I used to know a man who was partially responsible for building the first computer in Australia. He was Ross Blunden. He moved from electronics to become the foundation Professor of Traffic Engineering at the University of New South Wales.
I had the privilege of exchanging home-spun wisdom with this very talented person, over a cup of coffee, at quite frequent intervals. He referred to the internet as the information super-highway. He may not have coined that expression.
He carried with him at all times a program he had made on a hand-held computer, which calculated the slow-down in traffic as it merged to pass through some gateway.
Some years ago I could do everything I wanted on the internet with a 486 DX 100 MHz with 48 MB RAM.
More recently I could run the internet satisfactorily with a Pentium I and relatively small amount of RAM. A particular computer which used to handle the internet quite well with 64 MB RAM, now can barely crawl along with 128 MB RAM.
So I believe that Professor Blunden’s forecast that the internet super-highway would eventually be clogged with traffic, has proven to be true.
I am not imagining this. The slow speed of the internet is a constant annoyance to me. Is it because there is a lot more (electronic) traffic, or is there some other factor that I am not aware of?
