by Judith Gelernter
(Director of the Library and Curator of Special Collections for the Union Club of the City of New York).
Taken from: Information Outlook, Vol 5, No. 6, June 2001.
With the span of actual Internet years between yesterday and today under a decade, tomorrow's virtual reality very soon may become actuality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate some current ideas that are dictating directions in online evolution. In contradistinction to the hordes of Internet histories that interleave name, date, place and concept, this brief article attempts to organize time and technical invention around a single concept that comes from the Internet itself. The Internet, by definition, is a network of interconnected computers, and that network is composed of communication channels of varying bandwidth. The greater the bandwidth of a connection, the greater the amount of data that can travel along that line each second, and the faster the communication potential between the computers it connects. Because the drive for faster communication is among those factors that spur the evolution of Internet technology, the bandwidth of the line makes a logical point of reference in reviewing Internet growth.
Yesterday
Planning for the Internet precursor ARPANET began in the 1950s under the aegis of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. The Federal Government required reliable communication channels between the nodes of the proposed network because dedicated telephone lines were undependable, and so the net was designed to create alternative communications pathways between source and destination nodes. Message data to be transmitted would be disassembled into packets of fixed size, and the individual packets could arbitrarily follow any one of several pathways to be reassemble coherently at the desired destination node. Initially, source and destination computers were in government facilities and major academic research centers. Most lines laid were of copper, which is expensive and used for telephone lines, although other options were available.
ARPANET in its infancy was a technology in search of a major application. E-mail, the first "killer app," became available in 1981 at colleges and universities via BITNET (Because It's Time Network). The TCP/IP protocol suite was adopted in 1983, and ARPANET was eventually supplanted by Internet in 1992. The hypertext-based World Wide Web became available in the early 1990s, and the phrase "surfing the Web" was coined by a librarian (!) in 1992. Web standards were and continue to be set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), established in 1994. The Mosaic browser, precursor to Netscape, was released a year earlier. By allowing Web pages to be displayed graphically, the browser brought the Web to life.
The Internet expanded exponentially through each of the last years of the century, spinning off Intranets and Extranets as it grew. These are enterprise-wide networks that use TCP/IP and hypertext transfer protocol (http), but remain private either wholly within a given company in the case of Intranets, or including the company's vendors in the case of Extranets. Our metaphorical yesterday ended at the turn of the millennium, when the Strategis Group research and consulting firm estimated that the U.S. online population had reached 101 million.
Today
The 21st century race for ever more bandwidth to satisfy the multi-media appetite spurred development of broadband technology, including high capacity cable, fiber optics and wireless services. Improvements in the traditional technologies have permitted faster communication over copper wire. ISDN and xDSL, for example, bypass the standard modem's job of translation from digital to analog and then back to digital, and instead allow digital data to travel in directly digital form. Copper lines with dedicated channels to the Internet such as T1 or T3 carrier lines provide even higher bandwidth, but expense prohibits their widespread use.
Internet access today is more easily available than ever before. Most libraries provide free Internet access, and for home users, it is not even necessary to own a computer. Internet appliances with keyboard, (touch) screen and/or mouse offer e-mail and Web access. Wireless Web service is available on some of the newest hand-held devices. A tv screen can become a monitor for Web tv, and many local cable companies can provide high bandwidth connections that are potentially much faster than standard telephone modem service. For those who can tolerate the intrusive advertising, Internet service providers such as juno.com offer a somewhat less reliable connection free-of-charge.
Such convenience makes the Internet an attractive tool for remote learning, and may even spark a sort of revolution in higher education. Adults who cannot afford the time or money to live on campus full-time in pursuit of a college degree may be able to achieve the desired result by earning course credits online. The fully accredited University of Phoenix, for example, now has a student body among the largest in the country. University of Phoenix Online students can matriculate, takes courses and graduate without ever seeing Arizona.
E-biz is flourishing, although a number of dot-coms became not-coms last year, losing the critical struggle for Internet name recognition. Fewer than half of the Web pages are indexed by search engines, and many of the surviving dot.coms now look to out-of-Web media such as television commercials, journals and billboards to make themselves known to Web-consumers. E-businesses aim to make their sites "sticky" by offering free e-mail, valuable information and attractive media-rich interfaces.
Tomorrow
It is easy to predict that the Web of tomorrow will support billions of users worldwide, and that new technologies will enable ever more sophisticated applications that will include higher quality audio and video. Assuming that the World Wide Web Consortium recommendation is followed, media-rich Web sites will be created using a combination of HTML and XML (extensible markup language). The Napster case outcome suggests that information, if it is to continue to flow freely, will not continue to be free to use. Even libraries, traditional champions of free access to information, may not be able to sustain the costs of digitizing documents and maintaining Web sites without sometimes charging for use of their materials. The net will also be more widely used for other applications; Telephony or Voice over Internet (VoIP), for example, should flourish once industry standards are set, because long distance call savings are potentially substantial.
The Internet is still a frontier. Among those involved in extending its boundaries are the federal government in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative, and over 180 American universities in a consortium called Internet2. NGI and Internet2 are parallel and complementary, although they intersect in some areas. The NGI Web site is not wholly current, so it might be better to consult the Internet2 site to glimpse the Internet of tomorrow. Internet2 activities are in the three main areas of developing a faster backbone, creating a more stable networking environment, and developing practical applications. Research is helped by members' access to the very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS).
Internet2 projects encompass many reaches of human endeavor. For instance, in the medical domain a fast network can transmit high resolution images such as x-rays, or allow the use of sophisticated microscopes or surgical instruments remotely. However, the Web site points out that many medical applications, even when feasible in terms of bandwidth, cannot be called upon for use in urgent patient care until the network is 100% reliable. The most exquisitely futuristic if not the most practical projects are in tele-immersion, defined as the creation of a virtual space in which individuals may collaborate as if they were in the same actual space. This 3-D environment requires high bandwidth and reliable networking, and is considered by Internet2 to be "an ideal driver" for Internet2 community research agendas. Presently, four groups on the East coast are working together to create a tele-cubicle, a kind of shared virtual office space. A video clip on the Web site (www.advanced.org/tele-immersion/news.html) offers a demonstration of tele-immersion in action.
Summary
The essence of the Internet is its interconnections. During the early years, economics dictated that these interconnections be of copper wire, with digital data translated into analog form via modem for transmission over telephone lines. Today the demand for the ever higher bandwidth necessary for multi-media applications speaks louder than the economics of the telephone line. Alternative services such as multi-channel and fiber optic cables and wireless are becoming prevalent, as are technologies such as ISDN and xDSL that allow data to travel in its native digital form. The vBNS allows organizations such as Internet2 to let both high quality images and imaginations fly, and makes possible new levels of cooperation between geographically remote collaborators.
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