The Information Superhighway. The Internet. Cyberspace. The Infobahn. The World-Wide Web.
You've heard the terms; you've heard the hype. You've heard the promises of 500-channel interactive television and of computer networks that will change the way we live our lives. But when all is said and done, you've probably heard very little in the way of substantive information. Do you really have the slightest idea what it all means? If you're like many people, the answer is most likely a resounding "no". And that's unfortunate, because you have -- quite literally at your fingertips -- the most versatile informational, educational, and recreational resource ever devised. Forget, for a moment, all the media hype and all the empty promises. I can assure you, as someone who has been hitchhiking on it for years, that the Information Superhighway isn't some "pie in the sky" dream. It isn't the future; it's the present. It's here, and it's now.
Simply put, the Internet is a vast network of computer networks, through which users of any given computer system can access thousands of other computer systems. Why a "network of networks?" It's simple. When you connect two or more computers, you create a network. Connecting two or more networks creates an "inter-network," or internet. The Internet (with a capital I) is simply the largest example of such a system. It connects some 50,000 independent computer networks, allowing people all over the world to communicate with each other and to exchange information almost instantaneously.
The Internet's direct precursor, ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Administration Network), was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the United States Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area networking. From the beginning, though, the use of the network for peaceful scientific research and communication overshadowed its potential military uses. By the early 1980s, it had escaped the control of the Pentagon, as more and more independent networks -- including some outside of the United States -- became interconnected through it.
In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) established a national network based on ARPA protocols to connect five supercomputer hubs with a high-speed network backbone using commercial phone lines. Regional, local and campus networks could easily connect via the closest hub. The NSFnet brought computer networking to a much larger science research community, and in the first year after its creation, the number of networked host computers on the Internet grew from 5,000 to nearly 30,000. Eventually, the NSFnet superseded ARPANet as the framework of the Internet. ARPANet was officially decommissioned in 1990.
Meanwhile, a variety of commercial service providers (CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy and others) began to introduce the general public to the idea of computer networking and eventually to the Internet itself. Though the growth of the commercial networks was originally slow, today, approximately half of the networks comprising the Internet are commercial in nature, and commerce is its fastest growing use.
There are now over 40,000 registered computer networks on the Internet, containing over six million host computers and an estimated 25-40 million users in more than 150 countries. Over a third of the households in the United States have at least one computer, and nearly one million new users come online each month. In 1995, for the first time, the volume of e-mail sent and received in the United States surpassed that of normal mail. In that same year, PCs outsold TVs, and there was more data traffic over the Internet than voice traffic over phone lines. The growth of the Internet, especially within the past few years, has been explosive, and it shows little sign of slowing.
What Good Is The Internet?
Although many people find the analogy rather annoying, in part because it is so overused, the comparison of the Internet to an "Information Superhighway" is actually rather apt. It is important to realize that the Internet is not a destination; rather, it is the pathway which connects thousands of potential destinations. Thus, when people ask "What is the Internet?" what they usually really want to know is, "Where does the Highway lead?"
The truth is, when you connect to the Internet, you gain access to a collection of sites and services which, initially, can be quite overwhelming. Even the most basic of accounts will usually offer e-mail, access to Usenet groups, and FTP capability. Making sense of all the available options can sometimes be a bit difficult.
Of course, the most common and basic use of the Internet is the exchange of e-mail (electronic mail) messages. For all its apparent mundanity, e-mail is an incredibly powerful and revolutionary result of the formation of the Internet, which allows virtually instantaneous communication with people anywhere in the world. It is both faster and cheaper than conventional postal ("snail") mail, and as we already noted, its use has already surpassed that of conventional mail.
Perhaps the best known of the actual "destinations" on the Information Superhighway are the Usenet groups: over 10,000 discussion groups devoted to every conceivable topic, from Rush Limbaugh to particle physics, from vegetarian cooking to hang gliding, from astronomy to role-playing games, from home gardening to computer programming, from international politics to the nocturnal habits of the ring-tailed lemur. If you want answers to questions, or just want to find people with whom to correspond about your particular interests, you'll probably find them here. But be forewarned: the information can sometimes be rather deeply buried.
Usenet newsgroups, like the Internet itself, are ultimately anarchic. They lack any central authority, and are distributed, by design, in an incredibly chaotic manner. The messages posted reside not on any particular computer, but on every participating computer. Anyone can participate in the discussions, regardless of whether they actually have anything worthwhile to contribute. The resulting "signal-to-noise ratio" is sometimes abysmal. Perhaps the best description of Usenet comes from Professor Eugene Spafford at Purdue University, one of its founders. "Usenet," he said, "is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
Similar to the Usenet groups, but catering to those who prefer their conversations to occur in real time, are the "chat rooms" available through IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Like Usenet groups, these "rooms" can provide access to others who share your interests, whatever they might be; also like Usenet groups, though, they are often of questionable value, and can become incredible "time sinks" if you're not careful. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) also allow users to interact in real time, but with an emphasis on role-playing rather than on conversation. Even more than Usenet or IRC, they are quite notorious as "time sinks."
