Where is the future taking us?

Brave New World: Websites, The Internet, and Computers of the Future

As the world around us becomes increasingly complex, simple technologies we have come to take for granted will evolve, but the rate of evolution is difficult to predict. Half a century ago, the internet was created as a means to share data between researchers around the world. Fifteen years ago, services like America OnLine and CompuServe brought rudimentary internet services to millions of people through their dial-up modems. Now, computers, phones, video game consoles and even televisions give access to websites of startling complexity. The changes in processing power and connection availability have created this complexity, and they lead many to speculate on the course of the future.

Though primitive by today’s standards, the potential within those old web services was amazing to behold. Many users could connect to and update them. Rudimentary game and chat sites allowed users to interact directly with each other. These basic traits have led to internet giants like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. All three have similar features to older, social sites, but the capacity of users and range of media users can interact with lead many to question the future of social websites.

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The content of web pages has also advanced with changes in computer technology. Powerful processors within personal computers can handle more data than mainframes a decade ago. Random-Access Memory, or RAM, has increased in personal computers from a few megabytes to several gigabytes (a 1000 fold increase) in two decades, allowing a greater number of complex programs to run at a single time. Hard disk drives can now be purchased on the terabyte scale (1000 gigabytes), while a high-end computer in 1999 would feature only a few gigabytes of hard disk space. The computers themselves can not only hold more data permanently, they can also handle more temporary data at a time.

On the other side of the internet connection is the service provider. Phone lines have the capacity to carry information at almost one megabyte per second. Internet service providers moved to coaxial cable lines several years ago, and these lines now offer speeds at fifteen megabytes per second. Fiber optic cable is becoming the new norm in data transmission, and the average system in place achieves a rate between 10 and 40 gigabytes per second [1]. The current record for data rates over fiber optic cable lies in France, with a 7000 kilometer cable achieving speeds of 100 gigabytes per second [2]. To put that in perspective, the largest, current estimate of information the human brain can hold is five hundred terabytes [3]. To transfer every piece of data from one human brain to another over that line would take a little over an hour and twenty minutes – this is pretty amazing if one considers that it could take a lifetime of seven decades to amass that information to begin with.

Computers have come to a point where they can hold more data than we could have ever thought, and they can transfer it from one end of a nation to another in the blink of an eye. This is a far cry from the several megabyte hard drive and kilohertz processors receiving information at 300 bytes per second only a few decades ago. Prominent futurists and average_joe_1@internet.coms alike have tried to determine what the future holds for the internet, with many fantastic conclusions.