The Internet culture is shaped by a limitation of the IP protocol
The way the Internet works, it is hard to connect two random computers on it together. This asymmetry led to the client-server idea that is basically our culture on how the Internet works today. This gave rise to the web, and later to a revival of the terminal/mainframe model of the 70s (now called "cloud computing" and "web apps"), exacerbating the separation between technology producer and technology consumer, which is ironically the opposite effect of what the XEROX Park people who invented Ethernet and TCP/IP were aiming for. But if it weren’t for this basic limitation in the IP protocol, the Internet and the way we use it to communicate and the kinds of apps that we would envision for it might look very different today.
The Internet culture is shaped by a limitation of the IP protocol
The way the Internet works, it is hard to connect two random computers on it together. This asymmetry led to the client-server idea that is basically our culture on how the Internet works today. This gave rise to the web, and later to a revival of the terminal/mainframe model of the 70s (now called "cloud computing" and "web apps"), exacerbating the separation between technology producer and technology consumer, which is ironically the opposite effect of what the XEROX Park people who invented Ethernet and TCP/IP were aiming for. But if it weren’t for this basic limitation in the IP protocol, the Internet and the way we use it to communicate and the kinds of apps that we would envision for it might look very different today.