For those of a more pragmatic bent, there is a great deal of software and a wide variety of information readily available via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), a special method of logging in to another computer system anywhere in the world and downloading information to your own computer. You can find just about anything in this manner, from arcade games to NASA images, from utility software to David Letterman's latest jokes, from today's news to electronic manuscripts to the latest DNA sequences from the Human Genome Database.
Of course, with so much information available, the question naturally arises of how to deal with it efficiently. After all, when you have easy access to dozens or even hundreds of software and information archives, knowing where to look to find the particular file you're seeking isn't always easy.
Until recently, the best known tool for navigating the Internet was Gopher. It was introduced in 1991, and is still quite popular. A gopher system is basically a hierarchy of menus which allow you to search out the information you need by following an "idea path" which leads to it, starting with a broad category and narrowing the focus as you proceed. It's a bit like climbing a tree, following progressively smaller limbs, until you finally end up at the precise twig for which you were looking. Of course, the main disadvantage of a gopher system is that to get from one "twig" to another, you often have to go all the way back up the branch you're on and down another one.
The World-Wide Web is a newer and much more versatile tool for navigating the Internet. (Yes, despite the imagery conjured by the name "World-Wide Web" and the popular confusion of the terms, the Web and the Internet are two different things. Where the Internet is the network, the Web is the newest method of utilizing the network.) It was originally created by researchers at CERN Laboratories in Geneva to provide an infrastructure through which particle physicists throughout Europe could share information. Since those researchers were located in various organizations and used a wide variety of computer systems and applications software, one of the goals of the Web's designers was "universal readership." From the beginning, Web browsers and documents were designed to be platform-independent, meaning that anyone could access any Web document, no matter what sort of computer they were using or what sort of computer stored the document.
In part as a result of this unprecedented universal applicability, like the Internet itself, the Web quickly expanded far beyond its original conception. With the introduction of the Mosaic Web browser to the general public in 1994, its popularity began to grow exponentially.
The Web is fundamentally different from Gopher and from other similar systems for two main reasons. First, it is designed around the idea of "hypertext." Web documents (usually referred to as "pages") can include direct links to other documents. In other words, to extend the tree analogy we used earlier, to get from one twig to another, you just jump. It's that simple. You might be reading an article about penguins, for example, and see a mention of icebergs. Select that link, and you might end up reading about glacier formation. Selecting another reference in that article might take you to a history of the Ice Ages, and from there, you might find links to human prehistory or cosmology. In short, everything connects to everything else.
The ease with which Web pages can be established and the ease with which they can be linked together has produced a profound change in the "appearance" of the Internet. Whereas only a few years ago, the typical online information source might have presented itself merely as a "raw" directory listing, today, that information source is likely to be full of descriptive explanations and interactive help features.
This, of course, brings up the second, and perhaps more important, difference between the Web and other Internet utilities. Browsing the World-Wide Web is easy and fun. Web documents can include not just text, but images, sound and even video. And unlike many of those other tools, Web browsers don't require that the user know how everything works. You just "point and click." If you want specific information, it's relatively easy to find, as there are many indexes and directories of Web sites freely available. And if you just want to "see what's out there," the world is at your command.
The Web has become so popular that today, over half of the people who access the Internet regularly do so through the World-Wide Web. (Part of the reason for this, no doubt, is the fact that most Web browsers incorporate within themselves many of the older Internet tools, such as FTP and Gopher, allowing them to be accessed through the same simple interface.) The number of Web sites has grown from about 600 in June of 1994 to well over 50,000 today, and it has been estimated that by the end of 1996, there will be over 500,000 Web sites online.
How Do You Connect?
In order to access the Internet, you must have an account on a "host" computer through which you can connect to it. There are a wide variety of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and accounts available. How you choose to connect will depend to a great extent upon your specific needs and resources.
Perhaps the simplest method of accessing the Internet is to subscribe to one of the major national online service providers, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or America Online. They generally offer Internet access as well as access to various service-specific "extras" (software libraries, discussion groups and such). And since they provide you with their own proprietary connection software, getting set up is usually very easy.
The national ISPs can become quite expensive, though, as they charge by the hour for basic online time and often charge additional fees for the use of their specialized services. As a result, if your funds are limited, they are probably not your best bet. An additional problem which has emerged recently, in particular with regard to AOL, involves their users' ability to access the Internet quickly and easily. Since their proprietary networks connect to the Internet through only a relative handful of lines, "bottlenecks" often form when many users are active on those lines, resulting in very long delays for information retrieval.
If you want greater flexibility and a lower price, you can open an account with a direct dial-up service provider. You will probably find that you have several to choose from, no matter where you live. On the down side, such accounts usually demand that you be a bit more familiar with the specifics of the software you're using than do the national ISPs; however, on the up side, one of the advantages of such an account is that you are usually working with a local company, and technical support is more readily available. As well, the smaller ISPs usually feature a "flat rate" for effectively unlimited monthly Internet access as opposed to the per-hour charges of the national ISPs, and so in the long run are much less expensive.
