In the 2002 film, The Time Machine, Professor Alexander Hartdegen (played by Guy Pearce) visited the New York Public Library after time traveling to the year 2030. There, he got introduced to a photonics-based AI named Vox (played by Mobile-native Orlando Jones). Vox was connected to "every database on the planet" and was able to retrieve any of it in a fraction of a second.
We’re not going to make you wait until 2030.
In case you’ve not figured it out yet, we don’t just do books at the Library.
It was about this time of year in 2010, late fall eight years ago when I started working at the Library. At that time, the LibraryNet was all copper — analog T1 lines (think: old-style phone-grade) from our branches, a MetroEthernet for our Internet connection, and all the cabling within our Downtown Branch’s Computer Room were typically 100 megabit per second (Mbps) Ethernet links. Improving this infrastructure was quickly identified as one of my primary goals to improve service in the Library.
Here’s that story.
