The following is a talk that I gave at the Modern Times bookstore on December 1 2, 1993 on the occasion of the publication of The Online User's Encyclopedia. The talk was part of the Cyberspace Literacy series organized by Eric Theise, verve@well.sf.ca.us. Thanks, Eric!
Firstly, I would like to thank Eric for inviting me here. Most of the time when I'm invited to talk, it seems that I am expected to show something, to demonstrate the technology of telecommunications. I will not do this today. Today I will take a computer sabbath, which I don't do all that often, and I will talk about the origins of the telecommunications revolution, and where it is going.
The Online User's Encyclopedia, which has just been published by Addison-Wesley, is an exploration of the telecommunications revolution. It is a technical exploration, in that it shows you how to do things, and it is a spiritual exploration, in that it talks about the origins of this revolution, sometimes in my words, and sometimes in the words of people who have played an important part in it.
Those of you who do not know me, perhaps do not know that for more than a decade, I was a forensic engineer, first for the Rand Corporation, and then for a firm called Failure Analysis Associates. My specialty was evaluating a technology, or a piece of equipment, or a product, after it had failed. I have done this with technologies such as synthetic fuels, diagnosing their political, engineering and economic failures, or with chemical plants, or oilfield platforms, or pipelines.
For much of my time as an engineer, I studied events, or processes that were disappointments, that turned out to be something less than what their creators had planned. What has most struck me most in interviewing telecommunications luminaries for the book is that in almost every case, telecommunications technology has turned out to be something more than what the creators had envisioned.
In many cases, this success has turned out to be something of a problem. Sparky Herring, the inventor of the QWK message reader standard, created a product for a friend, which is now being used by tens of thousands of people, many of whom are trying to do things with it for which it was never intended. At the time that TCP/IP was created, the idea of a billion node Internet seemed fantastic; today we are in danger of depleting a portion of the address space.
Leo Laporte, creator of the EchoMac network, was overwhelmed by the growth of the network, and eventually could not afford to upgrade his system to keep up with the demand. Filling the void left by MacQueue was one of the reasons behind BMUG's multiline bulletin board, which started in 1988. Back then, I would have found it mind boggling to imagine our present system, with 4 CPUs, over 2 Gb of disk space, 26 phone lines, 8000 users, and a graphical user interface.
There is something about this technology which once started tends to grow and grow and grow, without any obvious limits. It is almost as if mankind and womankind, and perhaps even dogkind and catkind, and every appliance in our homes, and maybe even the rings on our fingers, was destined to be networked. I cannot imagine what the ring on my finger will have to say to my car, or to my toaster, but after listening to the history of this technology, I am no longer can say with certainty that there will be no such conversation.
This concept, of ubiquitous, tetherless computing, is I think one of the fundamental avenues on which this technology is developing now. This is a low to moderate bandwidth application. The other avenue is multi-media computing, which is inherently a high-bandwidth application, and therefore tied to land-line communications, over media such as cable TV connections, ISDN, or leased lines. Personally, I believe that the tetherless access avenue has more potential to validate the utopian point of view than does the multimedia, high bandwidth avenue.
As this technology has advanced, it has exerted incredible power over individual as well as collective lives, the kind of power that we would normally only ascribe to an addictive drug. Tom Grundner, father of the Cleveland FreeNet, gave up a secure job at Case Western Reserve University to found the National Public Telecomputing Network, in an attempt to bring community computing to America in the 21st century. Al Rogers left his job in educational computing to create the FredMail foundation, a non-profit foundation supporting educational communications. Giving up secure lives and careers, to go off on a quest -- this came up again and again. With passion in their voices, the creators of this technology told me that telecommunications has something unique to offer us, and that it is the cure for some of the ills that confront us today.
I am normally very uncomfortable around this kind of fervor. I have studied nuclear engineering, as well as the history of nuclear power itself, which began with claims of "too cheap to meter" and ended with default on the WOOPS bonds. So when people begin to talk in fanatical tones about technology, it sets off alarm bells in my head, and I am immediately inclined to focus on what it is they are missing, and why things will not turn out as they say it will.
