13 November 1998

The Rise of the Internet from nowhere 20 years ago to its state today is one of the more fascinating events to happen in my memory. This is not said to belittle the many other momentous things that have happened in this time span. Certainly many other significant events have happened - wars fought, diseases conquered (actually obliterated in the case of Smallpox), technologies discovered (atomic fission and fusion and superconductivity to name a few), social progress, and so forth.

The Internet, however, is interesting in at least 2 different ways. First, however, I probably should describe its present state in case it has changed drastically by the time you read this. For that matter, I suppose even the name may have been lost. The Internet is a loose connection of computers held together by conventions and practices that allows every individual computer owner to connect to every other owner who is also connected and to exchange information in several different ways. End users like me have a computer and a communication circuit to our home or business. We pay a small monthly fee to a business called an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP assigns us an address. Whenever we want to use the internet we go to our computer and use the software on it to connect to some other computer. We need to know the address of that computer. How we find that address varies with what we are trying to do. Some of the addresses are given to us when we contract with our ISP. Others services we might want to access are known by names which the computer can translate to addresses. For example, it is common now for businesses to publish these names for the use of their customers.

Our ISP in turn will contract with other ISP's that are in the business of providing connectivity service to smaller ISP's. There are a very few high level ISP's who have very fast data circuits connection one another. All interested parties have joined committees who's purpose is to hash out the standards necessary for the ISP's and the end users to talk to one another using several different metaphors. For the most part, these metaphors not surprisingly resemble metaphors used in the past for paper information systems.

A prime example is email. The entire structure of current email systems intends to mimic the sending of a written piece of paper through the postal system. The most outstanding example of this is the abbreviation used to indicate that additional parties are to be sent a copy of the email: "cc". This abbreviation originally meant "Carbon Copy". At one time, machines that made copies of pages did no0t exist. When a person wanted to send the same letter to more than one person he would use three pieces of paper. The first and third were normal pages. The second was coated on the back side with a layer of carbon black. When one wrote or typed on the first sheet, the pressure made the carbon come off the second sheet onto the third. This became the "Carbon Copy". It was common practice to indicate on a piece of mail who got copies, so these names would be listed with the abbreviation "cc". Email systems use the same abbreviation even though there is likely never any carbon involved.

So an interesting aspect of the Internet is that nobody owns or controls it. It is simply a voluntary association of individuals working together for their common good. This lack of centralized authority is due to the genesis of the Internet. The research that lead to the creation of the Internet was a military project. Its original goal was to develop a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack. The only way they saw to do this was to design the network so that it had no central control point. Originally it was only open to "non-profit" organizations and the military. As these people used the system, however, they began to realize the kinds of power it had and they wanted to use it in their personal lives as well as in their work. Eventually the government dropped their funding for the project, but not before it had acquired enough inertia to continue on its own.

At about the same time, personal computers were going through a very dramatic development process. They went from processing sixteen bits in parallel at eight million operations per second to processing thirty-two bits in parallel at three hundred million operations per second. Random access memory (RAM) went from sixty-four thousand bytes (eight bit characters) to sixty-four million bytes. Hard disc drives went from ten million bytes to ten billion bytes. All of this happened in about fifteen to twenty years. The price of a system stayed remarkably constant at under two thousand dollars for a high-end system at any given point. This is roughly one to two months wages for a minimum wage job. Software also went through similarly remarkable developments. At the beginning we had text oriented systems that routinely displayed only twenty-four lines by eighty characters. Now we have machines that use graphical user interfaces (GUI) and can usually display many more characters when they are showing text.

A lack of an overall controller for the Internet is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it means that anybody who has a hot new idea is free to try it out and see if it works. On the other hand, it means that the overall system is less reliable than if a government regulated monopoly were running it. The telephone system, our current analog voice network, is much more reliable than the Internet. People put up with this lack of reliability for two reasons - first because they know that it is a side effect of the freedom that has allowed the Internet to evolve so quickly into such a powerful tool, and second because they do not see it as a critical resource. They use the telephone for emergency or critical communications. They use the Internet for communication that is for entertainment or that is not time critical.

