INTERNET MANIA
World Wide Web Technology: What's Hot and What's Not!
Michael D. Bush, PhD
Brigham Young UniversityThis article was published in the February 1996 issue of the industry newsletter, the Multimedia Monitor. Copyright 1996, Phillips Business Information, Inc. Appears here by permission.
Author's Note: For a long time now, I have prided myself on knowing where digital technology is and where it is going. For example, I have been thinking about applying various forms of technology to education since 1975, and I have actually been doing it for not much less time than that. Some time this past Spring I was feeling like I was really ignorant, having missed the fact that the Web was developing at an incredible rate, right under my nose. Luckily for my self-esteem, I read in the 5 June issue of Time magazine that in April 1994, Bill Gates had called an off-site meeting of his top staff to work out Microsoft's Internet strategy. Supposedly, he had confessed that the Internet "mania" had taken him by surprise. Despite the fact that he beat me by about a year, I no longer felt so "out of it." I take some consolation in the fact that Microsoft is working on improving its position as laggard in the race, having recently announced its strategy in its expansive 7 December Internet Strategy Workshop (Monitor 1/96 p1). The point is not necessarily being there first, but arriving with the right stuff - albeit not so late that the show is over by the time you make something happen. It will be interesting to see who winds up with the right stuff.
Whether you need to get information on Rush Limbaugh's famous and colorful, "power" ties [Author’s Note, 20 January 2014: The rushties.com link is now dead…] or access the Quran, you can find it on the World Wide Web. As someone once said, the Web is like one great big, wonderful library. You enter the front door, and there are all the books... piled in the middle of the floor!
It is not that bad. The other day a colleague and I needed some words to a song by a French singer, unknown in this country. I found them on a site in France and gave them to my friend. When we went to practice, he couldn't find them in his office. Not remembering where I had found them on the Web, I did a NetSearch, clicked the mouse four times, and Voilà! With a quick cut and paste to my word processor and a slight font change, our printer was able to serve up the new version. No matter how you figure it, it is pretty amazing to get music from France faster than my friend could find it in his office next door!
On another occasion, I was having a challenging problem with a hard drive. I got the manufacturer's 800 number and then couldn't get through over a couple of days. It then occurred to me: http://www.conner.com. I had never seen the address and didn't know for sure if they had a Web site, but it seemed like a good guess... A couple of minutes later, I had the solution to my problem from their frequently asked questions page.
There is other evidence that something intriguing is underway. For example, I marvel each time I see Web addresses go flashing by as part of an increasing number of TV commercials. Just this evening, before I sat down to write, a national radio news broadcast mentioned how an organization was planning to do a Web page to help locate missing children. It's obvious that commercial action on the Internet is growing at an ever-increasing rate. It's going through the roof - just like Netscape's stock price!
Not so fast: This might well be the current state of affairs, but just how the Internet phenomenon will continue to unfold is open to question. The potential is certainly there for things to proceed on an exciting course, as evidenced by the current wave of interest. Yet, there are problems - some simple and some complex; some with short-term solutions some requiring time to be resolved.
So, we have excitement and even some evidence of value, but where are we now? "What's Hot" with the Internet and the Web? Let's save the good stuff for last. Let's look first at "What's Not."
What's Not Hot With the Internet?
Lack of bandwidth, evolving standards, low interactivity, the current economic model, growing pains, passwords. This is a short list of the things that I see wrong with the Internet as it currently exists.
Lack of Bandwidth
At a recent conference I asked a colleague what she thought about how the Web was developing. "Oh," she replied, "you mean the World Wide Wait?"
Several years ago, I chuckled when several researchers at a large university revealed to me that their goal was to distribute digital movies on standard Ethernet. To think that I get frustrated with the normal level of digital traffic we have on our university net right now... I shudder to think what it would be if people were shipping around movies instead of text, graphics, and, now, JavaScript applets.
