How do you sing happy birthday to a computer? Or, more specifically, how do you sing happy birthday to a system of hyperlinked files accessible, by the internet, that live inside your computer (and phone, and tablet, and so on)? It is, after all, the World Wide Web’s 25th birthday.
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Every new communications technology has that honeymoon period where a select group of people embraces it as the key to utopia. And then come the trolls. Even early radio had miscreants who would send out false distress signals
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Before the word wide web was a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee’s eye, CERN had developed the Grid—a world-spanning network of computing power to help drive the progress of physics.
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So how does this whole world wide web thing work? Cables, man. Websites, h tee tee pees and computers. And it’s all a pretty new thing, right? Well not quite, the history of the web is a lot longer than you’d expect. John Allsopp of Web Directions created a timeline showing the "key dates, browsers, technologies and ideas in the history of the World Wide Web" that dates back to 1910 and goes right up until today. Even if you consider yourself a professional Internet surfer, you’ll probably learn a thing or two cruising through the timeline here. [Web Directions via The Presurfer]
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For the past five years, the mad scientists at CERN have been connecting their computers to colleagues’ around the world to pool their processing power. This so-called Worldwide Grid turns a regular old desktop into a supercomputer by just plugging in. Now it will do the same with smartphones and tablets.
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In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.
If you’ve ever thought “Hey, my internet is pretty slow, maybe I can get a second line and combine them into one big, zippy connection!” then you’re not alone — those of us who are broadband-deprived need all the help we can get. But a quick tour through Google will show you the difficulty of doing that process, called “bonding,” at home. So, Connectify has proposed Dispatch, software that lets you easily combine your WiFi, ethernet and 3G/4G into a single, fat pipe, at a reasonable cost. The company brings along wireless sharing know-how from its Hotspot product to the project, and promises that with every connection you combine, you’ll get a corresponding bump in throughput. Also, the system will automatically failover to a good connection if one goes on the fritz, and even switch automatically between WiFi and 3G/4G to maximize speed and save money.
To prove the tech, the company combined all the available open WiFi networks in a neighborhood along with a tethered Verizon mobile phone, and were able to create an impressive 85Mbs connection, as the video below the break shows. So far, Connectify has vacuumed up $30K for Dispatch toward the $50K objective, with about two weeks left. So, if you’re desperate for more speed, or just want to trump your neighbor’s bandwidth by stealing his WiFi and melding it with your ADSL, check the source to see how to pledge.
Filed under: Internet
Insert Coin: Connectify Dispatch lets you put all your internets together into one big internet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Once upon a time, Tim Berners-Lee took the concept of Hypercard and turned into a world of networked pages. Then there was the first website ever, a boring but clean and well-lighted place that started with the title: “World Wide Web”. More »
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