interconnection had to be robust, that is, not crucially dependent on local failures. While this particular aspect of global network design will not bear directly on the role of personal electronic devices, it’s good to remember because it has an effect on security, which is where trusted systems play.

Coming back to naming, and related to what was just said, a hierarchical, distributed naming system was put in place, which we all will certainly be familiar with, having an e-mail address, or entering business names into our Web browsers daily.

The expansion of the global network was first geographical, by now expanding to the most remote places in the world. The expansion was also physical, in the sense that all personal electronic devices in the world have been progressively given individual addresses, just like computers were at the beginning. For example, your mobile phone, your camera, your printer, all are getting addresses that will allow anybody on the network to recognize them. To fully enable this level of connectivity, new addressing schemes have been developed that expand tremendously the number of names available for devices. We’ve rather greatly simplified the story here, but we can summarize the success of the global network in one acronym you may well be familiar with, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), that covers the core essential networking technology that makes it all possible. You don’t need to understand the functioning of TCP/IP to read what follows, as it suffices to take it for granted that it is a fundamental means for the network to exchange information, or, if we want to expand on a familiar metaphor, it is the concrete of the Internet highway.

Of course, one device that would benefit for individual naming capability is our trusted analogue for people, the personal electronic devices and their trusted core, now capable to have their own independent presence on the network. But we’re walking ahead of ourselves here.

Industrial networks are networks of computers and/or other devices that have developed globally to answer specific needs of an industry. We are going to look at three important ones in terms of the computer equivalents of social ecosystems: telecommunications, financial, and television networks.

Telecommunications established the first global network in the XIX^th and XX^th Centuries. Up to the 1980’s, the network was fundamentally a carrier of voice. Wires were used to transmit an analog signal; that is, a signal representing directly the physics of the transponder used to record the voice of the user.

To use our general model of networks, the local equipment was that of the phone box and its receiver, the local network was the link between that box and the office of the telecommunication operator, and the global network was the link between that office and other offices throughout the world.

Standard telephony, from the time of Alexander Graham Bell’s initial invention, was comprised of a switched circuit architecture based on dedicated terrestrial physical links. A wire was run from one’s home to a central switching station, and by entering the address of a desired telephone out there on the network somewhere (e.g. Pennsylvania 6-5000 for Glenn Miller fans) the local switch established a circuit to the local switch for the other telephone, and a dedicated session was brought into being for the time that one remained on the phone. Sometimes, a radio connection was patched into one of the dedicated lines and one could talk to a very remote location, partially through terrestrial line and partially through a radio link. For any telephone call of course, there

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