Ever since I attended the First International Conference on CD-ROM (now known as Intermedia World) sponsored by Microsoft Corporation in 1986, I have never had any doubt that the delivery of video data for interactive education and training would ultimately be digital. In fact, at that first CD-ROM conference, I had the opportunity to participate in an informal get-together one evening where a dozen or so of us talked with Bill Gates about the new technology he was touting (CD-ROM) and what it really meant.
Several of what I would call "old-line videodisc guys" hammered Gates with questions about bandwidth. "But you don't have the bandwidth! You don't have the bandwidth!" they said. Gates' response (to paraphrase) was, "Don't worry about it. Processors will get sufficiently fast, and memory will get tolerably cheap to give us the power we need. Once your material is digital, you can do so much more with it."
It makes a lot of sense to me to heed advice in this sort of technical area when such advice is given by someone who has created personal worth approaching $15 billion by selling related technical stuff. Nevertheless, I have spent a lot of time over the past ten years doing videodisc, all the while wondering how the transition away from my technology of choice would take place. Although it took longer than Gates thought, CD-ROM is now a viable option for interactive materials delivery.
So what are we talking about now? The Web! And the question remains... bandwidth. I can only imagine Gates today, saying, "Don't worry about..." Yet, he was right then, and he is right now: bandwidth will most certainly come.
Evolving Standards
The thing that has made the Web what it is today is that anyone can display anyone else's Web page. This capability is due to the simple mark-up scheme developed at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory) and to Mosaic the de facto standard browser developed at NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications). Despite the fact that HTML is a giant leap into the past of marked-up files à la "UNIX nroff," the solution is elegant in its universality. It isn't hard to implement compatible browsers for all the platforms that people want to use - but there is trouble looming on the horizon.
Netscape has gotten impatient with the standard setting/guiding W3 Consortium which can't seem to be able to finalize HTML 3.0 - and is putting the finishing touches on its browser (Netscape Navigator, Version 2.0) which implements features that are not certain to be universal standards. In fact, at least one successful Web development company, Organic Online, has chosen not to implement Netscape "enhancements" to HTML. Check out their explanation. [Author's Note: Here is an illustration about another, if less significant, problem with the Web: You might find some good stuff one day, and the next day, it will be gone. The original, very good explanation of Organic's ideas on this Netscape issue has been replaced with "a more general discussion about content negotiation." What is there today, might well be gone tomorrow. Author's 31 August 2006 Note to the previous Note: I fixed the HTML 3.0 link, but the previous one does not work!.]
Microsoft, too, has put some new twists on its browser - different twists than Netscape has used, and that make the two somewhat incompatible. Oracle also has its own proprietary viewer for connecting to its data-base products. And I don't know about anyone else, but I never seem to have the right "helper apps" enabled to experience the fun data types that are out there on the coolest sites. Whether it's RealAudio, MPEG audio, or AIFF audio, one slight installation problem or another often keeps me from experiencing the Web pages as their designers intended.
The compatibility issue is complicated further by the looming competition between Sun's Java and Microsoft's Blackbird - two systems for making Web pages more useful and interactive. Netscape and at least 28 other companies have embraced Java (Monitor 1/96 p1). Of course, the initial list was missing Microsoft, which had promised technology based on its OLE technology and Visual Basic. Microsoft now says that the Microsoft Internet Platform will use Visual Basic Script and will be compatible not only with OLE, but will also link to applets created using the Java language from Sun Microsystems.
Low Interactivity
As an educator, my sentiments about hypertext/hypermedia have varied over the past few years. I have long recognized the potential of such technologies, but I have been disappointed at most of the applications. Ready information is a wonderful thing, but most people don't just want information for the sake of information. Who sits down just to read the encyclopedia? (Supposedly, Bill Gates got well into the project before abandoning it for other interests - presumably computers.) Who reads the dictionary? We use these reference tools to accomplish something else. Usually, the information is not an end in itself. It is, rather, a means to an end - a way to accomplish something else: read something, write something, explain something we heard about in carrying on our daily lives.