We perceive that we are at the dawning of the Information Age. In a sense, the Internet is a pinnacle of a sort of the evolution of the technology to date. What has happened is that people have come up with all kinds of mechanisms for making information accessible. One metaphor is a kind of a library. To have a simple name to use I will describe one such system, probably the best known today, called Yahoo! When you access the first page of the Yahoo! system you are presented with a screen that is rather like a menu. The choices are higher level topics like the higher level subject divisions in a library. Using a pointing device, you select a choice form this menu. You are then presented with another menu which breaks the first menu down further into smaller subjects. Eventually one finds a list of individual resources that provide information on the chosen topic.

Currently this information might consist of presentations of text, still pictures, moving pictures, sound files or any combination of these. It might also include screens that are interactive such as forms and shopping lists. At this point, both the Yahoo! menus and the pages it points to are built by a human.

Another metaphor is a text search engine. This is rather like looking in an index for the entire web except that one can combine terms together. For example, I might search Alta Vista, my favorite search engine, for a phrase like "+Carrick +genealogy". It would search through its indexes and show me a list of every web page that contained both of these words. I will then scroll through this list, reading the descriptions of the sites that Alta Vista has shown me, and trying to find ones that really pertain to my chosen subject. An interesting part is how Alta Vista builds its indexes.

When I create a web site I go to each of these "search engines" and tell that service the name of my web page. Some time later a program that is running at the search engine home office will go to my site and retrieve every page it can find there. It will scan each page and add entries to its indexes for my pages. It will ignore words like "it" that are too common to be useful in such search. This is an extremely powerful tool. About the only drawback is having to wade through much irrelevant material. With practice one gets better at making queries that are more exact.

I like search engines. You can find documents on literally any topic you can think up. Not too long ago I was wondering about an invention I had read about roughly 30 years ago. It was called a "rolagon." It was touted at the time as being a new basic machine on the order of the inclined plane or the screw. It allowed very low friction linear motion within a restricted range. I had not heard anything about it after that, however. I did a search and eventually found several documents about them. One set concerned the fact that these devices are used in automobiles today. The other discussed a more advanced development stemming from the rolagon. This development allowed very low friction rotary motion, a more powerful tool. I had not been able to find anything on this topic in the intervening years but found these references in seconds on the Internet through a search engine.

Yet another metaphor is called a "portal". This sort of site is rather like the front page of a newspaper. It will have titles of current topics that will take you to other pages that have been prepared with stories on the topic. Other smaller titles are also shown for topics that are covered every day such as weather, entertainment listings, etc. I find this metaphor less useful myself, but then I don't read the newspaper much either.

Not only is the Internet without a central authority, it also has some other interesting characteristics. First, on the Internet nobody can tell who you are. In that sense it is a great social leveling device. Anybody can write anything they like and can put it on the web. If I choose to be anonymous then I could be the Vice President or I could be a six year old kid. The VP probably does not write anonymously, but he could. Many sites are essentially anonymous. They are presented as being a site about the Bible, or whatever topic the author is interested in. Some sites are just vanity devices, of course, containing pictures of the family dog, stories about their vacation, etc. In this way the Internet has brought "power to the people". If I understand the tools I can find out a good deal about almost any topic that might interest me. Of course, I have to read carefully and suspiciously and be able to form my own opinions about the data.

The information I read on the Internet might all be lies. It might be fiction made up by some bored youth. Part of the information is also just plain trash. As you might imagine, with virtually no regulation except the sensitivity of the ISP's to the censure of their customers, some people put mindless drivel out there and some put material that anybody would agree is obscene. If the material is really outrageous, child pornography, for example, the federal government can arrest the offender on other grounds. It is illegal to take such pictures and it is illegal to use the telephone system to distribute them. The phone system is not a necessary for Internet use, but it is a typical means of connection.

critical mass of information

indexing is pathetic

lots of trash and abuse