How is grid computing today similar to the Internet in the early nineties?
Ian Foster: In the early nineties, the Internet made a transition from being something of utility, and really only known to people in academia, to something that was of broad industrial relevance with the emergence of the Mosaic web browser and Netscape. Grid computing is making a similar transition at the moment, from academia to industry. Just in the last two years or so weve seen major corporations, like IBM, Sun, and HP, deploying grid products. JL: What is the history of distributed computing? IF: Grid computing is about the large-scale integration of computing systems to enable new classes of applications to provide on-demand access to computing and information. And its certainly not a new idea. Back in 1969, when the very first node of the (then) ARPANET, which became the Internet, was deployed at UCLA in Los Angeles, a press release went out touting the wonderful things that were going to happen once the Internet was ubiquitous. It was quite an ambitious and visionary view of t