Of course, the distinction between "big" and "small" ISPs isn't as clear-cut today as it was even as little as a year ago. With the rise in the popularity of the Web, a number of companies have emerged which offer to a national client base the sort of direct connections formerly offered only by local service providers. Even AT&T recently announced that it is beginning to offer Internet connectivity to its customers. The Internet has become big business, and with it, so has the providing of online access.
In short, when you decide to connect to the Internet, you will probably find yourself with a wide variety of options. There is no "hard and fast" rule for selecting the best service provider. Some of the factors you should consider in making your selection are cost, availability of technical support, system "uptime" and accessibility (if the provider has only a hundred incoming lines and over a thousand customers, it's obviously going to be difficult to get anything from them other than a busy signal), and the speed of their connections to the Internet. If at all possible, you should speak with some of their customers. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find a provider who meets your specific needs.
If you choose to set up an account with a direct dial-up service provider, you will also have to select what sort of account you wish to open. This isn't as intimidating as it might sound, as you essentially have only two options.
The least expensive ISP accounts are "shell" accounts. These are the sort of UNIX-based accounts offered without charge, for example, by most universities to their faculty members and students. They can be accessed with standard telecommunications software programs, such as ProComm (IBM) or Z-Term (Macintosh). Virtually all such accounts offer e-mail and FTP capability; most also offer access to at least a limited selection of Usenet groups. Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of shell accounts is that they offer only a text-based interface. Even if access to the World-Wide Web is available, it is limited by the capabilities of Lynx, the standard UNIX Web browser. Information can certainly be obtained, but the graphics and other niceties which can make the Web so much fun are conspicuously absent.
Your other option in gaining direct access to the Internet is to open a SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) or PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) account. These accounts allow you to create temporary TCP/IP connections with your host, effectively allowing your computer to "join" the Internet. Instead of merely connecting to it, you literally (albeit temporarily) become part of it. This allows you to run Web browsers or other Internet utility software directly on your own computer, and permits you the greatest possible degree of flexibility in deciding exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it. Of course, it naturally demands that you have at least a passing familiarity with how everything actually works. It also demands, not incidentally, that you have a reasonably fast computer and modem. (A 386 computer or equivalent is generally considered the minimum requirement; a Pentium- or PowerPC-based machine is vastly preferable. And anything less than a 14.4 Kbps modem can be intolerably slow when loading heavily-graphic Web pages.)
What does it mean to say that these accounts allow you to create TCP/IP connections? TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the set of protocols which define how computers communicate with each other on the Internet. SLIP and PPP accounts are basically two variations on the same theme; either will allow you to create a TCP/IP connection over standard telephone lines. By establishing a SLIP or PPP connection with your host computer, you allow your own computer to communicate directly with any other computer on the Internet. This sort of connection differs from a shell account primarily in that you are able to run programs of your own choosing on your own computer. With a shell account, your computer is merely acting as a remote terminal for your host; the programs you use are run on the host machine, and you can pretty much do only one thing at a time. (If you're downloading a file, for example, you can't also be reading messages.) TCP/IP software, on the other hand, establishes and maintains a connection through which other programs can communicate. The primary advantages of this arrangement are twofold: first, you can run whatever programs you choose, rather than just the ones to which your host system provides you access; second, you're not really limited in how much you can be doing at once, save by the speed and memory limitations of your computer and modem, as it's possible for several different programs to simultaneously utilize the connection.
To establish the connection, your specific software requirements will, obviously, depend upon your equipment. If you're using a Macintosh, you will need either MacTCP, an extension which comes packaged with System 7.5, or the TCP/IP extension, which is a part of Apple's new Open Transport system. You'll also need an application program to actually establish a SLIP or PPP connection. One of the most popular shareware programs for that purpose is known as FreePPP. If you're using an IBM, you'll simply need one version or another of a commercial program called Winsock, which now comes packaged with Windows 95.
Of course, either way, you'll also need the actual utility programs which use the connection once you've established it. There are quite a few such programs available, either as shareware or commercially. To a large extent, which programs you use will depend upon what, precisely, you want to do and how, precisely, you want to do it. Two especially popular and useful programs, available for both IBM and Macintosh systems, are Eudora and Netscape. Eudora is probably the best known and most widely used mail reader. It does pretty much everything you'd want a mail reader to do, and does it quite well. Similarly, Netscape is the most popular Web browser by far. Like Eudora, it's available as shareware. While there are quite a few other browsers available, Netscape is one of the easiest to find and one of the easiest to use. Besides, since so many Web pages now are "Netscape enhanced," Netscape is the browser that's most likely to actually let you see them the way they were intended to look by their creators.
More information, and any assistance you require in getting things set up, should be available from the technical support staff of your ISP.
Information, education or recreation: whatever you want, the odds are good that it's available on the Internet. Do you need to find background information for a research project? Are you looking for people with whom to trade baseball cards? Do you want to know more about your favorite television show? It's all right there at your fingertips.