To me, because hypertext/hypermedia were just fancy ways to get information, I have been less than excited by the Web. Only recently have I come to appreciate the sheer volume of stuff that is "out there." Nevertheless, the mostly static HTML pages currently available have not convinced me that we can use the Web (in its present form) in education for much more than reference material. We need to create "teaching" materials that our students can use in conjunction with the Web. These materials might take the form of simulations, games, or even tutorials. All of them, however, require more interactivity than is easily possible on the Web today.
The Current Economic Model
We have all heard the cries of dismay from people who lament the fact that the Internet will, in the future, become a place where people pay as they receive value. Others complain about the ease with which programs and content can be copied in the digital age. In his columns in Wired Magazine (3.01) and in his book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte (the director of the Media Lab at MIT) has written about the move from an economic system that accounts for things in terms of atoms to one based on bits.
Author Esther Dyson said something similar in an article in Wired (3.07), in which she stated that content will be essentially free on the 'Net. The editors at Wired concluded from her ideas that content providers "had better get over it!" They added, "In a 'Net-based economy of easy replication, the trick is to control not the copies, but the relationship with the customer." Dyson did not use these exact words, so you can read for yourself [Author’s Note, 20 January 2014: Dyson’s words on Amazon are no longer available via a live link.] to see what you think.
The point here is that it is unclear how to continue to make the whole Internet thing work without an appropriate business model. Some people have maintained that advertising will be the key. However, an article on the front page of the December 1995 WebWeek carried the headline, "Ad-Supported Web Sites Will Be Rare, Experts Warn." Others feel that an efficient system of "e-cash" transactions will make the wheels of the InfoEconomy turn. This is not unlike the vision that Ted Nelson had for his Xanadu project (Monitor 1/91 p24).
Unfortunately, "tremendously complex" is the best way to describe a system in which money is transferred or in which accounts are credited and debited throughout all levels of information access, as the information is accessed.
Finding an appropriate economic system for the Internet is somewhat related to the standards issue. We need a system that is secure and yet allows money to easily flow among accounts as the information is accessed. Such a system cries out for a single standard, but, to date, it appears that two competing systems are well under development. Visa (combined with Microsoft) is doing working on its Secure Transaction Technology protocol. At the same time, MasterCard (working with Netscape) is developing its Secure Electronic Payment Protocol (Monitor 11/95 p6). You guessed it: the two systems are incompatible. Rumor has it that a "converged" standard will emerge "over the next few months." [Author's Note: Since this article went to press, the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) specification was announced on 1 February as a collaborative effort of GTE, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corp., SAIC, Terisa Systems, Verisign, Visa International, and MasterCard. SET will be using specially developed encryption technology from RSA Data Security.]
Growing Pains
One of the most significant difficulties faced by any new presence on the Web is the inability of developers to forecast the popularity of the content or service they plan to offer. On the first day it was open for business, Limbaugh's page received anywhere from 1 to 1.5 million hits, bringing its host server to a screeching halt. Will sites continue to fail every time a new, popular Web presence hits the Infobahn? Sun's did the first day its new programming language, Java, was made available.
Passwords
A few years ago, someone predicted that the CD-ROM revolution would come to an early demise once it was no longer able to create new acronyms. The same sort of thing is happening with the Web; but, this time, it is not with acronyms. Rather, it is with the passwords that users must keep track of for the various sites for which they are registered. Is it possible the Web will fail to meet its potential because no one will be able to remember all of their passwords? I hope not, but I already have trouble keeping track of the "free" sites for which I've had to register. Forget the passwords. I have - and, now, I can't get online anymore to some of these great servers.
What's Hot?
Now for the good news: What's hot on the Internet front? Efforts to increase bandwidth (fiber networks and other exciting technologies), Java, and Blackbird (Real Soon Now).
Increasing Bandwidth
Nicholas Negroponte has had a lot to say about bandwidth in his book, Being Digital. He challenged his researchers at the Media Lab some years ago to "think of things as if bandwidth were unlimited." (Note: Bill Gates made his current fortune on the assumption that hardware would ultimately be cheap. He wants to make his next fortune - or keep the current one - on the assumption that communication will be basically free.)
