Daily Archives: July 12, 2007

The Web in 1994

Posted on by

This is just wonderful — a DEC promo video from 1994 about this amazing world wide web thingy. How things change. DEC (the acronynm stood for Digital Equipment Corporation) was once a powerful minicomputer company whose founder, Ken Olsen, was contemptuous of personal computers. (“There is no reason”, he said, “for any individual to have a computer in his home.”)

You can guess what happened. DEC faltered, then began to fail as the bottom dropped out of the minicomputer market, and was gobbled up by Compaq, which in turn was taken over by HP. And now the only people who remember the mighty Digital Equipment Corporation are ageing hippies like me!

The DEC VAX range of computers was the mainstay of most university computing and engineering schools, and BSD Unix was developed on them. When my department finally decommissioned ours, the SysAdmin put in in the foyer with a sign saying: “Excellent, fast games machine: free to a good home. Comes with £35,000 annual maintenance contract.”

Although most university VAXes ran under Unix, DEC’s commercial customers generally ran the company’s own proprietary operating system, VMS. When Microsoft decided to try and create an industry-strength version on Windows, they hired Dave Cutler and many of his colleagues on the team that wrote VMS. The result of their labours was Windows NT.

China’s Online Population Explosion

Posted on by

The Pew Project has a new report out. It’s written by Deborah Fallows. summary reads…

There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China’s internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country’s widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China’s relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies.

Full report (pdf) here.