Are you familiar with the Large Hadron Collider? I knew nothing about it until I read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. Then it started popping up in the news all the time, so it seemed. The LHC -- I don't know if that's its real abbreviation or not -- is a particle accelerator that was built and is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. (Side note: According to credible sources such as Dan Brown and Wikipedia, CERN invented the Internet. Not DARPA. Not Al Gore. CERN.)
Those who have followed the Collider's history are familiar with a recent shutdown that took it offline for several months. Within the past few weeks CERN brought it back online and has had great expectations of it. However, news got out today that, perhaps among other components, copper connectors will be responsible for the Large Hadron Collider going offline at the end of next year for what's likely to be a year's worth of repair.
I learned about this through Australian news agency The Age, which quoted a CERN scientist as saying, "We are pushing technologies towards their limits." It looks like the collider will run at half power between now and the end of next year when the repairs begin.
Now I'm not a gambling man, but I'd be willing to bet a dinner that the copper connectors that are the collider's weak links are not of the RJ-45 variety. So no snarky comments saying this wouldn't have happened if they'd used fiber - or anything like that.
I just couldn't resist passing this info along, as a high-profile example of the criticality of a "little thing" like a connector. Our industry lives and breathes the importance of high-technology systems' infrastructure components. Sometimes the rest of the world gets wind of that importance as well.
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1 comment:
#1. How about putting a date on your articles?
CERN did not create the Internet, but while at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee did develop the idea of hypertext, the basis of html and the World Wide Web.
The first vestiges of the Internet took root in 1969 under the DoD's ARPANET contract, and the more-familiar TCP/IP protocols were developed in the early 1970s.
From 1969 to 1973, Tim Berners-Lee was still in what we would call high school. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976. The Brit was never involved with the US Dod or ARPANET.
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