The Interface Message Processor

This is Dr. Leonard Kleinrock pinching the nipples of the Interface Message Processor, a ruggerized Honeywell DDP-516 Minicomputer. This box is responsible for what you are reading now, which either makes her my mom or the internet's mom or both.

The Interface Message Processor was The Original Router. Two of these machines connected in October 29 1969: One was at the laboratory of Dr. Kleinrock—who established the mathematical theory of packet networks, which made the internet possible—at the University of California-Los Angeles. The other was in the laboratory of Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart, who later became famous as the creator of the mouse, was working on online collaboration and human interfaces for Darpa during that time.

That day, the first internet backbone—then known as ARPANET—was born with the exchange of the first data packets. Before, only a few meaningless bits were exchanged. Two months later, a four-node backbone was completed. Today, forty years later, there are 1,668,870,408 users.

Oh, and right now, 5% of the packets are getting lost in North America. [Wikipedia via Daily Mail]

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Project Dark is a Go

After all the speculating, “Project Dark” is officially a go. The pricing is up on the T-Mobile website and it is exactly what we hoped feared. At first glance I’m not seeing any changes whatsoever from all the leaks, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know if anyone can really make that determination yet. Marketing is of course going to be the key factor here and we look forward to whatever T-Mobile brings to the table as they ramp up advertisements to the rumored tune of 40% this holiday season. Regardless of whatever marketing may come, we’re still super happy to see a new standard in the wireless industry with a no contract offering. It’s about time that the European style way of doing business made it over to US shores. Love it or hate it, it works quite well everywhere else in the world. So without further ado, we present to you, Project Dark. Time will tell today, as it’s just barely 9am in South Florida, if there are any more surprises in store–handsets, 3G, 4G or otherwise. We aren’t holding out hope for anything but we do love surprises!

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T-Mobile Project Dark

We've heard plenty about Project Dark lately, including new unlimited plans, 21Mbps HSPA, and new handsets. The newest rumors, courtesy of Boy Genius Report, are whispers of Rent-A-Center style, contract-free unsubsidized phone purchasing and tiered unlimited plans. Updated.

Obviously T-mobile is attempting to expand their customer base through Project Dark, and part of the approach is to entice customers who would normally be forced to prepay monthly dues as well as full retail for a device:

"Even More Plus" will give those who would otherwise qualify for FlexPay the option to finance a phone. [...] Our sources tell us that the phones will not be subsidized and so there won't be contracts for the devices, which means you pay the full retail price over the course of a set amount of time (up to 20 months is what we're told). Not bad - for a $500 device over that time is just $25/month, as an example.

The next step is offering the "Most Affordable Unlimited Rate Plans" in three flavors:

[U]nlimited voice, unlimited voice and text, and unlimited voice/text/data all priced at $40, $50 and $60, respectively.

All unconfirmed rumors, of course, but moves like this could definitely help T-mobile leap up from fourth place in the Great Battle of the Carriers.