Inside the Internet

by Richard Kool

"The Internet has been described as a library where at the moment there is no catalogue, books on the shelves keep moving, and an extra truckload of books is dumped in the entrance hall every hour. Unless it is properly structured and constantly monitored, the positive feature of radical decentralization of knowledge will degenerate into a medieval fragmentation of the body of knowledge, which in turn means a virtual loss of information."

AND THEN THERE'S the World-wide Web (WWW or W3). You gotta love this thing, this incredible chaotic yet highly organized pseudo-nervous system that brings people into the spell of the net. Here it is, folks, you too can have a presence on the net, be enthralled with the world's biodiversity, cultural diversity, technodiversity, perversity, and any other ersity you care to name. It is all here.

Where, you might ask, did all this come from? Did the W3 just spring, like Athena, fully formed from the head of some latter-day Zeus? Well, pretty close! It all began in the winter of 1989 at CERN, the European high-energy physics lab in Switzerland. Tim Berners Lee wanted to develop a system that could share ideas, but not just through text. He had the idea that hypertext was the way to go, hypertext being text that allows the user to jump from one place to another through the establishment of links. Choose a link and instantly you'll be sent to another part of the system where more information about that word or graphic resides. The name World-wide Web was decided on in October 1990.

What grew through those early years (and remember, in this business, the olden days are last week) was the idea that the growing WWW could also include any kind of media that a computer could handle: sound, still and moving images, graphics and text. Obvious, really, because to a computer, text and images are really only a bunch of zeros and ones. (For history buffs interested in where things come from, take a look at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/WWW/)

For awhile, the web was just an idea. You could get to it through the Internet gopher, but it was no great shakes. Then, in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first usable Internet web browser capable of showing pictures, playing sounds and connecting links in hypertext. Mosaic in turn pushed the need for higher-speed modems able to carry more information faster from a host into your home computer. And from Mosaic came a variety of web browsers and software applications, highlighted perhaps by Netscape.

And here, things began to take off. In January 1993, WWW traffic was 0.1% of Internet traffic. By September 1993, it was 1% of Internet traffic. In January 1994, there were less than half a million megabytes of traffic on the web; today, it is more than ten times as much. As of December 1995, there were more than 300,000 WWW sites (and 49,348,881 people on the Internet, if you care to know).

So what is the big deal here? The big deal is that everything is on the web. Okay, so I talk in hyperbole. Almost everything is on the web. Over the next few columns, I'll describe more about this amazing Internet tool, but let me just tell you how I've used it in the last little while.

My associates and I are just finishing a new learning resource on protected areas. I wanted to use the quote attributed to the American naturalist John Muir, "In wildness is the hope of the world," but wasn't really sure I had the quote right. So on to the net I went, and did a net search for John Muir (more on how this is done next time). I quickly found (at http://ice.ucdavis.edu/John_Muir/ ) that there was a whole on-line exhibit on Muir, with information on his life and times, his writings, and writings about him by others. I found my quote, "In God's wildness lies the hope of the world," and much more.

So then I thought, if Muir is here, what or who else is? I searched on Herman Melville, being a fan of Moby Dick and whales. Sure enough, the Herman Melville Internet Society has all of Moby Dick and other works of Melville on line, as well as links to other whale-related sites, links to a Melville discussion group (Ishmael-list), links to Melville's geography, and to places of interest to those interested in 19th century sailing and whaling, and on it goes (http://www.melville.org/).

What about Henry David Thoreau, I wondered (you might tell here that I am an ex-New Englander). You guessed it (http://miso.wwa.com/~jej/1thorea.htm) ... all of Walden, On Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts , and more.

And you're interested in what?