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 The UK’s first monthly on-line journal dedicated to conveyancers!

 

Technofile...
Text Box: These days, the Internet seems so ubiquitous that we can hardly imagine a time when it wasn’t around. Actually, it’s a very recent development, and the “Internet”, as we think of it today, didn’t really exist until the end of the 1980’s, beginning of the 1990’s. Until then, it had been pretty much the exclusive preserve of the military and academia, and up until then, and despite various attempts, neither industry nor the public at large had found a use for it. The Internet first saw the light of day some forty odd years ago, when the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, was tasked by the Pentagon to solve a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Post-nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state-to-state, base-to-base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armoured or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The centre of the network would be the very first place to go. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters. The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis. During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blastproof, packet-switching network was further developed by RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines that were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development projects. In the autumn of 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. The Internet had been born. Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant. In 1971, a mere thirty five years ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET network. Today there are millions of nodes connected to the Internet, scattered over more than a hundred countries, with more coming on-line every day. Hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people, now regularly use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks. The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s was spectacular, almost ferocious. It spread faster than cellular phones, faster than fax machines. In 1992, the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a month. The number of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year for five years. The Internet has moved out of its original base in military and research institutions, into schools, universities, public institutions, the commercial sector, and – most importantly – the home. So what caused this spectacular growth? What was the catalyst that transformed a few thousand networked computers into a global electronic nervous system? The answer is the World Wide Web (WWW). In essence, the “Internet” - the millions of linked computers - should be seen as the hardware, and the WWW as the software that runs on the system. The WWW is a collection of billions of electronic documents, stored on millions of computers that together make up the Internet as we experience. The overwhelming majority of these pages are written in a display language known as HTML (hyper text mark-up language) and often contain small programs written in a language known as Java or JavaScript. In order to view these pages, we need a program known as a “browser”, the best known of which is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Every page has a unique “address” in the system, known as a URL (uniform resource locator) which is used by the browser to locate the page we whish to look at. Finally, the WWW uses a set of rules that permits documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. This set of rules is known as HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). An English scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, whilst working for CERN in the Swiss Alps, invented all these four elements – HTML, the browser program, URLs and the HTTP rule set. Together they created the WWW, which turned the Internet from the preserve of academics and the technological elite, into a mass medium. As the Internet and the WWW have grown in power and sophistication, so more and more business processes have migrated to “Cyberspace”. The beaureaucratic and transactional routines which go to make up conveyancing are particularly susceptible to this process, and so it is not surprising that some practitioners are already undertaking tasks, such as searches and SDLT submission, on-line. By 2010, however, when Land Registry are scheduled to complete their e-conveyancing roll out, all conveyancers will need to feel comfortable in an on-line electronic environment. Next month, we will look at some specific Internet technologies which are available to practitioners right now, and have a closer look at how best we can fit them in with our conveyancing practice. Text Box: Back to News Text Box: Home Text Box: Letters

  CONTENTS
Explanatory note
Text Box: Home Text Box: News Text Box: Features Text Box: TechnoFile Text Box: Comment Text Box: Interview Text Box: Archive Text Box: Jobs Text Box: Letters Text Box: Events Text Box: Contact Text Box: Volume 1 Issue 5 July 2006 Phone: 01275 845656 Fax: 01275 845656 Email: news@conveyancingmonth.com
Explanatory note
Explanatory note

Over the coming months we’ll be taking a detailed look at the Internet, it’s impact on the Conveyancing Industry, and how it will affect your practice. This month, we trace the history of the Internet from it’s earliest military beginnings to the present day.

 

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