There is one area in which I feel technology is moving in the wrong direction. From my personal historical perspective, one of the great benefits of improvements in technology has been the distribution of computing power. The Internet has been part of this trend and so have powerful personal machines. Older folks (like me) remember days of walking to a computer center in order to submit “jobs” or work on a terminal. There were both political and technological limitations to the “old way.”
There is one area in which I felt the industry made great strides and is now back sliding. I am a fan of what might be called a “server on every desk.” I like the idea that each computer could function as a personal server connected to millions of other servers.
We were getting there. For a while, Microsoft had a product called personal web server that was free and allowed a Windows or Mac machine to function as a low capacity server. I still run this product on my desktop as a demo. This will have to change soon – Microsoft no longer is upgrading PWS and there has not been a version for the Mac platform for some time. As soon as I upgrade my operating system my little experiment will have to be terminated.
Desktop machines still offer this option. Microsoft has ISS for the Windows playform and OS X has a built-in version of Apache. ISS has to be installed separately and installation is not the easiest thing to accomplish. Web sharing on the Mac is easy to implement.
Even if you are willing there are barriers. Most direct connect systems are now dynamic (the IP is assigned each time you connect). With a dynamic connection, your server would work, but it would be impossible to locate you because your server would be a moving target with a changing address. I guess dynamic IPs are easier for system administrators somehow. There is also the security issue. Servers represent a security problem. It is more than your machine getting messed up by a hacker, it is the potential of your machine being turned against others without your knowledge. These problems can be addressed in the same way they must be addressed for any server, but the burden has to be taken on by each individual rather than by specialists responsible for a larger system.
I hope the idea of distributed computing in its most extreme implementation does not go away. Power to the people and all that – must be something I picked up in the 60s.
