Chances are, if you're a World Wide Web (WWW) surfer, you've come across this URL site: http://sunsite.unc.edu. It's hard not too. This address in Cyberland is home to some of the Infobaughn's most frequented venues. Dr. Fun, the immensely popular on-line comic, is here. So's the World Wide Web's exegesis of its very own being -- the WWW Frequently Asked Questions (WWW FAQs). Here, too, is the electronic version of The Meyers-Briggs temperament test.
"Here" is a SparcCenter 1000 about the size of a large cake box attached to various storage peripherals physically located at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. It's a place that is now among the top five busiest Internet traffickers in the world.
"We're deadly," said UNC's Paul Jones, a journalism and library science instructor at the school. "We have lots of good stuff."
Jones, who goes by the title of general expert in electronic knowledge (or GEEK), is the curator of this electronic archive where Web surfers can learn Gaelic or about the legendary bluegrass guitarist Doc Watson. With a current staff of seven students, Jones maintains an untotaled number of Internet sites. "I'll admit I've lost count," said Jones.
80,000 hits a day
So how did this college in the Carolina pines perhaps best known for its basketball heritage come to be one of the most familiar stops on the information superhighway?
About three years ago, before Sun Microsystems had the powerful Internet server it does now, the company was looking for ways to make itself more accessible to Internet users. It then began contracting with various educational institutions: Sun would provide powerful technology that the universities could use to develop and store more grand, more informative Web pages in return for the institution using the name "sunsite" in the Internet address and store some Sun specific information.
In October 1992, the UNC SunSite officially went on line. By the end of that month the site had already surpassed its goal of moving 10,000 files by the following January.
Now the site moves an average of 85,000 files a day. Eventually Sun moved most of its files off of the site to its own server (though many sun patches are still sent to the UNC site), as has been the case for many of the site's more popular attractions. Once an organization has developed a popular presence on the Web, it may acquire its own server to cut down on the traffic sent to the UNC site.
"One of the things that we've done for several people is foster their growth and moved them out... which is fine by us, because we're ready to move on to do the next thing," Jones said. "That's what we ought to be doing."
Despite all the WWW ballyhoo, there have been a lot unsuccessful, costly attempts to establish a presence on the Web. So rather than purchasing a server outright, the SunSite allows organizations to test the Web waters before investing in a powerful server.
Sometimes, like in the case of Dr. Fun and the Washington, D.C.-based Smithsonian Institution, organizations' own creations become too popular and need they need more powerful technology to handle the traffic. "At the Smithsonian, they have a server, but they needed an off-site back up. They also needed a secondary [server] because their server was getting swamped," Jones said.
Coolness factor
There are no principle guidelines on what is and what isn't on the UNC SunSite server, other than what is prohibited by law or Internet "netiquette."
For instance, the site is barred from competing with the private sector for profit, so any of the ftp files or Web pages must be accessible for at no cost (unlike many of the services offered by commercial Internet providers such as Prodigy, Compuserve and America On Line).
"[Profit] is not our mission," Jones said. "We're supposed to be collecting and extending. The university is supposed to create knowledge and transmit it to other people as best we can." He added that he sees the site's role as that of an electronic publisher for a medium where a greater audience can have access to a greater variety of information.
But, just as a newspaper can only publish so much of the world's news in a day (or too much of it, depending on how you look at), the UNC site, too, can only store so much information. "So what we're looking for when we take on a project is how far we can push it," Jones said. "Our goal is not just to use the technology, but to use it creatively, to use it appropriately and to present some pretty interesting stuff."
Determining what gets on and what doesn't is difficult, especially at the rate the Web is expanding -- as more people travel in cyberspace, more organizations will be clamoring to create more stops. So the UNC site has to be somewhat selective about its residents. And what is the criterion for becoming a resident?
"Basically we get four people in a room and decide if any of us would want any of it," Jones said. "We want cool stuff that people want that's copyright free. That's a pretty tough decision." But once an organization becomes a resident of this home in cyberspace, it likely will receive no hassles from the cyber-landlords. The organization is trusted to act in accordance with "netiquette" mostly because it is very difficult for the caretakers to view every updated electronic page or ftp file. "I mean we look at Dr. Fun every day because we can't stand to be without it," Jones said. "We try to give a lot of latitude to people that we think know what they're doing, and can be trusted and have proved it."
He added that he sees this a way of experimenting with electronic publishing -- learning about its shortcomings, potentialities and risks.
"What we're really trying to do is experiment and understand a lot of the various issues that have to do with online publishing... That doesn't mean we don't get into trouble."
J.M. Roe is a technical writer in Temple, TX. He has covered the Sun market for several years.