On the 31^st of December 2011, a Saturday, over one third of every man, woman, and child on our planet accessed the Internet.

And, yes, these days it seems like the Internet (not really news anymore), and the World Wide Web that rides on top of it, have been around forever; as ubiquitous—and as necessary to life—as water.

My children certainly view it that way, and their children, I am sure, will have a hard time conceiving of a world without it. Already, to some children in this world—to too many, if you ask me—the Internet is the world.

But like all things, it has a beginning, and at this beginning it wasn’t even called the Internet. It was called the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency), and ARPA, too, of course has a beginning.

We can trace it back to 1958, when President Eisenhower requested funds to create ARPA. It was approved as a line item in an Air Force appropriations bill.

Moving forward from there, here are some of the Internet milestones:

• 1961 — Len Kleinrock, a professor of Computer Science at UCLA, wrote the first paper on packet switching entitled “Information Flow in Large Communications Nets.”
• 1962 — Len Kleinrock writes another ground-breaking paper entitled “Communication Nets,” which describes the design for packet switching networks, which was eventually used for the ARPAnet.
• 1964 — Paul Baran writes a paper entitled “On Distributed Communications Networks,” which was the first paper about using message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.
• 1965 — Larry Roberts at MIT conducted the first network experiment at the Lincoln Lab, where two computers talked to each other using packet-switching technology.
• December 1966 — The birth of the ARPA project with Larry Roberts at the helm as its chief scientist.
• December 1968 — Two years later, the ARPAnet contract is awarded to Bold, Beranek & Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, MA.
• September 1969 — The first ARPAnet node is installed at UCLA’s Network Measurement Center. Len Kleinrock installed the Interface Message Processor to a Sigma 7 Computer.
• October 1969 — A month later, a second ARPAnet node is installed at Stanford Research Institute, where the Interface Message Processor was connected to an SDS 940 computer.
• October 1969 — The first ARPAnet message ever sent said “lo” in an attempt to spell log-in, but the system crashed after those two letter.
• November 1969 to March 1970 — Three additional ARPAnet nodes are installed at the UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and at Cambridge, MA respectively.
• March 1972 — Sees the birth of email in a program written by Ray Tomlinson at BBN for the ARPAnet. Its two components were “SNDMSG” and “READMAIL.” At this point the “@” was chosen for its “at” meaning.
• March 1973 — Sees the first International connection to the ARPAnet as the University College of London and NORSAR in Norway came online.
• 1974 — A key ingredient of the Internet—the Intel processor—saw the light of day as the 8080 processor.
• 1974 — This year also saw the first design details of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in a paper written by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.”
• 1976 — The two Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—found Apple Computers. This is the same year that Vint Cerf joins ARPA as its program manager.
• 1978 — TCP is split into TCP and IP (Internet Protocol).
• 1980 — Time Berners-Lee writes a program called “Enquire Within,” which is a precursor to the World Wide Web.
• 1981 — Microsoft creates its Disk Operating System (DOS).
• 1981 — IBM announces its first Personal Computer.
• 1983 — Cisco, a prominent Internet key-player-to-be—is founded.
• 1983 — In November of this year, Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris, and Craig Partridge create the Domain Name System (DNS) and the domains .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int all see their respective lights of day.
• March 1985 — Symbolic.com becomes the first registered domain.
• 1986 — The ARPAnet connectivity reaches the 5,000 hosts milestone.
• 1987 — The Internet reaches the milestone of 10,000 hosts. This is the same year that 25 million PCs are sold in the U.S., and that Cisco ships its first router.
• 1989 — The Internet reaches 100,000 hosts; McAfee Associates are founded, and Quantum changes its name to America Online.
• 1990 — ARPAnet quietly shuts down the same year that Time Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web.
• 1993 — Jean Armour Polly coins the term “Surfing the Internet.”
• 1993 — Marc Andreesen creates the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
• 1993 — Internet Network Information Center, known as InterNIC—the organization primarily responsible for domain name and IP address allocation—sees the light of day.
• April 1994 — Netscape also sees the light of day.
• 1994 — Microsoft licenses technology from Spyglass to create a Web Browser for Windows 95.
• 1996 — Let the browser wars commence; with Netscape and Microsoft as the principal players.
• 1999 — America Online buys Netscape and the Browser Wars are declared over with Netscape and Microsoft splitting virtually 100% of the market between them.
• 2000 — Wireless, high-speed Internet technology becomes a viable alternative to copper and fiber optics.
• 2000 — the Dot-Com bubble bursts.
• 2000 — In February of this year, the Internet saw 10,000,000 registered domain names.
• 2000 — By September this same year, the number of registered domain names doubled to 20,000,000.
• 2005 — YouTube.com launches.
• 2006 — The Web is estimated to now contain over 90 million sites.
• 2006 — In October, Google, Inc. acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.
• 2007 — Apple surpasses One Billion iTunes downloads.
• 2007 — Google becomes the most valuable global brand.
• December 2011 — There were 2,267,233,742 unique Internet users this day; that is over one third of the Earth’s population.

