Google Greets New Year with Easter Egg and Special Logo

January 1st was the day of resolutions for many, many people. Google decided to look back to the past of the Internet and acknowledge its importance. And I wonder how could it not, it's about the TCP/IP turning 25, it's a quarter century from the protocol's switching on and never going off again.

Wikipedia and more exactly the page on Internet protocol suite page, that clicking on the doodle leads to, says that it "is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet and most commercial networks run. It has also been referred to as the TCP/IP protocol suite, which is named after two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were also the first two networking protocols defined."

Well, that means that a birthday party was in order and I got no invitation… shame on the Internet! Shame on all of it!

Now on, my valiant Internet historians, on to the Easter Egg that had me stop and gaze in wonder. As you can see from the screenshot, there are lots of dots under the Google special logo. Connect the dots and what do you get? (It might take a while to accommodate your eyes or you could go ahead and cheat and get a magnifying lens for the job) SYN SYN/ ACK ACK - that's a command line that's part of TCP and is known as the "Three way handshake" and what it does is establish a connection. The client sends a SYN (short from synchronize) and the server replies with a SYN and sends back to the client an ACK (acknowledgement) for it to respond with an ACK. Now, I must confess that I didn't want to kill my eyes with the dots, so I peaked over in others' notebooks. Philipp Lenssen "helped" me out on this one. Shame on me! Shame on all of me!