Internet Week 2005 was held at Pacifico Yokohama from December 6th through the 9th. On the second day, which was designated “IPv6 Day”, they held a conference focused on IPv6, “IPv6 Technical Summit 2005”.
At the conference, a speech was given by Jun Murai, a Professor at Keio University who received the Postel Service Award, an award given to people who contributed to the growth of the Internet, in August.
At the beginning of his speech, he looked back on his first encounter with Mr. Jon Postel, whom the award is named after and who passed away suddenly in 1999. Prof. Murai said that he took on the management of domains and IP addresses in Japan and it led to the founding of JPNIC and APNIC.
Around that time, there were some issues, such as that only 7-bit ASCII could be used for e-mail, because people did not think about using the Internet in places other than the US. He worked with those who led the Internet at that time and played a role in bringing international frameworks into there.
The speech was titled “various years”. Using the materials that he used in his speeches in the past, Prof. Murai looked back on the history of his work, or to rephrase, the history of the Internet industry in Japan, and talked about the direction that the Internet should take in the future.
The first slide shown on the screen was the oldest presentation material that Prof. Murai had; it was used when he proposed an experiment using fiber optics in 1999.
The proposed experiment was as follows: they establish experiment facilities both in Tokyo and Osaka and connect them using fiber optics. They create a delay on purpose by making the connection go back and forth many times between these two facilities in order to test what kind of effect the latency would have on applications when fiber optics are laid down around the world.
Following that, he showed the materials from when he participated in setting up the government’s IT strategy in 2000. It showed that, although the Internet at that time was using telephone circuits, IP networks would eventually become mainstream and the telephone, conversely, would use the Internet, and that broadcasting would be done over the Internet in the future. It was completely a dream at that time; however, it is amazing to see that, in reality, things are really going precisely in that direction after 5 years.
At the end, he talked about the future of the Internet and the responsibilities of people who will be creating it. Once the entire earth is able to be connected using fiber optics, it means that the infrastructure preparation has been completed so that things can work as one computer on a global basis although the CPU and hard disc are far apart.
He concluded that in this new computer notion and environment, we engineers have a responsibility to create new architectures, and that, at the same time, it is something to greatly look forward to.
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Professor Jun Murai from Keio University gives a speech about his receipt of Postel Service Award.
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The oldest presentation material on Professor Murai’s computer was from January 22, 1999. The picture is of Professor Murai at that time.
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Diagram showing the relationship between the industry and infrastructure in 2000. The Internet is using the telephone and is separate from broadcasting.
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The communications infrastructure switched entirely to being IP-based in 2003, and it is predicted that the broadcasting industry will also start using it. Although the move is actually behind the predicted time, it is going in this direction.