To think that this vision was born over fifty years ago, when Len Kleinrock conceived of packet switching.

It all started with a brilliant idea.

A belated Happy Fiftieth to the Internet.

There has always been and always will be a significant, if not vast, difference between the heart of a thing and the appearance of the thing, a lesson we seem to flatly refuse to learn.

The old adage not to judge a book by its cover means just that. Not even the flashiest, most aesthetic cover in the world will transmute a badly written pulp novel into fine literature. The only way to tell the difference is to actually read to book—and I’m not talking about the CliffNotes either. I’m talking actual book, cover to cover.

This lesson came storming back recently as I read through FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s prepared remarks at a Digital Learning Day Town Hall at the Newseum in Washington, DC, on February 1, 2012.

And reading Michael Hiltzik’s comments on this meeting as reported in the Los Angeles Times only served to underscore the lesson; only served to once again separate the flash of it from the substance.

Flash in this case is technology, and substance is teaching and learning.

For once again, in a forum sponsored by technology manufacturers and broadband purveyors, technology is being bandied about as the elixir to solve all manners of teaching and learning problems of this country.

The new approach, and the gist of the FCC Chairman’s prepared remarks, is that digital books will come to the rescue.

Of course, the same was said of computers when they first appeared: one for every student would solve all teaching problems—according to computer manufacturers.

And the same was said of motion pictures just after they were invented, that they would revolutionize teaching—at least according to their inventor (who, naturally, stood to gain financially) Thomas Edison.

Let me first say that in my experience teaching and learning come down to some very simple fundamentals.

A teacher who knows and loves the subject, and who can interest his students in that subject.

A demonstrable and tangible use for the subject (no student really wants to learn something he or she has no need or use for—the application has to be apparent, and not just “in order to pass the class”).

Frank and honest communication between student and teacher to establish whether learning is in fact taking place (no computer, no book—digital or otherwise—can take the place of live communication between student and teacher).

Liberal use of dictionaries so that the students can ensure they understand all the words used—for how on earth are you going to understand a sentence or paragraph littered with unfamiliar terms? Still, and I kid you not, many a teacher tell their students to read on past all manner of mysterious vocabulary and “sort it out by the content.”

A practical way for the students to use the subject in class to demonstrate that they have grasped and can actually work the principles and actions involved.

These are the principles that have worked (and not too badly) for centuries where teaching and learning has actually taken place.

The panacea touted by the FCC Chairman is more technology—and, so the economies of the solution seem to dictate: fewer teachers, for the money has to come from somewhere.

Apparently, a digital book (an iPad in fact) in every student’s hand is the answer. And there we have the flashy cover; one that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to also endorse.

