Thirty years of the net : what’s next?

Dear Internet,

You’re older than me, my brother, most of my friends but younger than my father. This January, you turned 30 – and while you’re spiraling very quickly into middle-age, the irony is this: the millions of people around the world who benefit from your services are getting older, while you’re getting younger and more innovative every
passing day.

This blog wouldn’t have been possible without you and without the dense network of hardware and programming structures that have gone into building you. Needless to say, you wouldn’t have been possible without the brilliance of some of the most essential programmers, computer scientists and engineers of all human history; people who are the 20th century equivalent of an Einstein or a Newton or a Maxwell. While you had been conceived way back in the late 60s, it was on January 1, 1983 that the USA’s Defense Agency decided to run all its computers on the same network in a way that they could communicate with each other, using a Transmission Control Protocol. You were born.

Soon enough, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had the genius of ‘linking’ one page of information to another, a basic structure which still defines you today. You must be proud of the fact that hundreds of innovators have led to
your creation. You are the backbone of the world’s communication, information access, entertainment and advertising. You have also combined the efforts of investors, educators, thinkers and writers all over the world into a greater-than-1 trillion dollar industry which shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

What’s going to happen to you next? To be honest, though everyone is predicting, no one knows for sure. The potential of your growth and the endless imagination that has led to you seems to have no limits in the
future. Some facts are for certain though: you’re going to be more intelligent and semantic, thus geared towards user responses in a much more responsible and automated way than ever before. You’re also going
to be present on literally every device and machine, from the simplest phone to the biggest refrigerator, from classroom blackboards to even household TVs.

You’re going to enable machines and non-living things to communicate with each other without human intervention. And nearly all of the world population should soon be in touch with each other through you.

Hope you feel glad about how you’ve changed our world. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you.

Happy 30!