My experience as a forensic engineer has left me with a very sensitive nonsense detector, and right now, that nonsense detector is going off nearly every time I hear the words "information superhighway." Whenever I hear that phrase, I can't help but think of an Irish folk song in which a farmer complains "They're going to build a motor way through me back garden; no one can explain how I came to be chosen." and the last stanza ends with "They're going to build a motor way, they're ripped up all the trees; Now the lories zoom where once I grew my cabbages and peas."
The words "information super highway" make me think of that farmer, and I wonder whether the people who are building this information motorway are going to bulldoze the gardens of all the little info farmers. There is good reason for being suspicous about that, I think. For one thing, if you make a list of all the firms who have committed large sums of money to building the superhighway, you will find that a very large fraction of that money is coming from entertainment companies or their partners; firms like TCI, or Bell Atlantic, or Time Warner. And although the merger or strategic alliance announcements always focus on information products, once you get below the surface, you quickly realize that they are really oriented toward delivering entertainment, such as interactive games, or movies on demand.
So we need to make the distinction between an Entertainment Superhighway and an Information Superhighway. They are not the same thing, since they may not end up running the same protocols, and it may not be possible for them both to coexist on the same physical infrastructure. And while it is possible that we will have multiple highways, and multiple protocols, from an economic standpoint, there is one connection that is particularly worth owning, and that is the connection to the end-user's desktop.
An economic analysis discloses that there is no more inexpensive means to deliver large incoming datastreams to the desktop than over a Cable TV connection. Using existing technology, it is possible to deliver a 10 Mbps incoming datastream to your computer for under $100/month, and perhaps for as low as $30/month. For systems based on copper wire, the outgoing connection, if there is one, may need to travel via a different path, such as over a modem; this is because many systems do not support upstream connections, and even those that do find upstream transmission extremely noisy. However, the situation is dramatically improved in systems that have been wired with fiber optics.
Today Cable Internet is on the verge of introduction in the Bay Area and in Boston, and it is projected that the service will be available nationwide by 1995. This is for a high speed incoming channel that ranges in speed between 2.5 Mbps, and 10 Mbps, depending on the implementation. The projected price is $100-150/month.
The problem with cable Internet is that there is a limit to the number of people that can be accomodated on a single cable TV channel, before you have to break the channel into cells. In a future where the Internet will be competing with the Mortal Kombat channel, and the Auto Mechanics channel, and the Chef Boyardee Channel, I am wondering exactly how many channels we will see dedicated to the Internet. 20? 50? Even with 500 channels available, it is hard to see how more than 100 of these could go to the Internet, especially when there will be so many more interesting things to hook up to, such as a Mortal Kombat channel, where you can cut off your opponents head and watch real blood spurt out in real time digital video.
However, I would argue that 100 channels is probably much too many; it is much more likely that those channels will be devoted to entertainment media, especially if the firms owning the transmission media (the conduit), also own the information to be transmitted over it (the content). So far, cable providers have shown as much more more interest in offering access to "name brand" services such as AOL or Prodigy than in offering Internet access, per se.
The separation of conduit and content is I think is one of the fundamental principles of a Information Ecology. Several commentators have described the online world as an Ecosystem, where we have a wide variety of information providers and consumers inhabiting various niches, who interact with and provide nourishment for each other in a variety of ways. Just as you wouldn't want one species of fish deciding who gets to swim in the ocean, so too it makes sense to guarantee all players equal access to the information conduits of the future.
But even though the online world is a lot like an ecosystem, many books and newspapers still talk about it as though the Internet were an online version of Disney World, with lots of neat rides you can go on. In an amusement park, the interactions are scripted and so you can ride the roller coaster at irrational rates of speed, and yet never get hurt, as long the roller coaster stays on the rails. But on the Internet, everyone interacts with everyone else, you're in charge of the experience, and you're dealing with real people. So you're not driving a bumper car with a big rubber bumper, and you're not being directed on a rail.
