Michael Nunoo Shares a Brief History of the Internet and the Latest Breakthroughs
Although most people on the planet use the internet on the daily, very few people actually know how the internet came to be. Even more than that, people are often unaware of how the internet is constantly evolving and of the major scientific and technological strides that have been made because of the internet. Michael Nunoo is a network engineer from Watervliet, New York. He shares a brief history of the internet and some of the latest, most important breakthroughs relating to it.
History of the Internet
According to Michael Nunoo, the history of the internet begins much earlier than many people realize. In fact, computer science first began to emerge as a discipline as far back as the 1950s, when time-sharing between computer users, and then between wider networks, first became a possibility. What are now referred to as packet switching networks were really the first iterations of what we know today as the internet. Packet switching is a method of grouping data whereby data is transmitted through a digital network into packets.
The earliest packet switching networks date back to the 1960 and 1970s and include the NPL Network, the Merit Network, and the French CYCLADES. Roughly a decade after these packet switching networks came to be, the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States established supercomputing centers at several different universities across the country. Each of these supercomputing centers were equipped with interconnectivity in 1986 via the NSFNET project, which in effect created network access to these sites for the purposes of academic and scientific research.
Michael Nunoo claims that it wasn’t until 1989 and 1990 that commercial internet service providers, or ISPs as we know them today, started to pop up for private use in many American cities. It was also in these pivotal years of 1989 to 1990 that the World Wide Web was founded, the achievement of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who had been conducting research at The European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. The World Wide Web was the first form of the internet that could link hypertext documents into an information system that could then be accessed from any node on the network. This was a revolutionary change and the effects of this innovation have altered the world as we know it. Since the mid-1990s, there is no part of the world that has been untouched by the internet. Culture, technology, and the global economy are all inextricably linked with the internet. The internet has come to represent the main way that people around the world communicate with one another. Through text messaging, video chat, blogging, social media, electronic mail, discussion forums, and the like, the internet has quickly grown to be the number one way that people communicate with each other (a far cry and rapid increase compared to the mere 51% of people who used the internet to communicate as recently as 2000).
Michael Nunoo on Significant Breakthroughs
As previously mentioned, the internet has changed the world as we know it. But according to Michael Nunoo of Watervliet, New York, there are a few specific breakthroughs relating to the internet that have already had or are expected to have an extremely significant impact on the world. The first and most recent example is digital money. Digital money, also known as cryptocurrency, is rapidly growing in popularity and will be used more in 2020 than any other year. However, this means the need for financial security will only grow.
Another example of a breakthrough that resulted from the internet relates to climate change. Due to the internet, researchers around the world are now able to prove climate change by detecting the role of climate change as it relates to extreme weather conditions. This discovery not only helps scientists monitor the rate at which the planet is deteriorating, but also allows them to predict when severe weather is coming and prepare the population for it.
Third, Michael Nunoo is in awe of a breakthrough that he believes will happen very soon in the future — the unhackable internet. Within five years, the internet could be unhackable owing to the major advancements that have been made in quantum encryption. Finally, Nunoo is fascinated by AI-discovered molecules, which became a reality and an important first step in 2020. Artificial intelligence having the ability to search for and identify drug-like compounds with specific characteristics could result in new drugs being commercialized at a much lower cost than we’re used to. This would also help speed up the search for new, urgently needed drugs.
