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).