Interesting Snippets from 2012-08-16

• Entrepreneurs: The right stuff | The Economist

  PEOPLE did not know they needed the Post-it note when it was first invented, but it is now ubiquitous. The same could one day be true of Sugru, a material which resembles modelling clay but sticks to almost anything and dries to a tough, rubbery finish. The new substance has emerged from a former button factory in east London. It is beginning to stick thanks to social media, thus bypassing the traditional routes by which new products find a market.

• Where Did the Internet Really Come From? | TechPresident

  When the ARPANET was created, each of the research laboratories around the country had different equipment. That meant we had to figure out how to connect machines that were manufactured by different companies. The first four computers on the ARPANET were the Xerox Data Systems Sigma 7 at UCLA, the Scientific Data Systems (later acquired by Xerox Data Systems) SDS 940 at SRI International, the IBM 360/75 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Digital Equipment PDP-10 at the University of Utah. In order to connect these computers, there had to be some sort of common standard that was not controlled by any single company. This applied to every level of the system, from the hardware interface to the IMP to the basic protocols that moved messages from one computer to another, to the higher level applications such as email and, later, the world wide web. The open architecture of the Internet, with defined interfaces and open standards that were all freely available, initially made it possible for any person and any company to participate. This was a fundamental principle of the early work. This was also a hallmark of the government research effort, and would not have come about if the Internet had been created by industry.

[/snippets] permanent link