November will mark 20 years since the word “Internet” broke into public discourse, with the release by Robert Tappan Morris of a “worm” that brought down many computers. Ten years later, the Web was in a state of exponential growth, and was already being exploited heavily for commercial and educational uses. At Harvard, by 1998 we had finished bringing high-speed connections to all our buildings.

This story about Abilene Christian University in Texas is a sign of things to come. Having discovered that the vast majority of students were bringing laptops to campus with them, they decided to equip every student with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Both have WiFi, and so can be used as Web browsers, email platforms, etc. Most students are picking the iPhone.) The university has passed on the Apple applications software and developed its own, presumably so it can switch to the Google phone or other open devices in the future.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under The explosion, The Internet and the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.