Yesterday I was talking to my dog, Spot
"Hey, Spot," I said, "with the massive amount of cash this Foreword has brought me, I felt generous, and so I bought you your very own computer."
Spot looked across the room to where I'd set up the machine next to his water dish. Still shiny with that putty-gray factory finish, it was the very latest model—the IBM Dog Computer 3000 with a cordless pawboard and a squeaky mouse! A 999,000-baud modem was connected to Spot's very own phone line. "Gosh," drooled Spot, "Thank you, Kibo! It's the most wonderful thing anyone ever gave a dog like me! Now I can log on to that amazing new Information Superhighway!"
"Uh, Spot, before you do, you know how to use the Internet, right?"
Spot barked happily and ran in a little circle. "Sure I do! I've seen The Lawnmower Man and WarGames and every episode of William Shatner's awesome Tekwar. I know all about this stuff. First you put on your virtual reality helmet and your glowing blue neon datasuit, then you fly through the maze, and laser beams come out of your eyes and you have to shoot the computer viruses before they turn you into a skeleton and then you have twenty seconds to guess the three-letter password before all the nuclear missiles in the world come out of the screen at you!!!" Spot turned on his new computer and the screen lit up:
>
Spot cried. "Waah! This sucks! Kibo, you tricked me. I hate you!"
"Now, now, little Spot, it wasn't I who cruelly deceived you. It was the media. Remember, everything can be blamed on the media. Who told you it was called 'The Information Superhighway'?"
"The media," sobbed Spot.
"And who told you it was a super-cool new thing they just invented last week?"
"The media," sobbed Spot.
"And who told you it was a dangerous and scary thing that could molest your children while they sleep?"
"The media!" bawled Spot. "Oh, how I hate them! They're evil. I guess I don't know anything about what the so-called Information Superhighway is really like. Kibo, you'll have to show me what to do here."
I leaned over and typed in Spot's password, DOG$BONE. Spot was now logged in to the world's most powerful information service, Dogidy.
WELCOME TO DOGIDY[tm], AN INFORMATION SERVICE WITH A DIFFERENCE. A JOINT VENTURE OF McDONALDS AND COCA-COLA. You have 13 new pieces of mail from long-lost friends and people who want to date you. There are 637 news articles clipped for you, on subjects that you care deeply about, with all others omitted. The President of the United States would like to talk to you personally via videoconferencing. He is offering you a Cabinet post. You are our one millionth customer! Press "Y" now to receive a year's free supply of your favorite brand of dog food.
Spot burst into tears again. "Waah! I can't read, I'm just a dog!"
The "Information Superhighway," for some reason, has become the hot new topic. Every magazine has done at least one article on it, usually emphasizing its hip trendiness.
The Internet has been around for decades in various forms. Heck, you could even trace its precursors back to the laying of the first transcontinental phone cable. Early computer networking often involved computers making phone calls to each other. Then, someone came up with the bright idea of connecting special lines directly between the computers so that they could communicate faster, and without paying the phone company. Various computers were connected to different networks, such as ARPAnet, Bitnet, and so on. Eventually these networks were linked together in various ways, so that now, effectively, all the well-connected computers in the world are on one network—the Internet. The computers communicate with one another in various ways—via cables, via microwave dishes, via satellite, and yes, some still call each other on the phone.
The commercial "information services" are now getting in on the game as well—if you have a CompuServe account, you can send mail to someone who has an America Online account, through the magic of the Internet. Businesses are offering electronic catalogs of their goods over the network, so that you can shop with your computer. You can send letters to people ranging from Conan O'Brien to the President over the network, without having to pay for a stamp. (Whether you pay for the network is different, but there certainly are ways of getting on for free.) You can browse through massive libraries of information, and even download entire books within minutes.
Ten years ago, you could have done many of the same things. You couldn't have sent electronic mail to President Clinton (or even President Reagan), and CompuServe users were forced to chat only with other CompuServe users, but the basic capabilities for dealing with large quantities of information rapidly were there. So why is there this sudden craze for the "Information Superhighway?"
Is it because someone coined that damned term?
Is it because computers are slowly getting easier to use?
Because they're rapidly getting more powerful?
Or is it just a "hundredth-monkey" situation, where enough people have gotten "into" it so that it's now chic?
I don't know, but the number of people connected to the Internet, and the quality of their connections, and the quantity of information moving over the network, continues to increase. I've had access for only eight years, but in that time, I've seen an amazing increase in the amount of stuff that happens on the network. For instance, on my favorite Internet service, Usenet, I can recall when I could read most all the articles in one day. Today, there are over 9600 topics on Usenet (it'll be ten thousand by the time the book is printed!), and many of them contain enough articles to keep you busy for several hours.
As the network grows and grows, the users (and their interfaces) need to grow more sophisticated just to be able to keep up with the flood of information. To be a "power user" these days, you need finely-honed skills that let you find the information or service or discussion you want, without having to wade through ten zillion irrelevant things. Just finding the documentation on how to do something (let alone reading possibly hundreds of pages of it) can be a difficult task.
Speaking of reading hundreds of pages, Spot finally managed to teach himself to read by following the self-guided tutorial in GNU EMACS. In just fifty easy lessons, Spot could read like a pro! With newfound enthusiasm, he logged into Dogidy and read the first screenful of text.
Spot was so excited by the availability of billions of bytes of information that he instantly forgot how to read. Poor Spot!