It all started with a bit of desk
cleaning. That sort of thing always uncovers treasures of one sort
or another, and this time it was a couple of very dated internet items.
The first is a 132 page booklet (in English) reprinted and distributed
in Israel by MACHBA - the university computing center. It's titled Internet
- Accessible Library Catalogs & Databases and is dated May 21,
1992. Six years ago isn't exactly ancient history, though in this case
it certainly seems that way. In the introduction to the booklet we learn
that it contains:
The second item that gave impetus to this column was from two and a
half years later: October and November, 1994: a printed out set of the
now famous Roadmap to the Internet sessions, and a digital copy
of the same lessons. By the end of November, 1994, the internet was already
well on the way toward becoming a well known phenomenon. In his introduction
to the first Roadmap lesson Patrick Crispen writes:
Roadmap was a series of introductory (27 in all)
lessons about the internet sent via an e-mail listserv to thousands of
readers throughout the world. (Since then undoubtedly thousands more have
read archived copies
of it.) Those 27 lessons covered a great deal of territory: listservs,
usenet (newsgroups), anonymous ftp sites, gophers, and even ... (two, count
them, two lessons) the World Wide Web (the name Mosaic gets thrown in a
few times). Browsers were truly in their infancy then, so it's perhaps
not surprising that much of one of the WWW lessons is devoted to: How
to access the Web by telnet. Though the Web got only two lessons, the
Roadmap guide was quite aware that something special
was in the works.
Make no mistake about it: Roadmap was cutting edge then. Yes, that's
five years ago, and I've already admitted that five years can be a number
of generations for computers, but still, a bit of retrospection can be
a fascinating thing: This is the way our ancestors went about trying to
find information?
But as interesting as this stroll down memory lane might be (and I have
to admit that many of them belong more to collective memory than to personal
memory - when I started getting involved with this tool the first version
of Netscape had already been released), the question begs to be asked:
what's the point in all this? I think that there are two answers to that
question.
First, an ongoing debate that flames up every
so often argues the logic and/or worth of search engines. Numerous persons
(why is it that for some reason I always get the impression that they're
usually part of a previous intellectual elite?), tell us that finding information
via a search engine is a tedious and illogical task that makes the internet
more or less useless. Of course I have to
admit that often, particularly after a lengthy search that produces nothing
that corresponds to what I was looking for, I find myself wondering what's
the point in all this. But then I reflect on how far we've advanced in
such a short time in the realm of accessing information, and I'm convinced
that there's both logic and worth.
The other is a more personal answer. I've already mentioned my desk.
It's much smaller than the internet, but I can't find anything on it either.
I'm always saving something that I trust will one day be useful, but of
course when I need it I can no longer find it. My dream is that, with enhanced
access technologies, the internet will become a vast reservoir of everything
such that I won't have to save anything on my desk. Instead, I'll be able
to save everything in the vast messiness of cyberspace, and finally find
myself with a clean desk.
That's it for this edition. Reactions and suggestions
can be sent to:
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From the Boidem -
an occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday
life
September 23, 1998*:
Frankly, I don't recall my parents every telling me this
sort of thing, but it's the sort of thing that's become part of popular
folklore: how hard life used to be before the advent of the wonderful technological
tools that make our lives so "easy". I guess it's sort of like a distant
cousin to "finish your food, children in India are starving" which I doubt
that I ever heard either. Parents tell their kids that in order to get
to school they had to trek through kilometers of snow, carrying heavy
school bags; or that instead of playing computer games all afternoon
they had to mow the lawn and perform various other household tasks. I don't
know about this, but I get the impression that when we talk with our kids
we convince ourselves that we really had unhappy childhoods. But that's
not the subject of this column. The subject is what we had to go through
a few years ago (how many computer generations is that?) in order to find
information on the internet.
... a listing of over 100 online library catalogs and
databases available within the United States and beyond. It contains listings
of U.S. and international library catalogs and databases, dial-up libraries,
Campus-Wide Online Information Systems, and bulletin board systems.
Back in 1992 compiling a booklet like this was apparently
a formidable task, and there's no question that what we have here is a
significant contribution to the academic community that has always been
in need of access to professional information housed at remote sources.
But what's most fascinating is the fact that the methods available for
accessing the information are, to today's eyes, so primitive. Almost every
library has a unique system and a special code for reaching it and retrieving
the information that can be found there. An example
should shed some light on the subject.
Alright, it's not really that difficult. Most
of the libraries are accessible via telnet, which though still readily
available isn't very common among internet users today. Today we either
browse the web or send e-mail. But telnet? I admit that I use it to access
the TAU library, or to search for titles at other university libraries
in Israel, but whenever I tell people that I do this sort of thing they
can't understand why someone would want to look at a black and white computer
screen and click his or her way through primitive looking menus. There
are, it seems to me, two reasons for that sort of attitude. First, we're
talking about locating information, but not necessarily accessing the information
itself. I can find that a book is on the library's shelves, but I can't
read the book itself, and the web has made us so used to getting information
served up on a platter that there's no attraction in simply finding that
something is available.. And second, and perhaps more significantly, using
the internet has become an experience - a state of mind. We expect something
to always be happening on the screen; we want to be able to freely click
away. Thus we resist the idea of meeting only black and white text on a
stationary screen. (And by now many, if not most, of the
catalogs have been put on the web and are thus much more readily accessible.)
According to a recent poll by Louis Harris and Associates, thirty-four
percent of the adults in America have recently seen, heard, or read something
about the mysterious "Information Superhighway." Sixty percent even said
that they thought that the Information Superhighway is a really neat idea,
even though they have absolutely no idea what it is.
One third of the adult population actually sounds like a rather large percentage
for back then. And "back then" is probably the only time when adults were
more aware of the internet than children. Truly, connecting to the internet
was very different then, as this snippet from lesson 3 suggests:
The one bad thing about PPP and SLIP connections is that they are
a relatively scarce commodity. Not many Internet service providers offer
PPP and SLIP connections, but the number of providers offering PPP and
SLIP connections will certainly increase over time :).
Put fairly simply, the internet wouldn't be what we know it today without
PPP and SLIP connections. And it certainly wasn't what it is today back
then.