ourselves.  Email was a confusing collection of @ and % and !, with special tools that figured out the uucp routing to reach a site, and messages sometimes took days to arrive, since some hosts only dialed out at night, when long distance rates were cheaper.  I worked at Harris Corporation, in Melbourne, Florida, and we were really lucky to have a dedicated 9600 baud leased line to MIT, which gave us a premium connection to the world.  The whole web community was maybe a few thousand people, and we kept up with each other using newsfeeds and FTP.

Now there are more sites than you can count, we’re pushing gigabit connectivity, billions of people are on the web, and there are people who have never paid for long distance by the minute.  I am astounded by the change and amazed at the penetration.

So, now a blog.  I don’t know that I have too much to say that would interest large swaths of readers, but I do have a compulsion to say something, every now and then.  We’ll see how this goes, and if the interest and effort seem to balance out.