E-journal promoted by the Campus for Peace, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (original) (raw)

2014

Abstract

“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked, I thought. Suppose I could programme my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything. All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and anyone else. There would be a single global information space.” (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 4). These words were written by Tim Berners Lee to ex-plain the hopes he had at the point when he ‘invented’ the World Wide Web (www), following his paper outlin-ing the concept in 1989 and his design of the first world wide website, in December 1990. Since 1990 the www has grown at an exponential rate. Cisco Systems, the Califor-nia-based corporation that designs and manufactures web-based networking technologies, has estimated that data carried across the web globally by the end of the twentieth century, merely one decade after the invention of the web, was about 12 exabytes of human-produced information and communications media. To try to explain what this means, an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, which in turn is 1,000 terabytes, and one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Expressed more concretely, one exabyte can hold 36,000 years of HD video. In the projection of Cisco and other monitors of web growth, the www will pass another huge marker of expansion when, by 2015-2016, it will be measured not in exabytes but in zettabytes. A zettabyte is about 1,000 exabytes, and we are about to enter what Cisco analysts

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