How they enjoy information superhighway

How they enjoy information superhighway

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Back in the Cold War era, one of the biggest
concerns in the United States was how a communication network
could be maintained and operated even after a major nuclear
attack by the Soviet Union had devastated the country.

A centralized network would definitely not meet this
requirement, since all the Soviets would have to do was to
destroy the central hub in order to cripple the entire
communication system. Therefore, the Department of Defense opted
for a non-centralized network.

Packet switching was also the clear option as opposed to
circuit switching. In a packet switching network, data is broken
down into units called "packets", and each packet is given an
envelop. Each envelop carries the necessary information about the
sender, addressee, and to which other packets it should be
reattached. Therefore, even though packets of the same data
travel along different paths, they will eventually arrive at the
same destination where they will be reunited in the correct
order.

Based on these ideas, the Advanced Research Project Agency,
Department of Defense started constructing networks of computer
networks in the later half of the 1960s. In the beginning,
members had access only their own computer networks. But later
on, academic institutions, such as universities began joining the
Internet, on the condition that they would provide the service of
forwarding any messages that passed through their nodes. Later,
public and private research centers also joined the Net. Since
early 1990s, the Internet has been open to commercial and
business networks as well.

Today, as you may have read somewhere else, it is estimated
that the Internet consists of more than 10,000 networks, which
altogether include more than 3.2 million host computers
throughout the world. As many as 32 million people are said to be
connected to the Net at one time or another.

With such a huge area to explore, and zillions of bytes of
data -- worthy or otherwise -- stored with so many hosts, how do
you navigate across the Net? Thanks to European Association of
Particle Physics, or CERN, we have the World Wide Web, or WWW.
WWW is nothing more than an on-going hypermedia-based project on
the Internet that attempts to link all documents that exist
there. It's an electronic system that will assist you in
accessing information on the Net. Thanks to the hypermedia links,
all it takes to jump over to another document stored in the same
computer, or on the other side of the globe, is a click on any
one of the highlighted words.

By now you must have also heard of Mosaic. A creation of the
University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing
Applications, or NCSA, Mosaic is simply a multimedia window on
the Web that enables you to display Web's documents, which are
called 'pages' or 'sites' in Internet jargon.

Is the Net a jungle? Well, in a way it is. At the moment,
there's no law that governs the conduct of the people who roam
the Internet. People steal other people's data, and people use
other people's names to harass their victims. And it is difficult
to establish law, since the Internet knows no national
boundaries. Several bills are being proposed in the U.S., which
would prosecute those who, for instance, use the Net for
transferring obscene materials. The bills, when they're passed
into laws, will be effective only in the United States. But what
if a cyberpunk commits an Internet felony in Hong Kong?

As Internet is worldwide in its scope, only international
cooperation will work in combating abuses. Thankfully, the
Internet Society, with its 10,000 members worldwide, has been
formed. It has been actively working on the Internet Code of
Conduct, which we hope will give us some guidance on
"Nettiquette".

What can you do once you're already on the Net? To start with,
you can send E-mail. Special interest groups with their mailing
lists exist in a number approaching hundreds of thousands. You
send an E-mail message to this special interest group, and the
list administrator will rebroadcast it to all members of the
group.

If the person you'd like to reach happens to be on line -- and
you can easily check this by using the Finger software -- you can
ask him or her to enter into the Talk mode with you. One half of
your computer screen will display what you type, and the other
half what your respondent types.

You also can retrieve data stored at prestigious sites, such
as the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Science
Foundation. You can retrieve timely information without having to
travel. You can shop on-line. Needless to say, these are just
some of the most widely publicized advantages that you can reap
once you're on the Net.

Finally, the too-often raised question: What do you need in
order to get on the Net? Well, for starters, you have to have a
modem and a telephone line. Then you have to subscribe to any of
the Internet access providers in your city or town, so that you
won't have to pay for long distance calls. Then you need special
software that will open the gate to the Net; a Net browser, as
they call it.

The OS/2 Warp, the 32-bit operating system from IBM, already
comes with Internet access tools, including Internet's lingua
franca TCP/IP. Windows 95, which is supposed to become available
this year, will include its own set. Therefore, chances are you
won't have to buy commercial Internet access software. However,
if you don't want to move over to Warp, or cannot wait for
Windows 95, you have other choices, such as the award-winning
Netscape Navigator from Netscape Communications Corp.

However, don't get too excited too soon, folks. Net surfing
can be frustrating, the wait for a file to download can be
forever, and the time that you may be wasting can be enormous.
Just be aware that the road to Internet is still rocky at best.

Zatni Arbi is a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of
Sciences (LIPI).