That wraps it up for end-to-end
The defining feature of the Internet back in 1980 was "end-to-end", the idea that all the intelligence was on the "ends" of the network, and not in middle. This feature is becoming increasingly obsolete.This was a radical design at the time. Big corporations and big government still believed in the opposite model, with all the intelligence in big "mainframe" computers at the core of the network. Users would just interact with "dumb terminals" on the ends.
The reason the Internet was radical was the way it gave power to the users. Take video phones, for example. AT&T had been promising this since the 1960s, as the short segment in "2001 A Space Odyssey" showed. However, getting that feature to work meant replacing all the equipment inside the telephone network. Telephone switches would need to know the difference between a normal phone call and a video call. Moreover, there could be only one standard, world wide, so that calling Japan or Europe would work with their video telephone systems. Users were powerless to develop video calling on their own -- they would have to wait for the big telcom monopolies to develop it, however long it took.
That changed with Continue reading