Is There Life After the Internet?

Abstract

Recent advances in infrastructure technologies have been radically transforming the fundamentals of computing paradigms. Three concomitant disruptive changes are of particular importance:

(a) Emerging wire-speeds have been inverting the classical speed hierarchy; with I/O rates outstripping CPU speeds, the focus of traditional architect-tures, scaling I/O-memory speeds to meet CPU speeds, is inverted to scaling CPU speeds to meet I/O-storage speeds;

(b) Tagged XML software is inverting the classical sequential-code / random-access-data computing into sequential-data / random-access-code; and

(c) Massive storage growth at clients and respective download-&-play applica-tions are beginning to stretch the Internet’s unicast-client / server-content-distribution-&-processing paradigm to its limits;

Similar disruptive changes have historically transformed mainframe-computing to desktop-computing then to Internet-computing.

It is thus not unreasonable to ask, whether the Internet-computing paradigm may be similarly transformed, and if so, what might be the characteristics of post-Internet computing.