And no, the question is not “What is my waistline doing?” {*grin*}
Along with all the publicity about running out of IPv4 addresses, how many of you caught on to the near exponential growth of the beast called the internet over the last 30 years? Given that I was assigned my first domain name in the eighties when there were only a few of machines connected, I have seen it happen and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes it has amazed me and other times it has seemed like the most obvious of things.
What do I mean? Consider the following data points:
| Year | Number of Internet Connected Devices |
|---|---|
| 1984 | 1000 |
| 1992 | 1 million |
| 2008 | 1 billion |
| 2010 | 5 billion |
| 2020 | 50 billion (est.) |
Who would have thought that an academic/DARPA experiment to go beyond dial-up store and forward systems would grown into such a monster. 1985 was the year the very first .com domains were issued (symbolics.com was the very first in 1985). Most companies saw no purpose to registering a domain name back in the good old days. All the hoopla would come later.
So my question for you is how many devices in your home and on your person are connected to the internet right now? I come up with between 10 and 20 for me, depending on how you define device. (And no, my toaster is currently not connected to the internet!)