| Fact | Source |
| For August 28: "All the world's businesses spend more on telecommunications each year than they do on oil. The global telecom market is US$600 billion, and it is estimated that this figure will double or triple in the next decade." | "Welcome to Silicorn Valley," Wired Magazine, September 1997, p. 130 (quote from p. 134). |
| For September 2: Internet advertising revenues totaled $266 million in 1996, with quarterly figures rising from $29.9 million in the first quarter to $109.5 million in the fourth. An impressive growth rate, but the totals are still dwarfed by traditional media such as newspapers ($40 billion/year) and television ($34 billion/year). | "Study Says Ads Hit $266M in 1996," Web Week, March 31 1997. |
| For September 4: "In 1980, a typical U.S. household spent $325 a year for telephone service, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In 1995, that figure jumped to more than $700." | "Telephone Technology Takes Off," The Idaho Statesman, September 1, 1997, p. D1. |
| For September 9: The number of Web servers in the world, as of August 1997, is about 1.3 million. This is roughly ten thousand times as many as there were in June of 1993 (when there were 130). | Hobbes' Internet Timeline v3.1. |
| For September 11: As you know from class, an 8-bit ASCII code can represent 2 to the 8th power, or 256 characters. This is not enough for every possible alphabet and special character in every language, so another system called Unicode has been developed as a 16-bit code with 65,536 possible characters (over 38,000 of which have already assigned). | The Unicode home page. |
| For September 16: The effective communication speed of any particular media is difficult to specify as it depends on a number of factors in addition to the media itself, such as coding method, signaling method, distance, mode of communication, protocol used, etc. One absolute, though, governs the minimum time it will take for the first bit to traverse any media with electrical or optical signals--the speed of light. Grace Hopper is famous for using an 11.78-inch piece of wire to show how far a signal could travel in one nanosecond (1 billionth of a second). | "The Amazing Grace Hopper" page. |
| For September 18: A traditional informal guideline relates analog bandwidth to digital bandwidth by saying that between two and five bits per Hertz can be carried on an analog signal. Modem technology has stretched this limit, however. Assuming an analog bandwidth of 3300 Hz for analog phone lines, how many bits per Hz are being achieved? | Curt's High Speed Modem Page |
| For September 23: One third of all Internet traffic passes through a network access point located in an underground parking garage in McClean, Virginia. | "Is the Internet in Trouble? Data Communications, Sept. 21, 1997. |
| For September 25: In the CommunicationWeek 1997 Managers Survey, over 300 of 405 corporate IT and network managers polled named IP as the primary protocol for 56% of LANs and 71.9% of WANS in operation today. This compares to the 1996 survey in which 23.8% of respondents said they use TCP/IP, second to IPX/SPX. | "IP time begins now." CommunicationsWeek: Jul 7, 1997 |
| For September 30: Here is the number of years between invention and reaching 25% of the US population for various technologies. Household electricity: 46. VCR: 34. Telephone: 35. Television: 26. Radio: 22. PC: 15. | Bringing it Home (Special Technology Section), Wall Street Journal, June 16, 1997. |
| For October 2: More than 90% of US homes have access to cable, but only 15% of those homes have cable capable of two-way transmission (desirable for high-speed Internet access through cable modems). | "Cable modem chip sets boast speed, low cost." Infoworld, Sept. 29, 1997 (p. 58) |
| For October 7: The FCC deregulated local call rates for pay phones effective today, which is widely expected to raise the cost of a typical local call from 25 to about 35 cents at the 2.1 million public pay phones in the US. | "Pay phone rates may go up after deregulation." Yahoo news, www.yahoo.com. |
| For October 9: Salaries for networking professionals rose over 15% from mid 1996 to mid 1997, according to a survey. | "Networking salaries on the increase." Infoworld, Sept. 29, 1997 (p. 135). |
| For October 14: It is estimated that around 80 percent of network interface cards are Ethernet/IEEE 802.3, with a large part of the remainder being Token Ring. | Source to be added. |
| For October 16: Novell Netware has the largest NOS market share, but Microsoft's market share (based on '95, NT, and NT server) is growing more rapidly. | Source to be added. |
| For October 21: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab Mars Pathfinder Web site had 46.9 million hits on July 8, 1997. This set a new record for any site--the previous record being held by IBM's Kasparov-Deep Blue chess site at 21 million hits. NASA used volunteer commercial "mirror" sites to help handle the load. | "Mars attacks the Web." Web Week, August 18, 1997 (p. 22). |
| For October 23: Deja News archives and catalogs postings to Usenet newsgroups. So far they have about 180 billion characters worth of information, which they believe surpasses all the text content on the Web. Some 20 million people contribute 500 million characters of new postings every day in over 20,000 active news groups. | "Will newsgroups outshine the Web?" "Inter@ctive Week, September 15, 1997 (p. 24). |
| For October 28: "Voice traffic is growing at 7 percent a year, while data traffic is growing at 300 percent; and data traffic is increasingly made up of Internet traffic. Put these facts together, and in five to seven years, the Internet will swallow the voice network." (Don't take this as gospel--read this article and others before you agree. . .) | "Bellheads Retreat." Wired, November 1997 (p. 114). |
| For October 30: 'Heard about DANs (Desktop Area Networks) yet? Traditional serial and parallel ports fall short of the speed needed for modern peripherals. Two of the new high speed standards are Universal Serial Bus (available now, 12Mbps total for up to 127 devices) and Firewire/IEEE 1394 (available in 1998, 200Mbps total for up to 63 devices; maximum of 25Mbps for any one device). | "High-Speed Standards." Inter@ctive Week, October 20, 1997 (p. 28). |
| For November 6: Availability and strength of encryption technology is a hot topic in the US Congress these days. A recent development is that the House Commerce Committee rejected the so-called Oxley-Manton Amendment to the Security and Freedom through Encryption Act. The amendment which would have mandated the use of key escrow--an approach backed by the FBI but resisted by many industry and privacy advocates. | "Snooping Feds?" LAN Times, October 27, 1997 (p. 46). |
| For November 11: 'Think companies upgrade their major network software as often as you upgrade your Web browser? Not even close! Half of Novell's 76 million customers are still running Netware 3.x (introduced between 1989 and 1993). | "Moab beta helps close the Internet gap." LAN Times, October 27, 1997 (p. 14). |
| For November 13: The Linux operating system is a freeware version of Unix that has become very popular in the last few years. It is estimated that there are between 2.5 and 6 million Linux users, and that the majority of the Fortune 500 have Linux running somewhere in their organization (despite the rather informal nature of Linux support). | General information: www.linux.org. |
Related pages: [Recommended Periodicals]
Last modified on November 10, 1997 04:48 PM by Robert Minch (risminch@cobfac.idbsu.edu).