We still mourn things we loved which are now obsolete. 8-track tapes. Short basketball shorts. Rotary phones. Mix tapes. And now … the Internet? [Fox News]
The scientists who invented the Internet are now hard at work at a replacement known simply as “The Grid.” We’ll try not to get too technical (primarily because then we wouldn’t understand it either), but here’s what we know.
The new system, “The Grid,” would be 10,000-times faster than normal broadband is now. That means you could download an entire feature-length movie in seconds.
In the time you took to read that last line, we could have downloaded “There Will Be Blood” AND “Sweeney Todd” to our computers. If we had “The Grid,” that is. Fox News said “...the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.”
Scientists have loftier plans for The Grid than just a really massive game of Bully. Researchers at the Swiss particle physics center Cern (they thought up the Internet) created the grid to work with their new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine that will explore the origin of the universe.
The LHC could also create a black hole to destroy the whole Earth, but that’s a different story for another time, darling. For today, just focus on fast movies. [IT Wire]
The difference: The Internet runs over a series of cables and routing centers that were actually built for phone lines. It’s very hodge-podge and soooo last century.
The Grid, however, is built over a network of fiber optic cables and totally updated routing centers. There are already 55,000 servers involved; they expect that number to go to 200,000 in two years.
Our kids will one day ask us about the Old Days, when you had to wait for an entire hour to download a movie and you couldn’t send your girlfriend a hologram just to say I love you.
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