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... k of what is already routine that would have been considered
impossible just ten years ago. You can browse through the holdings of
your local library -- or of libraries halfway around the world -- do your
banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all through a
computer and modem.
Imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever
more powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of
people. The Net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases
and other information sources, is no longer limited to the
industrialized nations of the West; today the web extends from Siberia
to Zimbabwe. The cost of computers and modems used to plug into the Net,
meanwhile, continue to plummet, making them ever more affordable.
Cyberspace has become a vital part of millions of people's daily
lives.
People form relationships online, they fall in love, they get
married, all because of initial contacts in cyberspace, that ephemeral
``place'' that transcends national and state boundaries. Business
deals are transacted entirely in ASCII. Political and social
movements begin online, coordinated by people who could be thousands
of miles apart.
Yet this is only the beginning.
We live in an age of communication, yet the various media we use
to talk to one another remain largely separate systems.
One day,
however, your monrovia email hosting telephone, TV, fax machine and personal computer will be
replaced by a single ``information processor'' linked to the worldwide
Net by strands of optical fiber.
Beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your
fingertips. Linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people,
you'll be able to participate in social and political movements across
the cambridge email hosting country and around the world.
How does this happen? In part, it will come about through new
technologies. High-definition television will require the development
of inexpensive computers that can process as much information as
today's workstations. Telephone and cable companies will cooperate, or
in some cases compete, to bring those fiber-optic cables into your monrovia email hosting home.
The Clinton administration, arguably the first led by people who cambridge email hosting
know how to use not only computer networks but computers, is pushing for
creation of a series of "information superhighways" email hosting co. louth comparable in scope
to the Interstate highway system of the 1950s (one of whose champions in
the Senate has a son elected vice president in 1992).
Right now, we are in the network equivalent of the early 1950s,
just before the creation of that massive highway network. Sure, there are
plenty of interesting things out there, but you have to meander along
two-lane roads, and have a good map, to get to them.
Creation of this new Net will require more than just high-speed
channels and routing equipment; it will require a new communications
paradigm: the Net as information utility. The Net remains a somewhat
complicated and mysterious place. To get something out of the Net today,
you have to spend a fair amount of time with a Net veteran or a manual
like this. You have to learn such arcana as the vagaries of the Unix cd
command.
Contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides email hosting colchester access to
large amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network
such as Prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse
clicks.
Internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all
people want to learn the intricacies of Unix, and that that fact does
not make them bad people.
We are already seeing the development of
simple interfaces that will put the Net's power to use by millions of
people. You can already see their influence in the menus of gophers and
the World-Wide Web, which require no complex computing skills but which
open the gates to thousands of information resources. Mail programs and
text editors cambridge email hosting such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older
programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity.
Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating
graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet just by
clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor,
sort of the ... |