This means that you, and only you, are responsible for your behavior on the Internet, and that behavior can make the experience better or worse for other people. In this respect, the Internet is a lot like Yosemite National Park in the summer time -- awe inspiring, yet under tremendous strain from the huge volume of tourists. The Internet does have people who are paid to maintain various parts of it, but like the Park Service, there aren't very many of them, and they are largely overwhelmed. Just as with our National Parks, much of the Internet is maintained by volunteers, and parts of it are showing strains.
[Message from Smokey the Cyberbear: Only YOU can prevent Flame Wars. Thank you!]
Just as the environmental movement started up in the 1960's to protect our environment, at times I wonder whether we need a new kind of movement, an Information Ecology movement. The spirit of volunteerism provides the nutrients for the Internet's Information Ecology, and if the networks are going to continue to function, we need to continually put back into the networks what we take out of them. To do this, we need to be able to recruit and train new volunteers and helpers at least in proportion to all the new users. Already we are seeing many of our major FTP archives overwhelmed by the levels of traffic, and we may not have much time before important parts of the Internet become unusable.
[Message seen on a tee shirt: Welcome to Cyberspace. Now go home.]
I believe it is this spirit of volunteerism that is what really distinguishes the Internet from other media, the sense that it is "our" network. This is both a blessing and a curse, because while it provides an extraordinary amount of flexibility and energy, in a network that is growing at 100 percent per year, few donors can continually afford the upgrades in hardware and connectivity that are required to maintain a constant quality of service. This is particularly true where multi-media is concerned, and it challenges the deeply-held conviction that what distinguishes global networks from television is the ability to provide information as well as to consume it.
Those of you who remember the debate that occurred over cable licensing in the 1970's may recall some of the arguments that were made in favor of public access cable. The concept was that cable franchises should have a channel where people could submit their own videos for viewing. The theory was that with video cameras dramatically declining in price, that people would be able to produce their own programming.
Today public access cable has not panned out, at least partly because while video cameras are widely distributed throughout the population, the ability to produce interesting videos is not. It takes a fair amount of study, equipment, talent and determination to produce an interesting video, and the reality is that only a very small percentage of the population has that kind of ability, and it hasn't been enough to sustain public access cable.
I think we are going to see the same thing in Internet multi-media, because the average person is no more prepared to produce a complex multimedia presentation in NCSA Mosaic, than they are to produce a video for public access cable. This is not bad necessarily; it is just that multimedia is a complex business, and one which most people are interested in only as consumers.
In particular, the growth of the Internet and the demand for multimedia is rapidly escalating the cost of providing servers. As traffic levels double annually, the hardware required to maintain a state of the art server also doubles, but if the information is being provided for free, it is hard to justify doubling the hardware devoted to it every year.
Already, if you've got anything at all interesting to put online, it makes no sense to try to do it over a 14.4 Kbps SLIP/PPP connection. If what you're doing is of interest to a wide segment of the Internet community, your connection will be swamped instantaneously. So already you probably should go to a service provider and ask them to put your information on their server.
It appears to me that the minimum hardware today for putting up a high volume Mosaic server is something like a multiprocessor machine with perhaps 10 Gb of disk space, maybe 128 Mb of RAM, an FDDI card, and a multiprocessor operating system such as Windows NT or Solaris. With all of this stuff, you can probably do a fair job of serving multimedia to the masses, but the hardware will probably cost in excess of $50K, with $100K spent yearly on maintenance, Internet service, phone bills and a full time system administrator. So in today's world of the Internet, Freedom of the Multimedia Press is only guaranteed if you own one, and multimedia info presses start at $50K plus $100K per year.
It seems fairly clear to me that in this brave new world, if the small info farms are to survive, that they will need to cooperate and band together to increase their buying power and connectivity. Here in San Francisco we have several organizations catering to the small info farmer. One is a community Internet buying cooperative or ToasterNet, called The Little Garden, which is a great name for a fledgling info farm. Little Garden, which has been growing very rapidly, has been able to purchase a T1 level Internet connection, and resell it. So it is a case of customers pooling their bandwidth.
Another organization that has been hospitable to the small info farmer is The WELL, which maintains one of the better gophers on the Internet, gopher.well.sf.ca.us. The WELL Gopher provides a machine, and excellent connectivity to WELL users looking to place information online, but not willing to purchase their own hardware or connections to do it.
