Petrie: So you treat disconnects as a normal event?
Kleinrock: That's right. And more than that. I am interested in all the middleware to support that and give you the right environment and give you the transparent architecture. The first Nomadix product is rather interesting. You know those trade-show badges, the little plastic card with a magnetic stripe? You go to an exhibit and you swipe the card at the exhibitor booth — and the exhibitors are complaining like hell because they're only getting your name and company. So you get more sophisticated cards; there's all kinds of things like that.
We have a new device which replaces the swipe card type of technology with a floppy disk and we call it the IDisk. Your name and other identification information is stored on the floppy when you register. When you go to a booth and insert your floppy disk into the exhibitor's laptop, he gets your information and gives you back information-either what he wanted to give you or what you select from a menu. It's right in his laptop, and it's a floppy disk which is cheap. You go from exhibitor to exhibitor. And what are you doing? First of all, you're going to take the trade show home on a disk-the brochures they give you and so on stored electronically on your disk. Secondly, we have been forming a Web page on your disk in the process. This stuff is in HTML format; you've got graphics on the disk and all of that. You go on the airplane and use Netscape, or any other browser, to navigate through all the information you have collected.. Now none of the links are hot because you're not connected. If you try to click on an exhibitor's logo, it'll indicate that you can't connect. But if you are online, then you're linked. You can go right to any exhibitor's page.
Petrie: But the local internal links are alive?
Kleinrock: Absolutely, and that's one of its really attractive features. We refer to the page on your disk as the MobileWeb. So that's our product. We've used it, for example, at the ATM Year 96 conference. It was a big hit. And it's in the process of rolling out as we speak.
Petrie: Yeah. It's like replacing key punches, isn't it? Matter of fact, IBM got rich doing that.
Kleinrock: Yes. The nice thing is that we can interoperate with any of the existing registration systems that produce magnetic stripe badges or any machine-readable badges. Either at the registration site, you can swipe your badge and out comes our floppy disk, or you could do swipe it at an exhibitor station and get your floppy disk there. And then when you go the next booth, you've got it.
Petrie: That's nice. Very nice.
Kleinrock: That's a high-impact product. It's just one out of many products and services that we are developing, products we have that I can't even describe to you. Some of them are dynamite products. The IDisk and the MobileWeb are examples of nomadicity where you carry your data around instead of carrying your machinery around.
Petrie: As a parting note, and an appropriate one, what I think you're saying to the readers is that one way or another, things are gonna get a lot better in the next few years.
Kleinrock: And a lot more exciting.
For more information on the origin of the Internet, see http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/.