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I am speaking at the largest recorded meeting of natural medical doctors in the history of the world in Las Vegas today. There are nearly 5000 physicians here that are eager and excited about learning more about what they can do to optimize health. I am learning many exciting innovations about bioidentical hormone therapy but, without question, the highlight of my trip was that I was able to meet the "father" of the Internet, Larry Roberts. I had dinner with him the night before last and then had an outstanding two hour lunch with him yesterday.
No, the father of the Internet is not Al Gore, nor is it as many people believe Tim Berners-Lee. In 1980 in the Swiss Alps Berners-Lee was doing a six-month stint as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. What he wound up developing was a "hypertext" notebook that allows us to have the graphical experience we now call the web.
However, the underlying backbone infrastructure was developed in 1969 by Larry Roberts. The picture you see of Larry is when he was 29 years old in 1969 and was fresh out of MIT. He was hired by the US Defense Department to set up the Internet through ARPA which was the precursor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In August 1969, he set up the first node at UCLA. A month later, the second was delivered to SRI. So in September of 1969 the two were connected and the ARAPNET was born. The ARAPANET was the first time an internet connection was done. In my view point this is an important historical event as Alexander Graham Bell discovering the telephone.
In my time with Larry I found out many interesting things. One of the amazing paradoxes of his discovery is that it will eventually cause the traditional telephone systems to go out of business. He does not have too much faith in ATT being around much longer. Nearly all voice traffic is bound to be going over the internet with Voice over IP (VoIP). I have been using Vonage for the last year for my home and business and am very pleased. Larry is convinced that we will all be using services like Skype that transfer far less expensively your voice over the internet.
Larry gave me many pearls and my understanding of the future of the net is much deeper as a result of our talk. One of the pearls that I can share with you is that he is now the CEO of a company that is developing a router that will give CISCO serious problems as it provides a simplified way to give ISPs control over the way they distribute their bandwidth. His major innovation is that this router will only cost $20,000 to $100,000. That may seem like a lot of money to you and I, but it will be replacing routers that currently start at $250,000.
So what does this mean to you and me? Once his routers are widely adopted, which is inevitable, we will have access to much more content like video and phone over the internet as the ISPs will finally have a way to efficiently control and bill for their bandwidth. I also learned that the US is a minimum of five to six years behind many Asian countries in our adoption of the Net. There are Asian countries that already have entire cities hooked up wirelessly.
Adoption of his routers is inevitable as he has visited all of the major telephone companies in the world and they are adopting his routers. My favorite Internet company, Google, will also be using them. It was so thrilling to meet Larry as he personally knows the top people at Google.
As time avails itself I hope to share more of what I have learned from Larry. It was one of the most awesome times of my life. Interestly, Larry is married to a top notch natural medical physician, Dr. Tedde Rinker, from San Francisco and he is fully into natural medicine. I want to tell you folks, that he is just at sharp in his 60s as he was when he develoepd the Net in 1969. He is an amazing testimony to what you can do with natural medicine. I always knew there was a synergy with natural medicine and the internet and know I understand why.
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