HyperText Computer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The HyperText Computer (HTC) is proposed as a model computer. Built on the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), the HTC is a general purpose computer. In its basic instruction set, every operator is implemented by a HTTP request and every operand is a URL referring to a document. The HTC is a foundational model for distributed computing.
Technologies like AJAX at the presentation level and iSCSI at the transport level are so undermining the Fallacies of Distributed Computing that inter and intra-computer communications not carried over IP are looking like special case optimizations. As noted by Cisco's Giancarlo, IP networking is rivaling computer backplane speeds leading him to observe that "It’s time to move the backplane on to the network and redesign the computer".
The HTC is a redesign of the computer. The transition from computers being connected by networks to the network as a computer has been anticipated for some time. The HTC is a model of a computer built from the ground up containing no implicit information about locality or technology.
Of course, implementation of this model will require optimisation of interconnections. A naive implementation of a HTC would have it spending 99.999% of its time in network routines fetching every operand and operator. Without affecting the programmer's view of the HTC one may be built as a Virtual Machine (VM) interpreting out the network overheads at run time. Programs written for this HTC would also run without change on a combination of HTCs distributed on 5 continents.
Computers of the future may contain just enough processing power to run an instance of a user agent, often a web browser. Any additional processing power or storage available locally will be presented in the same way as remote processing and storage -- as the ability to fulfill HTTP requests. However, unplugging the local computing resources, does not impact the user's or the programmer's view in any way. In this case, other issues such as intellectual property will dominate decisions as to where and how processing is done.
