ANDREU VEÀ
I have never worked so hard nor ever earned so little, but I am buying freedom, and I am now very happy.
We have to rate the power that lies in giving things, offering them to society so that it can improve them.
For many years now I have had the chance to meet people who have changed our lives. We could call them OAPs, ‘old and poor’, for they are unknown, and none of them ever became a millionaire. We must accord some recognition for all those pioneers of the technology that has changed life.
The big names of Internet whom we now know, the creators of Google, Facebook, Twitter, they have indeed become millionaires, but they have restricted themselves to making applications and new functionalities on the foundations created by the pioneers. Thanks to those pioneers, Internet has so far worked as a system of distributed intelligence.
Many of the technologies and developments that now surprise us are already in our present, not in the future. When you think something is magic, it is technology!
PAUL MOCKAPETRIS
How did I create the DNS?
All the experts thought at first that Internet was a minor thing, that it wouldn’t be useful for important tasks, and that is why they thought about making a very small edifice, a tent. I thought about the potential it would have, and that is why I laid the foundations for a cathedral. I wanted to build something big, something that could be extended.
When a technology is designed, we always think that people will continue it, that it will be given new uses, not just the use for which one thought of it in the first place. And so the uses of Internet have gone on expanding. There has been an evolution over time.
We have to build technology with the mission of having others able to develop it, extend it, improve it. It is much better to make something that can evolve than to draw up a perfect plan that works 100% right away.
Currently, anybody can run a domain on Internet. You can build your own identity, update the system. There are 60 different uses of DNS that are popular. I only invented three!
When a technology is extended, it is also being given further years of life.
If you want to develop something that will still be in current use in 200 years’ time, write music, not Internet protocols, which will soon be obsolete!
The important thing is who takes part in it. Let it be a technology available to as many people as possible.
With cloud computing, if you can make a useful application there are no replication costs, you can make as many copies of it as required, and thus knowledge is disseminated much faster.
In the open world what is needed is a bit of privacy, for we have not yet found the middle-point between privacy and publicity. But there is surely a simple solution, such that a few years on from now we will wonder how it was that in 2014 it had not yet occurred to anyone. Why not find it yourselves?
