In a recent blog posting, Masood Mortazavi waxed lyrical on the importance of the fundamental statement of Sun’s vision: The network is the computer. He wrote:
In my mind, there’s no more revolutionary concept in computing, networking and information technology than the motto which Sun coined in many of its corporate PR campaigns: The Network is the Computer. […] Many others, including Tim O’Reilly, have opined on the motto.[…] To me, it has an almost esoteric meaning.
I added a comment that I then decided to reproduce here:
Masood: I agree absolutely. As a 19 year veteran, I have found that “the network is the computer” has always been at the core of what Sun means to me. Occasionally we get distracted: we focus on the components and lose sight of the vision; but we always come back to it. You’ve reminded me to do something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, now: grab the domain name thecomputeristhenetwork.com. I want to use it to talk about some of my thoughts on the future of computing. Much of what I do revolves around the question that Rob Gingell asked a few years ago: “If the network is the computer, what is the computer that is the network?” It sounds Zen-like, but there’s a profound issue here. Hint: it’s NOT a Von Neumann machine. And no, it’s not isomorphic to a Turing machine. Turing machines are fundamentally synchronous. The network is fundamentally asynchronous.