Negroponte's name has been applied to a concept that some label the "Negroponte Switch." In essence, the Negroponte Switch is this: We need to put into the air that which is today on wires, and we need to put onto wires (probably fiber optic cables) that which is today in the air. What Negroponte is saying is that low bandwidth information (telephone conversations) can make good use of the area where the available spectrum is supposedly limited - i.e., Radio Frequency (RF). On the other hand, bandwidth-intensive data should be put onto what is the virtually unlimited spectrum available on fiber. If you fill up one set of fibers, you simply add another cluster.
To counter, George Gilder says in is new book, Telecosm (to be published this year by Simon and Schuster), that even the bandwidth available by transmission via radio frequency is virtually limitless given digital technology. If you are interested in this subject, you can access a portion of the book that was published by Forbes ASAP in June 1995.
People who own copper networks, of course, say, "Don't underestimate how much data we can pump on copper!" However, consider the capabilities of fiber. According to Gilder, one single fiber has as its upper limit the capability to carry all of the conversations that take place in North America during the peak time of Mother's Day, which is the peak telephone usage day of the entire year. This, of course, would require using all of the fiber's available bandwidth as governed by the wavelength of the light it carries - well beyond the ability of today's switching and relay systems. We are no where near exploiting all of that bandwidth; the US currently is using only seven percent of the capacity of the installed fiber networks in the telephone system.
What will it take to unleash industry's ability to create an infrastructure capable of the bandwidth we need? Gilder and Negroponte both maintain that telecommunications de-regulation will go a long way toward that end. The Communications Act of 1995 is an excellent step in that direction, but the status of its passage and its implementation is unclear. As of 4 December, it was not clear that Congress would be able to pass the bill before adjourning. It also isn't clear that the legislation will be on the calendar for 1996. Unless something substantive has happened by the time you read this article, we all need to write our Congresspeople! [Author's Note: You just read the status of the legislation as of the printed version of this article. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 become law on the 8th of February with President Clinton's signing of S.652 that Congress had passed on February 1, 1996. Its provisions became effective immediately. Click here to access an excellent resource on the legislation, including the full text of the legislation as well as several very useful commentaries.]
While we wait for more bandwidth, there is at least one organization that is doing its part to conserve what we currently have. Click here for information on how we all can optimize our bitmaps to conserve that most precious of our Infobahn resources.
Java
I mentioned the difficulty with static Web pages. Luckily, help seems to be here in the form of Sun Microsystems' Java, an object-oriented programming language that runs on many different platforms. Programmers can use Java to create programs called "applets" that can be transmitted as part of a Web page as it is accessed by a user's browser software. The resulting increase in functionality will provide, across the 'Net, a good deal of the multimedia richness possible in other applications available on the desktop and to which many users are accustomed. The degree of richness, of course, will be limited by our Information Age Nemesis, bandwidth.
Sun has garnered an incredible group of companies who will support Java (America Online Inc., Apple Computer Inc., Architext Software, Attachmate Corporation, AT&T, Borland International, Brio Technology Inc., Computer Associates Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Iconovex Corporation, Illustra Information Technologies Inc., Informix Software Inc., Intuit Inc., Macromedia, Metrowerks Inc., Novell Inc., Oracle Corporation, Paper Software Inc., Precept Software Inc., RAD Technologies Inc., The Santa Cruz Operation Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc., Spider Technologies, Sybase Inc., Toshiba Corporation, Verity Inc., and Vermeer Technologies Inc.).
Conspicuously absent from this initial group of supporters, Microsoft Corporation and IBM Corporation later announced separately their own plans to license and implement the Java technology into their respective product lines (Monitor 1/96 p1). IBM announced on 6 December that it had licensed the Java programming language for use in Web browsers, servers, and even in Lotus Notes. At its 7 December "InternetFest" Microsoft announced that it had "signed a letter of intent with Sun for a Java technology source license."
Summary
The party appears complete, so let the games begin! Drivers, start your engines! How's that for mixing a few metaphors? Forgive me, but I am having trouble containing my excitement.
