Friday, February 20, 2009

Cool Technology of the Week

A somewhat unusual Cool Technology of the Week - the internet itself.

The image to the right contains the current statistics on adoption of the internet worldwide.

You can see that the US leads internet adoption, but that just above every country is seeing enough adoption to significant impact the way the human race receives news and information.

When I think of the acceleration of communication in my lifetime, it's dizzying. When I was born in 1962, Western Union telegrams were the fastest way to communicate text. As I grew up, acoustic coupler modems became available to high tech government and corporate users. Then came fax machines. Then proprietary dialup data networks.

I remember creating my first bulletin board to enable 300 baud downloads of software updates for my small software company in 1987.

Today, I have folks asking me to arrange high speed terabyte data transfers.

We're all connected, with high bandwidth, wired and wireless, worldwide. Who could have imagined this 15 years ago when the first web browser was created.

All of humanity, connected, that's cool!

2 comments:

Lynne Prives said...

Your post 2-19-09 BEING WIRED, COOL TECHNOLOGY OF THE WEEK.
Patient BIDMC question.
Can I connect to Patient Site from my Blackberry 8700. Email from BIDMC IT dept. did not help me to get this up and running. Sign in is perfect from my laptop to Patient Site. HELP??? Me,others, Please
Thank you.
Lynne Prives

John Halamka said...

Blackberry screens are really too small to use with Patientsite and the browser provided on the 8700 is too limited. The next generation of Blackberries such as the Bold provide a better browser, but it will still be award to use. Best to use a laptop or desktop with Patientsite.