I urge you to follow the links above for the full texts, but what I take away from this is that plain old commercial interest (manufacturers and broadband providers) is the real target here, masquerading as concern for the learning welfare of our country.

Or as Hiltzik puts it, “The leading promoter of the replacement of paper textbooks by e-books and electronic devices today is Apple, which announced at a media event last month that it dreams of a world in which every pupil reads textbooks on an iPad or a Mac.

“That should tell you that the nirvana sketched out by Duncan and Genachowski at last week's Digital Learning Day town hall was erected upon a sizable foundation of commercially processed claptrap. Not only did Genachowski in his prepared remarks give a special shout out to Apple and the iPad, but the event's roster of co-sponsors included Google, Comcast, AT&T, Intel and other companies hoping to see their investments in Internet or educational technologies pay off.”

And my conviction is that this technologically flashy cover will do little or nothing to improve learning at a higher cost than it would take to hire more teachers who know the subjects and love to teach them.

Jonathan Franzen is a good enough writer I guess, although the one novel of his that I did read, The Twenty-Seventh City, did not necessarily bowl me over. Well written, yes, but, well, let’s leave it at that (as being off the subject).

Recently the very same Franzen has—and quite publicly at that, in a Guardian article—come out of the analog closet decidedly swinging in favor of the physical, printed-on-paper book, saying among other things that he fears that eBooks will have a detrimental effect on the world, and that he believes that serious readers will always prefer print editions.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Cartagena, Columbia, Franzen went on to say, “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing—that's reassuring.

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough.”

On many levels I agree with Franzen, especially with the view he has offered in the past that “it's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

What I have observed over the last twenty or so years is that anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection not only has been empowered to, but indeed has exercised that power and written something (or a lot) to then bandy it about the blogs and forums, not to mention the self-publication sites.

In contrast, in the “good old days” of publishing there was the Internet-less writer and, invariably, his equally Internet-less editor, who would not accept a manuscript as final until they were both happy with it and in a conflict the editor, often as not, had the final word, or at least veto powers.

The result was exactly what Franzen is talking about: a printed book with the language just right, and very likely to stay that way edition after edition.

My own experience also tells me that it does not matter how conscientious you are, or how many times you proof your own manuscript: you know what you want to say and so will read what you mean to say, not what you actually say. Another person, a friend, a colleague, or—yes—an editor, will spot things right away you have read past a dozen times.

The editor working with the writer will produce a book with the language just right; while the computer writer, mainlining on the Internet, will most likely not have the patience to do much more than spell-check (and bless these things, by the way—they’re getting smarter by the minute) his essay or story or letter, and sometimes—judging by some posts online—not even that.

The point is that I agree with Franzen that in today’s Computer/Internet environment it is doubtful that true literature will indeed be produced, or what we once—and what the hardliners like Franzen still do—considered true literature.

But we can’t really turn back the clock here. Amazon sells more Kindles than anything else, and more eBooks than print books. Fact. We have turned a digital corner, and no amount of wishing it hasn’t happened will change a thing.

And at this juncture, Franzen’s fear is larger than just the loss of permanence and loss of quality. What he fears is that “the combination of technology and capitalism has given us a world that really feels out of control.”

Again, I both sym- and empathize. Dickens’ heart would arrest on the spot were he to come for a visit. Not only is everyone writing (and mostly—I’m sorry to say—badly), but EVERYONE is writing: there is so much out there, so incredibly much out there that to dive for and find what pearls there are in this sea of digital text is near enough impossible.

What we’ve lost is the guard at the gate, the Editor.

Well, not entirely. The print houses still employ editors, and there good fiction (some of it fantastic) is still produced.

However, my prediction is that in the near future the Editor will become an endangered species, but that in the long term (after the world has grown frustrated with the sea of mediocrity washing ashore at every turn) the Editor will be tracked down and pressed back into service, only digital this time.

The digital publishing houses will then begin to stress that their ware has in fact been edited, and has in fact gotten the language just right.

