It was in June that year that a bearded engineer called Robert Elz plugged the network – the thing we now call the internet - into a computer at Melbourne University, and — somewhat typical of the early internet — was immediately forced to pull the plug out again when he discovered that it was wired up the wrong way.
We're not even sure that Sun understood their own slogan, when someone from their marketing team scrawled it on a whiteboard. Later they even changed it to "The Computer is the Network" which indicates the fluidity of the notion.
But a few years later, after the World Wide Web arrived on the scene, and information developed a certain ubiquity, we started to believe that yes, certainly, the computer was the network. Except that we didn't really operate like that.
We'd got so used to operating systems that in practice we operated on the presumption that the computer was the operating system, and to a large extent, so was the network.
We don't know precisely when our thinking changed, but it has finally struck us that something has shifted. Our daily routine is now formulated on the basis that the computer really is the network, and vice versa, and the operating system is largely — although not completely — irrelevant.
As it happens, the network as computer is much more reliable if you're using Linux, rather than Windows. Linux isn't just more stable. As IBM e-business architect Chris Walden points out in a series of articles to help developers move from Windows to Linux it's been designed from the ground up to run on a network, unlike Windows, which was built with printing in mind, and with the Australian-developed Samba file-sharing protocol, it works with a Windows network much more seamlessly than Windows works with either Linux or Macs.
Even more significantly, from our point of view, unlike with Windows — even the now venerable Windows XP — you don't have issues like constant re-booting and software clashes. We were reminded of this the other day, when Ananda Sim, one of our colleagues on the free Bleeding Edge blog, declared "Many people think of a computer like a wooden desk. It shouldn't change, shouldn't move. The computer isn't like that though. It changes as a result of your usage."
He's right in the case of Windows, but it's certainly not true of Linux. Linux protects the kernel from misbehaving applications and drivers, and because it's not so easy for programs to be installed and made executable in Linux, the system is infinitely more secure. It's those constant changes wrought by new device drivers and applications and malware that has driven us relentlessly towards the network computer, and hence Linux.
We're using an Ubuntu desktop, the Knoppmyth-based Australian Dragon media centre and an Asus Eee PC running Xandros and the incredibly condensed and powerful Puppy Linux developed in Perth by Barry Kauler, which Windows users considering Linux could profitably explore, given that it boots off a USB key, with the entire operating system and all its applications running in 256MB of RAM.
Not that we're necessarily using Linux programs. Increasingly, we complete our daily routine with Web-based applications, some of which we'll explore next week.
While we don't expect Microsoft to go broke any time soon, we in the department have decided that it's time to re-issue the network as computer concept for immediate, widespread adoption.