Infinite computing

I was 13 when I spent my entire 3 week school vacation learning how to program my Sinclear ZX81 computer. Days and nights disappeared in for loops, variable assignments, gotos and the paraphernalia that makes up the BASIC programming language. The machine had 1 Kb of memory (that's 0.0001 Megabyte or precisely 1024 letters). No hard disk. No stiffy drive. No data storage of any kind.

When you switched the machine off, everything in it's memory would be gone.

You could "record" the data to a portable tape recorder: the computer would send weak sound signals to the microphone input on the tape recorder and record the data "song"...that could sometimes, if you were lucky, be played back to the computer to reconstruct the program you spent 10 hours writing. A program that made a letter move randomly around the screen. Or print the first 100 prime numbers. Or make random beeping sounds.

It was fantastic. A cybernetic enchanted forest. Building digital tree houses, fortresses and fantastical machines. An ever changing, moving and re-configuring puzzle. A land filled with dragon bugs. I was the dragon slayer. Ruler supreme in my digital kingdom.

But my kingdom had very hard, very definite borders. It was finite. In the extreme. The 1Kb memory limit defined the character of the computer. It dictated the kind of program you would write on the device.

Fast forward two and a half decades and my cell phone is hundreds of times more powerful than my ZX81:

Today, for a few thousand rand, you can buy computers with 2Gb of ram (that's 2 MILLION times more memory than the ZX81) and the ability to quickly save and retrieve programs and data...but somehow one still feels the limits. In the speed at which the programs load. The fact that your hard disk is slowly filling up with photos, music, programs and data.

You can feel the finite limits of the machine. You may not be painfully aware of them, but you can feel it. Like gravity. You know it's there, so you try not to jump from the roof in your batman suit.

Until one day when you plug your finite computer into the internet.

It's like opening your refrigerator door and seeing Antarctica on the other side. It's not infinite, but it is damn close. So large and complex it might as well be. You will never be able to fit it into your mind.

And it is growing. By the second. Expanding at an exponential rate. In size. In the amount of information it contains. In the number of people connected to it.

Today, with this computer in front of you, plugged in to the internet, you have access to an near infinite supply of knowledge, facts, processing power and data storage.

The internet is not a "thing". Or a computer. It is as real as smoke rising from a fire. It seems insubstantial, but yet it is real.

Pretty soon the internet will squeeze out all other networks: the phone network will stop to exist, as will TV networks. Control networks for traffic lights, alarm systems, air conditioning, trains, electricity supply - everything will be moved onto the internet.

Your cell phone will become your personal internet connection. Your always on, always with you jack into the digital world. Through it you will stay in contact with friends, consume goods and services, read news, listen watch radio and tv streams, make and receive payments, vote.

Scary? No, not really. Contrary to what Hollywood would want you believe, the internet is not a thing. It is not capable of motive, ambition, malice, greed any other emotion.

Take the current world wide telephone network: Does anyone worry about the phones taking over the world? No. How stupid would that be?

It sure did change the world though.