In his remarkable book, Marooned in Realtime, science fiction author Vernor Vinge postulated a world where universal networking and a rapid evolution in human-computer interfaces led to a "discontinuity." The people who were online when the discontinuity occurred--nearly the entire population of the earth--simply vanished into another plane of existence, while the few who happened to be isolated from the network for one reason or another at the crucial instant were left behind to ponder the mystery of an empty world. Vinge's latest book, A Fire Upon the Deep, foretells a much different future. A future where theInternet grows to embrace the galaxy, but, as Figure 1 illustrates, the limited bandwidths across interstellar distances and the difficulties of communication between alien species perpetuate text-based newsgroups little different from the ones we know today.
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Language path: Samnorks -> Triskeweline, SjK: Relay
Units
From: Straumli Main
Subject: Archive opened in the Low Transcend!
Summary: Our links to the Known Net will be
down temporarily
Key phrases: transcend, good news, business
opportunities, new archive, communications problems
Distribution:
Where Are They Now Interest Group
Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Motley Hatch Interest Group
Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down
Transceiver Not-For-Long at Shortstop
Date: 11:45:20 Docks Time, 01/09 of Org year 52089
Text of message:
We are proud to announce that a human exploration
company from Straumli Realm has discovered an
accessible archive in the Low Transcend... We have
postponed this announcement until we were sure of our
property rights and the safety of the archive. We
have installed interfaces which should make the
archive interoperable with standard syntax queries
from the Net. In a few days this access will be made
commercially available...
Of course, when news postings are shipped across gazillions of light-years, filtered through multiple AI translators, and stored in archives that outlast the races that created them, one is never quite sure what to believe:
The Known Net had existed in some form for billions of years in the Beyond. It was not a civilization, few civilizations lasted longer than a million years. But the records of the past were quite complete. Sometimes they were intelligible. More often, reading them involved translations of translations of translations, passed down from one defunct race to another with no one to corroborate--worse than any multihop net message could ever be.
Small wonder that the Known Net of the distant future is also referred to by its users as "The Net of a Million Lies."
In our own era, the Internet has not yet fallen completely under the sway of the politicians, lawyers, and media moguls, so rather than The Net of a Million Lies it's more like The Net of a Million Banalities. True enough, the Internet is a treasure trove of information with its USENET newsgroups, FTP archives, Archies, Gophers, World-Wide-Webs, and all the rest. But the Internet faithfully follows the 90/10 rule, and for every USENET posting that provides some valuable morsel of information or worthwhile insight, there are at least nine trivial questions or inane remarks by people too lazy to pick up a manual or read through a message thread to its end before adding their two cents worth.
Two of the most aggravating characteristics of Internet News and e-mail are the senseless squandering of readers' time and network resources by the misuse of "signature blocks" and "included text." Signature blocks are ritualized appendages to news postings that minimally include the author's full name, place of work, and various network addresses for e-mail. Over the years, a certain percentage of net denizens have adopted the signature block as a vehicle for pretentious display, bulking it out with one or more hackneyed aphorisms, so-called "ASCII Art," or elaborate disclaimers. The one useful aspect of such bloated signature blocks is that they are a reliable predictor of content; I've empirically determined that the number of characters in a signature block is inversely proportional to the value of the entire message.
Included text, on the other hand, is material quoted from a previous message to provide a context for the new material in an e-mail message or news posting. When used sparingly, included text is extremely helpful in making sense out of a message thread that has dozens of participants over a period of weeks. Just as often, however, you see lengthy messages that consist almost entirely of included text with only a few lines of original material. The archetype of this genre has the mandatory header, then a hundred lines or so of quoted material, followed by a one-line comment such as "Yes, I agree" or "What utter nonsense," all terminated with two copies of a signature block boasting half a dozen e-mail addresses and a couple of pompous aphorisms. (The two signature blocks occur when the author includes one copy manually, oblivious to the fact that his software is going to include another copy automatically.)
