Happy birthday, Web
The World Wide Web turns 25 this week. To mark the milestone, the Gazette sat down with Scott Bradner, a senior technology consultant with Harvard who has been involved with the Internet since its early days. Bradner described the succession of networks — ARPANET to CSNET to NSFNET to NEARNET — that helped develop the underlying Internet structure, and then discussed the technology that in the early 1990s took the Internet from the realm of the geeks into our offices, homes, laptops, and, more recently, our phones. The past provides an indication that nobody really knows what’s coming in the future, Bradner says. But he believes that the potential for government regulation is the threat that looms largest, while the Internet’s spread around the world via smartphones holds its greatest promise. GAZETTE: You’ve been involved with the Internet pretty much from the start, haven’t you? What can you tell us about...