The story of the programming, design and implementation of the Internet Big Bang is not one filled with drama or sensationalism. It is, however, one of the greatest historical achievements in the annals of computing and technology history that was single-handedly launched by genius inventor Andre Gray on August 8, 1988. On that fateful day,after working on all three inventions for several months, Andre Gray did three things that came together perfectly to launch the Internet Big Bang.
First, Gray wrote, produced and uploaded the very first song to the internet appropriately titled Internet Killed The Video Star, a song he composed in the MIDI format. He also modified the computer code for MIDI by writing new blocks of code that would allow the MIDI file extension to be compatible with the Internet and file transfer protocol (FTP) softwares. The computer code Gray wrote was more compact and portable, which means that his version of the MIDI file extension worked more easily across various computers. This was a major breakthrough, especially considering that there were several versions of MIDI by the late 1980s and, by the very nature of some of their proprietary protocols, not every MIDI version worked on every machine.
Second, Gray also invented the world’s very first internet bot, inkling –a crawler bot imbued with artificial intelligence. Inkling was tasked with roaming the internet and notifying people that the first song ever uploaded on the internet was now available for download and reported the statistics of actual downloads back to Gray. Today, internet bot activities make up as much as 75% of all internet activities and are more responsible for the rapid growth and expansion of the internet than any other piece of technology.
Third, the voicemail icon is the perfect example of beauty and functionality wrapped in simplicity. Gray designed the voicemail icon to evoke the reel to reel recording studio machine tape look. It can also be construed to represent the cassette tape look, which was still a very popular music format in the late 1980s. The voicemail icon eventually made its way off the internet and Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short, and found a new and permanent home on all 15 billion mobile phones and counting.
Using FIDONET, a free software for disseminating information across the internet, Gray released the song, the inkling crawler bot and the voicemail icon simultaneously that resulted in what technology historians now call the Internet Big Bang. It was a miracle year for Gray, and at that instant, on august 8, 1988, he transformed the internet from a staid graveyard for military and academic research into a digital sandbox for the world to play in.
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