What Hath Satan Wrought?

It was 40 years ago this week that a computer at UCLA "talked" to a computer at Stanford, thus paving the way for what would become the Internet and, in the '90s, the Web.

If you click on the image at the top right, you'll see a record of the first message sent over the ARPANET, as it was then called, as annotated and preserved by Leonard Kleinrock, who is still a UCLA computer professor.

This record is an excerpt from the "IMP Log" that we kept at UCLA. I was supervising the student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) and we set up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The transmission itself was simply to "login" to SRI from UCLA. We succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then the system crashed! Hence, the first message on the Internet was "Lo!".

And behold!

In their 40th-anniversary salutes this week, an astonishing number of media outlets got their chronology all wrong, and placed the oft-designated "fathers of the Internet," Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, at the scene on Oct. 29, 1969.

In fact, it wasn't until the early 70s that Kahn and Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the technologies used to transmit information on the Internet.

Cerf is now Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and in this 2008 Beet.TV video interview, he provides some interesting perspective on the future of the Web, especially as it relates to video consumption.



You'll find good articles about the birth and development of the Internet in Forbes, and in the Guardian of London. Forbes also has an excellent Internet Anniversary quiz.

A day after the anniversary, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it would accept Web addresses (URLs) in non-Latin letters, meaning that next year you'll start seeing Websites in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi, Cyrillic (Russian), and, most prominently, Chinese.

"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," ICANN's President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said.

From our perspective, nothing has evolved as much as video. When we built our first Website in the early '90s, there were less than 1,000 Websites in existence, and most of them were known as "personal pages," manually catalogued by Yahoo (in that pre-database, pre-Google era). Everything was "flush left" and with a 14K modem, it took forever for a small still image to load. You'd pray it didn't crash your computer, forcing you to reboot. Video? Fuhgetaboutit! If you wanted to view a 5-second clip, you'd start downloading it at bedtime to view when you awoke in the morning.

Now, of course, you can watch entire movies and TV episodes via the Web, and we're at the point where the Web is becoming the primary media outlet for video production and consumption. And though more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to the network, that still represents only a fifth of the planet's population -- so adventures aplenty lie ahead.

We planned to write this ode on Thursday, the actual anniversary date, but we've been laid low with a nasty cold. So, yes, you might well ask, why is it that we can befriend thousands of strangers from places we've never been, and communicate with them in real time, for free, halfway around the planet ... and we still can't find a cure for the common cold?

Frankencamera Downloads Apps Like an iPhone

Imagine if your camera worked like an iPhone and enabled you to download applications that could alter your images while they were being shot?

Currently your camera can tweak your images in numerous ways -- and once an image is shot, you can revamp it endlessly in a program like Photoshop.

But even the world's greatest digital camera is limited by what's in its body. So imagine trying to take a single image in which one side is well lit, but the other side is not. Your camera can currently adjust so that part of the frame will be properly exposed, but the other part will be too dark or too light.

Frankencamera to the rescue! That's the invention of Stanford University computer science professor Marc Levoy (pictured), which will rapidly fire two shots -- one exposed correctly for the dark park, the other exposed correctly for the light park -- and then merge them into one perfectly exposed image, using the best parts of both images.

The Frankencamera could perform the same way for focusing -- taking several shots, each focusing on different parts of the frame, and then instantly merging them into a perfectly focused shot.

The idea is that, by using an open-source digital camera, programmers can create software to teach cameras new tricks -- and that, like your iPhone, your camera will no longer be limited to the manufacturer's software that it came packaged with.

Obviously the Frankencamera, made from a hodgepodge of existing parts, is a monstrous prototype, destined for downsizing and redesign. But rather than compete with manufacturing giants, Levoy intends to convince camera makers to incorporate open-source capabilities into their existing closed-end proprietary products.

Consequently, all the existing controls -- focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash -- will no longer be limited by what comes pre-installed with the camera, but can be commanded and superceded by external programmers. Users can upgrade their capabilities with the touch of a download button.

The innovative algorithms will be generated by a new breed of "computational photography researchers," who will be able to take their experiments out of the lab and bring them to photo studios, and everywhere that cameras go.

In addition to using algorithms to create optimal lighting or focus throughout a single frame -- currently not possible with current commercial cameras -- the Frankencamera can enhance a 30 fps low-res video by periodically capturing a high-res still image, and using the extra data in that image to imbue the entire video with richer detail.

In essence, by opening up your camera to a network or community of developers, your technical possibilities will catapult exponentially beyond today's capabilities.

This will clearly have exciting ramifications for still photographers and videographers. But let's not lose sight of the fact that, ultimately, images will always require human spirit, creativity, and imagination. And there will never be an app that can replace that.



LINKS:

* Stanford University News Story

* NPR Report