This is more than a prediction, actually. It’s a prayer.

Much of today’s computing, not to mention data storage, takes place in the “cloud.” Although I, as you, of course know better, I still now and then think of this cloud as, yes, up there. Airborne. This everywhere thing.

Mostly though, when I think of the cloud, I think of its size. It’s hard-to-get- my-wits-around size.

Take Google’s YouTube for example (which just achieved the equally hard to fathom milestone of four billion viewings per day), and the fact that anyone in the world can upload HD videos up to fifteen minutes long to their hearts’ content. Given that each minute takes about 100 Megabytes of storage, the 15 minute HD video will occupy in the neighborhood of 1.5 Gigabytes.

Should you need to upload longer videos, you simple need to confirm that you are the account holder by entering your mobile phone number so Google can send you a confirmation code as a text message; enter that code and, viola, you can now upload 3-5 Gigabytes files to YouTube—again, pretty much to your heart’s content.

To me this wonder has always raised two questions: How much storage does Google actually have in its “cloud” and how on earth can they afford to dish out these enormous amounts of storage for free?

At the same time I often wish I had their server account.

Takoma, Washington

As to the second question, I think the answer is Google's ridiculously successful AdWords, which shows no signs of slowing down or of generating less income for the Search Engine giant.

As to the first question, Google is pretty mum about exactly how many server farms they have and what their total capacity is. Three years or so ago the widely circulated rumor was that they had approximately 450,000 servers, and my guess is that this number may well have tripled, if not quadrupled, since then.

In 2010 one industry pundit estimated that Google’s cloud consumed as much electricity as the entire city of Takoma, Washington (population approx. 200,000), and that, to me, is quite the picture.

But when you consider the energy needed to not only operate, but to cool a million or so high-powered computers, it does not seem so farfetched.

For Google, these server farms are life and death, and they take that end of the business very seriously. They build their own high-efficiency power supplies, and conduct fascinating, public research on disk failure.

Two other consideration when you establish server farms of this size and capacity is the external climate—the cooler year-around average temperature the better—and availability of inexpensive power.

Sweden and Finland

This is why Facebook, as reported in October 2011, announced that they were building an enormous server farm facility in Lulea in northern Sweden (Lulea is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle).

According to a The Telegraph article by Richard Orange, the Lulea climate will allow Facebook to use only air for cooling their servers.

Said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a 'Node Pole', “If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it's around 2C [35.6F].”

According to the same article, “Taking advantage of the rock bottom temperatures, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields.

“Even though they will rely on air cooling, keeping the servers humming will still require 120MW of power, enough to supply 16,000 detached homes, and costing some $70 Million a year.

“These power needs will be met by renewable electricity generated by dams on the nearby Lulea River.”

Engman went on to say, “The Lulea River produces twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam does, so 50 per cent is exported from our region. There is a surplus of energy, and we can supply more data centers in this area easily.”

Engman pointed out that the Facebook's engineers were also attracted by the reliability of the local power grid, which has been built to supply the area’s thriving iron, steel and paper industries, as well as by Sweden's dense fiber-optic network.

Spearheading the move into colder climates, Google, in 2009, bought a disused paper mill in Hamima in southern Finland, and is now building a server farm. Again, very good server-farm climate, and lots of cheap, local hydroelectric power.

Companies by Servers

So, how big is the "cloud?"

A recent cursory survey of various computing giants and the total size of their server farms rendered this, albeit incomplete, list:

• Intel — 100,000
• OVH — 80,000
• SoftLayer — 76,000
• Akamai Technologies — 73,000
• Rackspace — 70,000
• 1&1 Internet — 70,000
• Facebook — 60,000
• LeaseWeb — 36,000
• SBC Communications — 29,000
• Verizon — 26,000
• Time Warner Cable — 25,000
• AT&T 20,000
• iWeb — 14,000
• Peer1/ServerBeach — 10,000

This, of course, does not include the companies that do not share this information, such as Google.

