Text of the poster : I was looking for signs, documents or clues of any awareness that the pioneers of Internet and the Web may have had on the considerable electrical energy that these networks consume today. Did Paul Baran, Douglas Engelbart, J.C.R. Licklider, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners-Lee or any other people doubt that the giants of the data processing industry would become such an energy guzzler? For many Internet seems to be liberated from the laws of physics but the increasing need in computing power, air conditioning and other factors have put an end to this illusion. A few months ago, Jérôme Fénoglio wrote in Le Monde:

"They will be the industrial zones of the 21st century, without workers and connected by optical fibres. They are just beginning to spread near to large hydro-power dams in the north east of the United States. Soon, they could surround the nuclear power stations under construction in emerging countries. Over thousands of hectares, these complexes will concentrate the power of the new dominant industry: on-line data processing. In their concrete blocks, sealed against the curiosity of the outside world, the conglomerates of the triumphant Web, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Ask.com will cram in tens of thousands of servers capable of memorising billions of emails, texts, films and musics and find them in a wink [...] Between 2000 and 2005, the consumption of data processing centres has doubled reaching 45 billion kilowatthours, that is a yearly total of 7.2 billion dollars on a planetary scale."

We can evaluate the electricity consumed by this new industrial sector in kilowatthours. We can also weigh the electrons in movement generated by Internet as the American scientist Russel Seitz did in 2007. From the total consumption of servers worldwide, he reasoned as follows:

"As logic gates operate with around 3 volts, an ampere is equal to 10^18 electrons per second and that an average processor runs at one Gigahertz, an accurate calculation shows that Internet as a whole is made up of around 50 grams of electrons in movement."

A sheet of 50 g paper measuring 1 square metre weights the same as Internet.

Amusingly, the WWW (World Wide Web) was invented in a fundamental physics research institute, the CERN (European organisation for nuclear research) by Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau in 1991. Thanks to its graphic interface, the Web has considerably made Internet popular. In line with the deployment of general public data processing and the PC (Personal Computer), the Web has in a way brought Internet to its current electrical consumption level. I spent several evenings reading the history of the Web on the CERN site. We can see screen captures of the first versions of the Web on Tim Berners-Lee's computer then equipped with the NeXTStep operating system. At http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html, we can see the first web browser. At the origin of the project, the WorldWideWeb was to be rewritable as are Wikis and other recent Web 2.0 interfaces but this option was abandoned as it would have run only on the NeXTStep operating system.

If you look on the bottom right of this screen capture dated 1993, you can see an icon representing the recycling symbol. It makes me think of the Moebius ring with arrows. This logo was created in 1970 by a 23-year old student called Gary Dean Anderson for a national competition financed by The Container Corporation of America (company specialised in packaging and paper). When I saw this icon, I first of all asked myself what it was doing on a computer... What could it mean, outside of the packaging context? After some searching on the NeXTStep operating system, I learnt that it was in fact the Recycle icon, that is the forerunner of the waste basket!

NeXTStep is an operating system of the NeXT Computer Inc. company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he left Apple. The company was finally sold 10 years later by him in 1996 and supplied many elements of the Apple Mac OS X version (Dock especially). In the meantime, the recycling icon was replaced by a much more commonplace waste basket. This, placed at the end of the read space, on the bottom right of the screen, provides a basis for examining the ins and outs of data processing. Passing from the idea of recycling data to the idea of simply throwing them in the waste basket is somewhat of a disenchantment.
Etienne Cliquet, 2007