The Internet and other information services carried on telephone networks suggest some aspects of how the information highway will operate. When I send you a message, it is transmitted by phone line from my computer to the server that has my “mailbox,” and from there it passes directly or indirectly to whichever server stores your mailbox. When you connect to your server, via the telephone network or a corporate computer network, you are able to retrieve ("download") the contents of your mailbox, including my message. That’s how electronic mail works. You can type a message once and send it to one person or twenty-five, or post it on what is called a “bulletin board.”
Like its namesake, an electronic bulletin board is where messages are left for anyone to read. Public conversations result, as people respond to messages. These exchanges are usually asynchronous. Bulletin boards typically are organized by topics to serve specific communities of interest. This makes them effective ways to reach targeted groups. Commercial services offer bulletin boards for pilots, journalists, teachers, and much smaller communities. On the Internet, where the often unedited and unmoderated bulletin boards are called “usenet newsgroups,” there are thousands of communities devoted to topics as narrow as caffeine, Ronald Reagan, and neckties. You can download all the messages on a topic, or just recent messages, or all messages from a certain person, or those that respond to a particular other message, or that contain a specific word in their subject line, and so forth.
In addition to electronic mail and file exchange, the Internet supports “Web browsing,” one of its most popular applications. The “World Wide Web” (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) refers to those servers connected to the Internet that offer graphical pages of information. When you connect to one of those servers, a screen of information with a number of hyperlinks appears. When you activate a hyperlink by clicking on it with your mouse, you are taken to another page containing additional information and other hyperlinks. That page may be stored on the same server or any other server on the Internet.
The main page for a company or an individual is called the “home” page. If you create one, you register its electronic address, then Internet users can find you by typing in the address. In advertisements today we are starting to see home page citations as part of the address information. The software to set up a Web server is very cheap and available for almost all computers. The software to browse the Web is also available for all machines, generally for free. You can Web browse using the CD that comes with this book. In the future, operating systems will integrate Internet browsing.
The ease with which companies and individuals can publish information on the Internet is changing the whole idea of what it means to “publish.” The Internet has, on its own, established itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users so that it is benefiting from positive feedback: the more subscribers it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more subscribers it gets.
The Internet’s unique position arises from a number of elements. The TCP/IP protocols that define its transport level support distributed computing and also scale incredibly well. The protocols that define Web browsing are extremely simple and have allowed servers to handle immense amounts of traffic reasonably well. Many of the predictions about interactive books and hyperlinks—made decades ago by pioneers like Ted Nelson—are coming true on the Web.
Today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway. An analogy is the Oregon Trail. Between 1841 and the early 1860s, more than 300,000 hardy souls rode wagon trains out of Independence, Missouri, for a dangerous 2,000-mile journey across the wilderness to the Oregon Territories or the gold fields of California. An estimated 20,000 succumbed to marauders, cholera, starvation, or exposure. Their route was named the Oregon Trail. You could easily say the Oregon Trail was the start of today’s highway system. It crossed many boundaries and provided two-way traffic to travelers in wheeled vehicles. The modern path of Interstate 84 and several other highways follows the Oregon Trail for much of its length. However, many conclusions drawn from descriptions of the Oregon Trail would be misleading if applied to the future system. Cholera and starvation aren’t a problem on Interstate 84. Tailgating and drunk drivers weren’t much of a hazard for the wagon trains.
The trail blazed by the Internet will direct many elements of the highway. The Internet is a wonderful, critical development and a very clear element of the final system, but it will change significantly in the years ahead. The current Internet lacks security and needs a billing system. Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the information highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today.
In fact, the Internet of today is not the Internet of even a short time ago. The pace of its evolution is so rapid that a description of the Internet as it existed a year or even six months ago might be seriously out-of-date. This adds to the confusion. It is very hard to stay up-to-date with something so dynamic. Many companies, including Microsoft, are working together to define standards in order to extend the Internet and overcome its limitations.
Because the Internet originated as a computer-science proiect rather than a communications utility, it has always been a magnet for hackers—programmers who turn their talents toward mischief or malice by breaking into the computer systems of others.
On November 2, 1988, thousands of computers connected to the network began to slow down. Many eventually ground to a temporary halt. No data were destroyed, but millions of dollars of computing time were lost as computer system administrators fought to regain control of their machines. Much of the public may have heard of the Internet for the first time when this story was widely covered. The cause turned out to be a mischievous computer program, called a “worm,” that was spreading from one computer to another on the network, replicating as it went. (It was designated a worm rather than a virus because it didn’t infect other programs.) It used an unnoticed “back door” in the systems’ software to access directly the memory of the computers it was attacking. There it hid itself and passed around misleading information that made it harder to detect and counteract. Within a few days The New York Times identified the hacker as Robert Morris, Jr., a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at Cornell University. Morris later testified that he had designed and then unleashed the worm to see how many computers it would reach, but a mistake in his programming caused the worm to replicate far faster than he had expected. Morris was convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal offense. He was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $10,000, and 400 hours of community service.
There have been occasional breakdowns and security problems, but not many, and the Internet has become a reasonably reliable communications channel for millions of people. It provides worldwide connections between servers, facilitating the exchange of electronic mail, bulletin board items, and other data. The exchanges range from short messages of a few dozen characters to multimillion-byte transfers of photographs, software, and other kinds of data. It costs no more to request data from a server that is a mile away than from one that is thousands of miles distant.
Already the Internet’s pricing model has changed the notion that communication has to be paid for by time and distance. The same thing happened with computing. If you couldn’t afford a big computer you used to pay for computer time by the hour. PCs changed that.