June 2009 - Communications Insider eNewsletter
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| |
| BY JOHN THOMSON
IPv6: An Historical Perspective
|
|
|
technology – is a very wonderful thing, not to mention a very precise science. History has a way of making us look stupid.
Take communications, for example – an area of technology that has made unbelievable strides since Gates and Olson are supposed to have made their pronouncements. At a time when we take instantaneous access to any computer in the world for granted – and not just from our desks or homes, but wherever we are and whatever we're doing – it is easy to believe that it has always been this way. But in fact, the path to where we are today has been one characterized (with the benefit of hindsight) with missteps, with journeys along blind alleys and with an almost complete, if entirely understandable, inability to see where the world might be going.
|
 Hindsight is a Wonderful Thing
It may well be that the story of Bill Gates claiming that "640K is enough memory for anyone" is apocryphal. IBM's Thomas Watson may not have said in 1943, as was widely claimed, that he estimated the total worldwide market for computers to be no more than five. Ken Olson however, the founder of DEC, certainly offered a hostage to fortune when he told a convention of the World Future Society in 1977 that "there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home" – even if his remark has been taken out of context. The point is that hindsight – especially in the world of |
|
|
|
|
|