When I started this piece, I felt somewhat negative on where we stand. I felt certain that Visa and MasterCard were about ready to duke it out with competing payment strategies, and my previous reading of various materials had left me with visions of Scott McNealy of Sun taking a hockey stick to Bill Gates' head, both figuratively and literally.
Although it will not be waged with hockey sticks, the battle between Gates on the one hand and McNealy and Bill Joy (also of Sun and the company godfather of Java) on the other is nonetheless quite real - and that's not to forget anyone else out there who is fifteen billion dollars or so hungrier than Gates. They are going after Gates' dinner plate, and he knows it. He says as much in his new book, The Road Ahead.
This battle is shaping up as a revolution - a revolution that is underway and happening on the 'Net. It's something that George Gilder has a few things to say about in another chapter from Telecosm, published by Forbes ASAP in August 1995. Gilder predicts the focus of software changing very rapidly from the desktop to the 'Net - a definite threat to the hegemony enjoyed by Gates and Microsoft.
What really interests me is that my research on the Web, using the Web, has changed my outlook significantly since I began to write this piece. I learned things that I had not yet picked up on, in what I feel to be a regular and consistent effort to remain abreast of goings-on in the information industry.
My vision of the future - as strongly influenced by George Gilder's 1992 book, Life After Television - has been renewed and remains mostly unchanged. In Life After Television, Gilder offers an optimistic vision illustrating how TV and film people, as well as video game makers, cannot and will not rule the future. He said:
It is companies that shun the PC today in order to cater to the TV, consumer electronics, and telephone industries that will end up in luxury backwaters. They will resemble companies catering to the mainframe trade early this decade, or the horse business early this century. They may find exotic or intriguing niches. But just as the real action was not at Churchill Downs or the Peapack Hunt Club, but in Detroit, the real action today - the source of wealth and power - is not at Nintendo or Sega, Sony, or QVC; it is in the scores of thousands of computer and software companies comprising the industrial fabric of the information age - the exhilarating new life after television.
The only thing lacking that might make the vision a reality is the bandwidth that Gilder predicts soon will be available. According to Gilder, we are quite near an era when nearly free bandwidth will be the rule.
This is my final concern, and based on what I just now picked up on the Web (Really! Well, okay. I read about it first in Wired, but I did just find it on the Web this evening.), I won't have to wait too long:
Tele-Communications Inc. and the renowned Silicon Valley venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers are doing their part, not waiting for telecommunications reform. They supposedly have great things in store in this arena. Their venture, @Home, promises to expand TCI's installed network of fiber and coax cable with a high-speed, nation-wide backbone (Monitor 6/95 p6). Using high-speed cable modems, @Home will bring Ethernet speeds to homes, offices, and schools everywhere by 1997. In fact, the TCI-Kleiner team recently announced a trial for Sunnyvale, California, to begin "early in 1996." [Author's Note: @Home recently announced in the Spring that they " would indefinitely delay the launch of its much-anticipated high-speed Internet access service due to technical problems, unexpected high demand for the service and a limited supply of cable modems." For the moment, their Web pages show that a trial is underway in Fremont, CA.] The speeds @Home is promising will go a long way toward helping make my 20-year-old dreams of widely available instructional media a reality. [Author's Note: @Home claims it will have speeds that exceed current dial-up methods by up to 500 times. My calculations yield 347 times when comparing Ethernet's 10 megabits per second to my 28,800 bps modem, but then, who's counting beyond two orders of magnitude anyway?]
So, "What's Hot?" The answer remains, "the Web," and anything associated with it.
Going back to my French song example, I am anxious to be able to do the same sort of thing with all of my junk mail, catalogs, magazines, and newsletters that now fill my office. With so much less stuff hanging around, I could more easily find the things that aren't on the Web. Now, where was that student's request for a letter of recommendation?
Michael Bush is Associate Professor of French and Instructional Science at Brigham Young University. In 1992 he retired from the Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel at the United States Air Force Academy, where he was principally involved in the design and implementation of the largest interactive videodisc language learning center of its kind on any college campus in the world.