Historians of science frequently point out that once the world is ripe for an idea, the idea tends to arise, frequently in several heads at the same time. Witness the simultaneous creation of calculus by Leibniz and Newton. An idea which now seems to be recurring with increasing frequency is that of decentralized computing over the networks. The original project GLOSAS was aimed at achieving something similar, somewhat ahead of its time. Now the resources seem to be in place. Read the highly original article by James Morrison (see below). Suspend your disbelief in its forecast of the imminent decline (demise?) of Microsoft. To help you along the way, consider the following:
The November-December issue of The Futurist has an article by Nicholas Negroponte, the well known founder of the MIT Media Lab, which includes the following paragraph:
"Thinking Machines Corporation, a great and imaginative supercomputer company started by electrical engineering genius Danny Hillis, disappeared after 10 years. In that short space of time it introduced the world to massively parallel computer architectures. Its demise did not occur because of mismanagement of sloppy engineering of the so-called Connection Machine. It vanished because parallelism could be decentralized; the very same kind of massively parallel architectures has suddenly become possible by threading together low-cost, mass-produced personal computers."
James Morrison's article argues very much along these lines. The stranglehold which Microsoft exerts over its markets will gradually weaken and disappear because much of computing can be done via distributed, time-sharing network computing and need no longer be done on the PC. Ergo, no need for massive operating system and application software residing on your hard disk space. All you'll need is access to communal computing power, whether run for profit or as a public utility.
A major contributing factor to this trend is James Gosling's creation of a new programming language -- Java -- which promises to cause a quantum leap in the use of networked resources. Here is a software which permits COMPUTING over the networks!
Java is based on "distributed" computing. This means that a number of computers share a job which would be too large for any one of them. The concept is not altogether new and Dr. Utsumi, of GLOSAS, has been advocating its application for decades. What is new is that Java has moved closer to solving some basic security problems which threaten any system which accepts to process programs of unknown users - viruses, worms, and the like.
Java could transform the Web as we know it today into a "computing ecology in which programs jump from one computer to another and do useful tasks - whether delivering the morning paper electronically without the user having to look for it, performing automatic diagnosis and repair of computers from an on-line service centre, or providing an interactive arena for elaborate multi-player games (The Globe & Mail, October 17, '95; C8)."
Netscape, one of the hottest Internet browsers, has now licensed the Java software that Sun uses to create HotJava and is incorporating a feature based on HotJava in Netscape 2.0. Sun Microsystems Inc. is distributing Java freely over the Internet.
Another concern of GLOSAS' is universal access to networked educational resources. One of our editors, Martin McGreal, has contributed an article which updates his editorial in a recent issue (see GN V/2). The article is about the info-poor and ways of mitigating, or escaping info-poverty. A must read.
Return to GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.
URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/edcom53.htm
November, 1995
GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.