Reddit reviews MIRROR WORLDS

/r/Thameus is spot on. Way too many people confuse the Internet with the Web.

The Internet essentially consists of mid-level (layer 3 and layer 4) network stack protocols. Those protocols are often referred to as TCP/IP, but there are several more layer 4 protocols than TCP (UDP, SCTP, NORM, etc.).

The web is an application level (layer 7 in the OSI model) protocol. It's main application layer colleague is e-mail, but there are several others.

The Internet is a specific instantiation of what's called packet switching. This is contrasted to the old telephone networks' circuit switching.

The Internet was not always a done deal; the Internet is not the only instantiation of packet switching. This is grossly over simplifying what happened, but there was a huge, huge battle in the '80s/'90s between the Telcoms (who wanted to use another packet switching scheme based on something called X.25), and the DARPAnet guys who wanted to use the TCP/IP open standards.

So the question you probably want to ask is: when was packet switching thought up?

In terms of the Web, there's a computer scientist named David Gelernter who wrote a book in 1993 called, "Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean ", that actually pre-saged the Web (although I haven't seen any indication that Tim Berners-Lee was thinking of this when he created hypertext).

It's all very interesting stuff, but the key is to distinguish between the various layers and components.

Mirror Worlds is a book from 1992 by David Galernter. The dude had quite a lot figured out then, and some of his ideas inspired movies like The Matrix.


Long story short, mirror worlds are virtual copies of reality where we can run infinite experiments. Something companies like SpatialOS are trying to market with their technology's ability to simulate a bagillion(or is it bajillion?) entities all interacting in a complex system. Innovation accelerant.