The World Is Flat: Flatteners 1 & 2 questions

a. "More and more economies would be governed from the ground up, by the interests, demands, and aspirations of the people, rather than from the top down, by the interests of some narrow ruling clique." "The Berlin Wall was blocking our sight--our ability to think about the world as a single market, a single ecosystem, and a single community." "When an economic or technological standard emerged and proved itself on the world stage, it was much more quickly adopted after the wall was out of the way."

b. There was no "limit on the amount of info that any single individual could amass, author, manipulate, and diffuse." "Ordinary people could get the benefit of computing without being programmers."

c. We can communicate with our PC and we can use our PC to communicate with others.

d. Berners-Lee developed the concept of the World Wide Web. He created the first website, which explained how the World Wide Web worked, how one could own a browser, and how to go about setting up a web server. He also popularized HTML and came up with URL's and HTTP.

e. Netscape not only brought the Internet alive but also made the Internet accessible to everyone. It was the first web browser.

f. Everyone wanted things to be digitized--the process by which words, music, data, films, files, and pictures are turned into bits and bytes that can be manipulated on a computer screen, stored on a microprocessor, or transmitted over satellites and fiber-optic lines. Investors realized that if everything was going to be digitized, the demand for Web service companies and the demand for fiber-optic cables to handle the digitized stuff was going to be limitless.