From ARPAnet to Facebook: The Story of Cyberspace (WEEK 2)

TWO TECHNOLOGIES FROM EARLIER STAGES OF THE INTERNET ERA.

1) Evolution of printers: from dot-matrix printers to 3D printing

Printing has always been an improving and evolving theme since computers were getting more mainstream, and dot-matrix printers (one of the earlier technologies used for printing)  have been around since 1960's and have had a great impact on modern technologies and been their exoskeleton since then.

Dot-matrix printers use a primitive technology called impact printing. Basically, in impact printing an ink soaked ribbon is utilized, and it moves back and forth on a piece of paper to print. Each ribbon has metal pins on it and its name dot-matrix comes from the fact that letters are drawn out of a dot-matrix and since this printers used mechanical pressure as the printing method, they could be used to create carbon copies and carbonless copies of documents. This meant that a premade document is not needed for a printer to print. A dot-matrix printer can create a document from scratch, using mechanical force. It is an undeniable fact that dot matrix printers had a significant impact as far as printing technology goes, but they have been long forgotten ang changed with their modern counterparts : those which are not as loud, have much greater quality and even can print 3 dimensional objects.

3 Dimensional printers or 3D printers for short are a relatively new and innovative approach to existing options and are performing way beyond some peoples' expectations before they were commercially announced.

Working Principle of 3D printers is actually much simpler than it looks. The printer takes the input in a digital format and then converts it to a physical 3 dimensional copy of the object. It accomplishes so by building a 3 d model layer after layer starting from the bottom and it uses different materials mainly consisting of plastic to do so. The heater in the operating part (head) heats up the thin plastic fiber material and pours it layer by layer onto the 3D printing platform according to the instructions given by the operator.

3D printers come in various technologies and sizes nowadays so we never know what expects us in the near future. 3D printers could be used for car manufacturing, house modeling or even furniture craft.

2) IPv4: The old but modern technology.

IPv4 short for (internet protocol version 4) is a technology implemented as far back as 1980's and was one of the earliest operation protocols that modern internet was built on. Back in 1980's TCP/IP internet protocol suite was implemented as a common standard for basically all networks (mainly for millitary purposes) as a common. IPv4 technology offers 2^32(4,294,967,296) unique IP addresses because it uses a 32 bit scheme. An even though its newer cousin the IPv6 was fairly recently implemented, most of the network traffic nowadays is still routed by IPv4 protocol. Although as the time passes, IP address deflation will get more significant and maybe one day all network traffic will be switched to the newer IPv6, IPv4 is a technology that was available to us since the ARPANET era and it is still holding its place as the most common protocol in the history of the internet.