Another such company is Microsoft which was estimated to run 200,000 servers mid-2008. Microsoft’s new Chicago container farm will hold an additional 300,000 servers.

Amazon and eBay run at least 50,000 servers each, as does Yahoo.

GoDaddy, IBM, and HP/EDS most likely belong to the 50,000+ servers club as well.

And we know that this server explosion is showing no signs of slowing down.

Some cloud.

Where exactly does life take place these days?

Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who for me made his mark with the astounding remark that “Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?”

In some ways I envy him, or rather his times, for life then was pretty clear-cut, and fairly distinct from dream. You were either awake or asleep, for life was then—in the main—lived through the five senses. It was rather easy, I suppose, to tell it from dream. All so analog.

Can we say the same today?

You read stories about Tokyo youth who never leave their darkened bedrooms for months on end, living their lives absorbed in the soft glare of computer monitors; or of those poor American souls that would rather lose their sense of smell than give up Facebook (see my December 27, 2011 blog). Is that living?

Then again, is reading a book—whether papery analog or Kindley digital—living? In many ways I’ve often thought that it is. The fictional wind blowing in your face, your heart beating faster with the suspense or of love. A well-written story will transform you, make you fall through the page of words and into the fictional dream, and live it just as fully as a dream, or as that walk in the woods. Is that living?

These days we have a new word: binge-watching; some call it television binging. A new concept made possible by digital streamers like Netflix or Hulu: An entire season of The Practice in a day. Two seasons of 24 over a weekend. This takes dedicated viewing. It means shutting down the rest of the day, turning off the cell, dimming the lights, don the headphones, then go. Barely break for food. Immerse yourself into the life on the screen and the fates of the actors to such a degree that for the next twelve hours, nothing else exists. Heady stuff, but is that living?

It seems to me that these days more and more living is taking place internally rather than externally. Without the need of smell, or taste, or touch.

And it seems to me that we are living more and more digitally, where the actual thing has partly evaporated.

I grew up with Long-Playing (LP) records. Vinyl. Analog. A good foot in diameter. Large and black. A sizeable sleeve. Lots of space for text and images. A thing. To touch, to care for, to collect, to cherish.

I did find the CD seductive when it was first released in the 1980s. So compact, so silvery, so, well, modern. And quite collectible. I must confess to gathering three thousand of them at one point. But in the long run, not quite the same.

And then even the CD was made obsolete by that thing that is and has no thing to it: the mp3. The only thing to tell you that you own it (or have stolen it) is a statement on the screen that says the file is there and that you’ve used up so much hard disk storage to save it. Yes, you can play it, and it sounds the same—to my ear anyway, though the pundits will tell you that nothing sounds as good as the analog vinyl. Musically it is there, but it is all cloud now. No thing to touch.

I recently uploaded (more as a backup than anything) some of my CD and mp3 collection to Google Music. So far I’ve uploaded 700 albums. 700 albums that in vinyl would have weighed far too much for me to lift (probably at least a couple of hundred pounds), and which would have occupied the better part of a good size walk-in closet—if racked and stored properly—has now been reduced to a Google Chrome bookmark. Click, and I’m there.

Yes, Google Music allows you to add cover art, which helps (but weighs nothing, of course, and is no thing); and Google being Google it does offer an amazingly well-honed search facility. But it is no thing. It is all cloud, all invisible bits and bytes chasing each other at the speed of light between me and some continent of servers we have yet to discover and chart.

But is that living?

I think I would like to go back now, close the door on mp3s and CDs, and return to my vinyl collection. I think I’d like to close the Internet and toss my cell, and don a pair of hiking boots, and take my living outdoors and into the five senses. Sun on my skin, wind in my face, forest in my nostrils, the cry of birds in my ears, the earth beneath my feet, the vistas real.

I think that is living