By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

The Ubiquitous Internet

I knew that the Internet was approaching the height of ubiquity when with my plastic Sunday morning newspaper bag, in the special sealed pocket that usually carries a sample of some hair care product or new and improved cereal, there was a CD-ROM for one of the larger Internet service providers. Of course, anyone who has ever indicated to anyone else that they own or use a computer has received an AOL diskette or CD-ROM in the mail. However, a distribution format that occurs randomly throughout neighborhoods,based merely on the premise that people might be able to read, represents a first in the ascendance of the Internet as a staple of American culture.

Such a development is not surprising. It has been reported recently that over 50% of U.S. households have a computer (which includes mine, where there is at least one computer and sometimes two or three for each family member, including the dog). Add the Web TV units which can be had for around the same price as a color TV and devices such as the self-contained e-mail units marketed by such firms as Southwestern Bell, and you realize that the Internet is quickly taking its place beside the numerous other appliances which are absolutely necessary for maintaining the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.

Maintaining the Style

This year, the popular media has discovered Internet-based commerce. Spurred by retailers’ scrambles to grab every dollar possible in this consumption-powered economy, you see URLs in newspaper ads and flyers. URLs are promoted in TV and radio spots. Some radio stations even have "news shows" devoted to reporting on the Internet, which at close examination, are little more than extended advertisements for Internet commerce sites.

It’s ironic that what is being seen in the popular media as the impact of the Internet is really an insignificant extension of a long-standing commercial practice. Internet retailing is just the next century’s Sears catalog. You see an item or its description, you can transact commerce, and you can arrange for delivery from a remote location. Wow. It’s the 1890s all over again. The only difference today is that if you want to pay a stiff premium, you might be able to cut down on the delivery time, since a jet plane can travel faster than a steam train.

The true impact of the Internet will likely occur through a series of much more subtle developments. The translation of traditional activities to the Internet are useful, but not necessarily significant. It is the increasingly invisible ubiquity of the Internet which will spur significant change in the course of our lives within a technological culture.

It’s the Protocol…

To understand the possibilities of this subtle change, you need to look below the surface and see how the Internet operates. Boil away a whole bunch of the technological broth from the Internet soup, and you are left with a couple of concepts at the bottom of the pot. The Internet consists of various services. Services are each supported by their own protocol. It’s the protocols that we know as that Internet alphabet soup: HTTP, FTP, NNTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP, etc.

An Internet protocol is simply an agreed upon set of methods for communication. The methods are sufficiently specified and sufficiently public so that two different programmers on two different computers can write two different programs that can easily exchange information. It’s the easy exchange of information that makes the Internet useful. It’s the easy exchange of information that lies at focus of the Internet’s potential power to influence change.

A Defining Concept

A service just came to my attention which is a good illustration of the implications of a protocol. You can find out about it by visiting http://www.dict.org/ . This is the home site of the Internet dictionary protocol, known as DICT. To quote the RFC (that’s alphabet soup for Request for Comment, a document type where protocols are publicly defined), "The Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT) is a TCP transaction based query/response protocol that allows a client to access dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary databases" (see ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2229.txt).

You might say, "So you can look up words over the Internet… I’ve got a dictionary in my word processor… what’s the big deal?" The big deal is how a protocol supports the transfer of information. It is not limited to an application. It is not limited to an operating system. It is not limited to a particular hardware platform. The dictionary protocol will support the lookup of words from anywhere on the Internet in multiple dictionaries on a dictionary server anywhere on the Internet.

Now, you could argue the epistemological benefits of having a dictionary at all. After all, before there were printed books, educated people were much better at using the long term memory capability of their brains. These days, it takes a written list for most people to buy more than five items at the grocery store. However, the bottom line is that we have placed much of our collective knowledge in books. If you own these books or have a library close at hand, then such a scheme supports your use of intellect fairly well.

The problem comes when you want to access the information from a location that is not a library. I don’t know many people who walk around with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in their pocket (insert your own Mae West line here). With today’s storage technology, it is possible to fit such reference volumes on a device that can fit in your pocket. But even storage technology is limited and requires you to constantly maintain the information to be sure it is up to date. If a dictionary service is available via a dictionary protocol, then you potentially have access to one or many dictionaries anywhere that you have access to the Internet. The dictionary information can be maintained for you and you can use a number of appliances to access that information.

We are just seeing the tip of the Internet ubiquity iceberg. Cellular phones which can double as World Wide Web browsers are now available for purchase. They represent just the beginning of the freeing of the Internet from desktop computers. Maybe dictionaries aren’t as interesting to you as they are to me, but the protocol supports any kind of natural language dictionary database. This could include technical terms, programming language references, recipes, part catalogs, etc. Internet protocols provide any information anywhere. That is the power of the Internet to make a real impact on how we live our lives.

The Bottom Line

I guess there are some who primarily value the Internet for its commercial potential. Call me an optimist, but I’d like to believe that true value lies in what we can produce, not what we can consume. It is our intellectual products that distinguish us as a species. Technology is a product of intellect. Now, technology supports intellect.

So, you can say I’m not all that excited about being able to buy stuff on the Internet. I get much more excited about arcane topics such as an Internet dictionary protocol. Still, if you are one of those excited about Internet commerce, you will want to investigate my latest product idea, which will make an excellent gift. Coming to a Web site near you, it’s an Internet bread slicer. It’s the greatest thing since… well, you get the idea.

Comments, Questions? Send them to Philip Baczewski.