In any event, whatever its features and faults, the Internet has been growing exponentially for the last ten years and is expected to continue to do so for years to come. It seems quite certain that, within three years, virtually every computer user in North America and Europe will have some sort of connectivity to the Internet. This opens up a huge market opportunity for books that can help new users make some sense of the Internet along with the fundamental networking facilities and utilities. I surveyed three such books in my last review, and I've picked three more user-oriented books to discuss in this month's column.
The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking is probably the first Internet book ever to be aimed specifically at computer illiterates and technophobes. It explains electronic mail, news readers, FTP file access, and "netiquette" in terms that even a sixth-grade Valley Girl can easily understand. The book is published in a handy pocket-sized quick-reference format and includes a forward by Al Gore, a bibliography, and a list of network resources and providers. The book's one flaw is that the authors have cluttered it up with "human interest" sidebars that add no value whatsoever and are written in a breathless sound-bite style reminiscent of USA Today. For example:
The most important piece of information for potential users to know is that the resource is gigantic and is growing larger. If it were an eggplant, we'd be in real danger.
--Steve Cavrak, University of Vermont
Some of the other sidebars are entitled "Enough of White Man's ASCII," "Elvis Sighted on Internet," "Geeks in Paradise," and "From Russia with Byte." I guess we should just be grateful that the authors didn't choose to call the book Bill and Ted's Excellent Network Adventure.
The second book on this month's list, Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, defies classification. Carl Malamud, a columnist for Communications Week and author of a number of networking reference books, was subsidized by The Interop Company to spend six months traveling around the world meeting Internet gurus, rogues, loose cannons, and entrepreneurs of every description. Whether or not The Interop Company got what it was after I cannot guess, but the book is incredibly entertaining. You'll learn about the Tokyo Akihabara shopping district, the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, the ITU's tyranny over ISO standards documents, the gated demon, Steve Robert's famous Winnebiko, the Wellington City Net, the Bombay train-reservation system, toll roads in Kuala Lumpur, and other loosely network-related topics too numerous to mention here. You'll also learn about many new foods; Malamud apparently fancies himself a gourmand, and his devotion to TCP/IP networking is rivaled only by his affinity for exotic victuals and restaurants.
My flight wasn't until evening, so I had time to have lunch with Bob. We went to an old hangout, the Italian restaurant Pan Pan. Normally, I try to stick to Asian food while in Asia, but Pan Pan is an exception. The Italian food is excellent, and more importantly, they have excellent durian ice cream.
Durian is one of those mysteries of the East. On the outside, it's about twice the size of a pineapple, with very sharp spikes about a half-inch tall sticking out all over, making it advisable not to fall asleep under a durian tree at harvest time. Inside, there are a half dozen segments of creamy, pale flesh that looks sort of like a banana. The durian's most famous feature, however, is its powerful, distinctive smell.
The taste is great, but the smell does tend to dissuade many westerners from taking an immediate liking to the "king of fruits." I describe it as tasting something like a cross between a mushy banana and brie, but one Englishman I know refers to it as "a bit like eating strawberries and cream in a public lavatory."
Internet: Mailing Lists is a hardcopy version of an Internet file maintained at SRI that is sometimes affectionately referred to as the "list of lists." Mailing lists are somewhat like USENET newsgroups, but the message postings are propagated to interested readers through the e-mail system rather than through the USENET news servers and readers. Many USENET newsgroups are reflected into mailing lists and vice versa, so if you have full Internet access you can obtain the information in the way most convenient for you. The important point about mailing lists is that they make information available to a great many users who do not have complete connectivity to the Internet; for example, people with CompuServe, MCI Mail, or BITNET accounts supporting e-mail connection to the Internet only. And the abundance and diversity of the existing mailing lists is guaranteed to amaze: Whether your interests center on prisons, ham radio, Kate Bush's music, or the Romanov dynasty, there is already a mailing list of your kindred spirits waiting for you.
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal