So, if you're a stockholder of Amazon, I
think you're in good shape, because he's a
bright fellow and he's always looking for
how to really do the right thing and, you
know, give us products that we really
like.
Now, in this, we sort of evolve the modern
internet.
And, and much like Jeff.
Jeff said that investment was growing at
3,000% a year or something like that.
There was this mania in '96, '97, '98,
where people just bought, and bought, and
bought.
And the notion that communications was
going to be so valuable led to, in a
sense, an overbuilding of the fiber optic
plant.
We have a massive amount of fiber optic in
the ground right now.
And our ability to send more data through
the existing fibers by just upgrading the
equipment at the two ends, that's growing
very rapidly as well.
And so we're in this really weird world
now, where a fiber optic between Ann Arbor
and Chicago, 180 miles, is not that much
more expensive that a piece of copper wire
that goes 30 miles, in 1960.
And so distance is less and less important
on the Internet.
That's why long distance phone calls don't
cost any money anymore, because long
distance and local are not that different
because there's so much fiber in the
ground.
But just one thing I want you to think
about and wonder about is, will we run
out?
The, we are living off of the overbuilding
that happened in the late 1990's, when
they put so much in, and they've been able
to upgrade it so effectively, but we might
run out.
And where will the money come from to dig
the next set of trenches to put the next
round of fiber in?
We'll have to see.
So if we take a quick look at, this is a
graph of the growth of the, of the servers
on the World Wide Web, and if you take a
look, we start in, 1990 with one web
server, December, 1990 with Tim Bernersley
having one web server.
And then it sort of doesn't grow, and then
you sort of see kind of like this take off
in last 2 years last late 2 years of the
1990's we you go up to about you know 20
to 30 million you know from what, I don't
know, 1996 is 200 less than a quarter to
million dollars and does require a million
hosts.
You see the kind of the crash.
The boom, and the crash, where it wasn't
growing.
And then you sort of see another new
graph, which is really, this is when
everybody had to be on the internet.
Every little store started being on the
internet.
Every web, one had to be a web server.
This was kind of the big ones coming on.
And this was sort of like the flame out of
the exuberant growth of the late 90's.
And this exuberant growth gets so
exuberant that it really changes the stock
market, in the United States and the rest
of the world, to the point where, you know
from the early 90's to 2000 was the
longest period of expansion.
And there's a lot of factors for this, but
one of the factors is, as we began to use
communication and computation to make
commerce more efficient, that triggered a
great deal of growth.
It also triggered over-speculation, right?
And so the kind of, the, this part here,
the crash, the dot com crash, was a bit of
the over-speculation working its way out.
Probably if, you know, if they hadn't
over-speculated it, it would go like this
instead, but it can't be like that.
You go crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy,
oops, oops, oops, oops, oops.
And then we sort of had a crappy economy
for a while after that.
But again, the web, an the Internet, and
all the technology that I just talked
about really put a stamp on the entire
world's economy in the 1990's.
So, I could go on and on and on and on
about this stuff.
Open source is a big part of this.
I will put links up for these videos that
I've got.
These are three open source luminaries
that I've interviewed.
Richard Stallman is the Free Software
Foundation, the GNU, which is much of Unix
utilities are written this way, compilers
are written this way.
He is a, tremendous advocate for open
source software.
Also we meet Brian Ballendorf, from the
Apache Foundation.
And the Apache Foundation was formed based
on the web server that was created at
NCSA, became the first web server, that
was the Apache web server.
So that lineage goes all the way back to
Joseph Hardin and the team at NCSA.
And then Rasmus Lerdorf is the inventor of
PHP, and one of the many very popular web
programming languages for building web
sites.
And so I'll put the links up for these and
you can take a look at them.
But they're not required for the course.
And up next we're going to start digging
into how this all works rather than what
it is, how it came to be.
So we're going to talk about what it is
rather than how it came to be.
And so, thank you for your time so far,
and I look forward to seeing you at the
next lecture.