Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk[sic]. Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data. There'd been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendently incredible.
Islands in the Net Bruce Sterling, 1988
The vision in Bruce Sterling's superb book, written as science fiction and set in the year A.D. 2023, looks likely to materialize at least a couple of decades sooner. Multi-MIPS single-chip processors, voice- and pen-recognition technology, high-speed fiber-optic backbones, wireless networking, pervasive cellular-telephone access, satellite-based position determination, experiments with virtual reality, the decline of traditional literacy, and, of course, the Internet--all these factors and a host of others are rapidly converging to create a new way of life that even we computer geeks can barely imagine. And when this Brave New World arrives, the Internet or its successor will undoubtedly be the foundation.
The very name of the Internet carries with it a certain mystique and even, I might say, a certain dread among DOS and Mac users. Many historical factors contribute to this, not the least of which is the Internet's traditional BSD UNIX power base. Indispensable network utility programs such as ftp, telnet, and rn are all prime examples of the well-known UNIX tendencies toward counterintuitive command syntax and cryptic, case-sensitive switches. Another extremely important factor has been the chronic lack of well-organized, well-written documentation for the Internet at either the user or the technical level. Most Internet lore has been carried around in the head of networking gurus or stashed away in documentation files that were only accessible via--you guessed it--the Internet.
What is the Internet, anyway? The Internet is a network of networks, based on the TCP/IP protocol, composed largely of Sun and DEC VAX hosts interfaced to special-purpose message-processing computers, routers, and bridges. The Internet had its origins in packet-switching experiments financed by the Department of Defense, and its high-speed backbones are still heavily subsidized by the government, but there is no centralized administration except for the assignment of computer node or "host" identification numbers and names. The Internet is run by, and evolves through, an odd sort of participatory technocracy. Most important technological decisions are made by an inner cabal of network wizards and hackers that dates back nearly two decades, but its mandate is based on grass-roots support from the administrators and users of the participating networks and, of course, an impressive track record.
The Internet started with just a few computer hosts in the early '70s, reached 100 hosts in about 1980, 1000 hosts in 1984, 10,000 hosts in 1987, 100,000 hosts in 1989, and was nearing a million hosts at the end of 1992. It now reaches every corner of the globe, including the ex-Communist bloc. Of course, this kind of exponential growth can't continue forever, but it's reasonable to assume that the number of directly connected hosts will expand by at least another couple of orders of magnitude before the curve starts to flatten out. As it is, the Internet is already much more pervasive than most people realize. If you use a computer on a local area network in a large company, or you own a modem and subscribe to any of the popular online services, you very likely can reach the Internet, even if you aren't aware of it. For example, CompuServe, BIX, and MCI Mail all offer gateways to the Internet.
So assuming that the Internet is indeed at your disposal, what can you do with it? For a start, the Internet provides free, or nearly free (from the end user's point of view anyway), electronic mail to any user on any connected host--with, for the most part, astonishingly prompt and reliable service. Another popular service available via the Internet is the so-called USENET--somewhat analogous to a bulletin-board system with hundreds of conferences on every conceivable topic, but message postings are automatically distributed throughout the network in near-real time. (USENET is not synonymous with the Internet, though; its conferences are also propagated by several other mechanisms.) Additional Internet facilities that may interest you include file servers with massive collections of public-domain programs and data files, the archie file finders, the gopher distributed-information retrieval system, and the World-Wide-Web hypertext servers.
Getting started with the Internet can be very baffling, especially if you don't have the benefit of coaching by some experienced user. Even the simplest dabblings in Internet waters can confront you with software that is almost unbelievably aggravating by DOS or Mac standards. (For example, the first time you run a USENET "news reader," it will automatically assume that you want to subscribe to every single one of the existing conferences. You can only get rid of the ones you aren't interested in by manually "unsubscribing" them one by one, or by using the hideous vi editor to modify a hidden configuration file.) Fortunately, the explosive growth of the Internet has finally attracted the attention of the trade-book publishers, and at least a dozen reasonably good books about the Internet have appeared within the last year. I've picked three user-oriented books to discuss in this installment of the "Programmer's Bookshelf," and will continue with a sampling of more technically oriented books in a later issue of DDJ.
Zen and the Art of the Internet is a concise and well-focused introduction to the Internet, directed at the computer literate and to some degree at the UNIX literate. This book is almost ideal for the DDJ type of reader; it can be assimilated in half an hour, and it will get you off the launching pad with all of the crucial networking programs and facilities. Regrettably, although the book is extremely useful, it's not very good. It was patched together out of a variety of Internet samizdat documents, so the writing and editing are uneven. Technojargon, insider references, and gratuitous admonishments are rampant. Moreover, the book was apparently designed and typeset by amateurs; the wide availability of tools like TeX and troff on UNIX systems has definitely been a double-edged sword.
The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, by Ed Krol, is much more comprehensive than Zen and also takes much less for granted. The book starts with an explanation of the Internet, how it came to be, how it works, and what you're allowed to do on your Internet connection. It continues with detailed chapters on mail and finding and retrieving remote files, and winds up its narrative with a beautiful essay on network problem solving. The final part of the book is devoted to an annotated description of some of the more interesting Internet databases, news groups, and other resources, a directory of Internet providers, an international Internet addressing guide, and a glossary. I can't possibly praise this book too highly; it should serve as a model for technical writers and publishers everywhere. The writing, editing, and production are simply splendid.
!%@:: The Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks is the perfect coffee-table book or holiday gift for the Internet hacker that you love. It is basically a yellow-pages directory to approximately 130 of the Internet's participating networks circa 1990, with maps, mail-addressing guidelines, contact information for network administrators, and miscellaneous technical factoids such as the speed and character of each network's links to the Internet backbone. The book is interesting in a nerdy sort of way, although it's hard to see how most of it could be useful to anyone but another network administrator, and much of the book's contents must have been outdated nearly as soon as it left the printer. [Editor's note: A third edition of this book should now be available, but as we were going to press the price was as yet undetermined.]
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal