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Roaming the Internet
Review by Ray Duncan
Copyright (C) Dr. Dobb's Journal, February, 1993
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 has since become available.]
Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide, 2nd Edition
Brendan P. Kehoe
Prentice-Hall, 1993
112 pages, $22.00
ISBN 0-13-010778-6
The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog
Ed Krol
O'Reilly and Associates, 1992
376 pages, $24.95
ISBN 0-56592-025-2
!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks
Donnalyn Frey and Rick Williams
O'Reilly and Associates, 1990
376 pages, $27.95
ISBN 0-937175-15-3
Electronic Review of Computer Books
Created 5/1/96 / Last modified 6/23/96 / webmaster@ercb.com