[Off-Topic] A View from the Past About the Internet
I’m opening some really old backups, work I’ve kept from 1995 to 2001, half a decade of history. On my Facebook page there are some examples I just posted. When I was in college, I started writing a book (which I never finished or published) about computing in general and about the early days of the Internet.
The text below is exactly as I left it in a Word file, on August 3, 1996, at 9:52 in the morning, named “CAP12.DOC”. See how I saw the Internet 17 years ago.
Sales on the Internet
Forewords
The real Cold War, in the 60s, wasn’t being fought in the field, with soldiers and planes, but in research laboratories funded by the government, and universities were already equipped with the best computing resources available. It was thought that the ability to create and maintain technological advantages over the adversary would determine the winner of the conflict.
The idea of connecting these centers, aiming at the exchange of information, began to be developed. However, a determining factor was assigned to the choice of the network technology that would make the connection of the strategic centers viable: the information had to keep flowing, even under the worst conditions, such as a nuclear attack.
ARPA ( Advanced Research Projects Agency ) and the DoD ( Department of Defense ) were delegated the responsibility of developing the best alternative for integrating the information centers.
A few years later, ARPA would change its name to DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ), starting a plan called the Internetting Project to investigate the possible forms of connection between packet-switched networks. As a result of this project and the studies of the INWG ( InterNetwork Working Group ), the two basic protocols of the Internet were developed and presented. In 1974, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn presented IP ( Internet Protocol ) and TCP ( Transmission Control Protocol ). These two protocols specified the way in which messages ( files or commands ) would be transferred between computers on the Internet.
Numbers
To understand the importance of the Internet in every sense: social, political, and financial, one needs to see who navigates the Internet. We’ll base ourselves on the research of John Quarterman, an access provider, consultant, and publisher from Austin, Texas, who researches the composition of the Internet population in his Internet Demographic Survey.
One of the things Quarterman has done is define several Internets according to the types of applications running on the servers and the activities of the users. The “core of the Internet” is made up of computers that offer interactive services like FTP, Telnet, or WWW applications. The “consumer Internet” includes people who use the interactive services offered by the core - for example, users who navigate the World Wide Web. The whole of cyberspace, which he labels the “matrix,” is all the users who exchange email with other users. These categories nest inside one another: the matrix includes the consumer Internet, which includes the Core Internet.
One of the problems Quarterman has to face involves virtual hosts. An Internet access provider has to register the domain names for the users, but the addresses actually reside on the provider’s machines. This can lead to misunderstandings, making it seem that people have machines connected to the Internet. This group belongs to the consumer Internet category, and all the mail Quarterman sends to the postmasters at various addresses is in the end grouped under a single host.
“The problem of virtual hosts grew enormously last year ( 1995 ),” said Quarterman. “You can reach a Web site, there really is information there, and it really corresponds to the organization. It is in fact on a computer on the Internet, but it may be the same computer as other domains.”
The most recent survey, for 1995, was published in January 1996. Out of the universe of 45,091 domains, 2.9% ( 1,293 ) responded. In the world of statistics, more than 1,000 responses is a large amount of data, and these responses represent entire organizations, not just users. In this survey, Quarterman estimates that there were 16.9 million users of the core Internet ( more than double the previous year ) and 26.4 million users of the consumer Internet ( again double ); 39 million users ( an increase of 50% ) already had email. Quarterman attributes the increase to the Internet users on the consumer networks ( America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy, and others ).
In the 1995 survey, Quarterman counted 45 thousand machines connected to the Internet. The real number of registered domains exceeded this figure because not all registered domains are used, and some are domains on other networks, such as UUCP, where you can send mail but cannot use interactive Internet services.
The Web is hot, but FTP still outweighs browsing. Quarterman also notices that the use of the Windows operating system is falling, and that Macintoshes ( despite using the Internet Protocol and not the MacOS ) and Unix machines are increasing their share of domain control.
The results are announced and published on the Web site of MIDS ( which publishes the monthly magazines Matrix News and Matrix Maps Quarterly, both in print and online, and sells maps and other information about Internet hosts, users, and other demographic data ). “What we made available to those who answered the questionnaires, and to the Internet as a whole about a month ago, is a result of the answers to each question. We also managed to trace levels of detail between the individual responses ( which are never revealed ) and the summaries. That is how we get some income.”
Speaking of Brazil, the Secretary of Informatics and Automation Policy of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ivan Moura Campos, says Brazil boasts one of the most astonishing growth rates toward cyberspace - we are growing 50% per month. With that we reached a population of 260 thousand cybernauts at the beginning of May this year. To give an idea, if the adoption rate kept up at that speed, by the end of the year the number of Brazilian cybernauts would be 16 million. But the Secretary’s more realistic predictions estimate one million users by the turn of the year.
Advertising
After the microcomputer revolution in the 80s and the spread of computing with “a micro on every desk and in every home,” we had one of the greatest evolutions ever seen in history, where humanity evolved in 10 years what it had not managed to evolve since the Middle Ages, entering the Information Age.
With microcomputers and the Internet, physical borders have been erased, in a place where “countries” and “oceans” no longer have meaning and where physical distances no longer make sense. Virtualization has evolved to such a point that a person living in a country like Brazil can already meet and make friends with people from anywhere in the world, like Australia, for example. Tools like Netscape Inc.’s CoolTalk, which replaces the telephone, or the TimedVideo Grabber, which enables real-time image transmission using a camera, make it possible for people to get to know each other without ever really having to meet in “flesh and blood.”
And speaking of evolution, after 500 years of the absolute reign of print media as a spreader of information, it is being rapidly replaced by digital publications on the World Wide Web, the part of the Internet that most catches attention today.
With pioneering works like the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was thoroughly shaken after print encyclopedias fell into total disuse following the appearance of digital encyclopedias like Microsoft’s Encarta, and also “yellow pages”-style search services like those offered by sites such as Yahoo! or Lycos, the Internet also became the largest data repository ever built, the best place for research one can find.
World-famous magazines like PC Magazine from Ziff Davis Publishing or Playboy already have their publications displayed and updated periodically on the WWW.
The World Wide Web, or WWW, was conceived to give a “face” to the Internet, enabling the editing of graphical sites, unlike the until-then text-based interface ( something similar to the transition from DOS to Windows, for example ). A new scripting language was created, HTML ( Hyper Text Mark-Up Language ), and a specific protocol, HTTP ( Hyper Text Transfer Protocol ). And for navigating these pages, browsers were created, programs made to interpret HTML. Right at the start, two stood out: Netscape with its Netscape Navigator and SpyGlass with its Mosaic. Netscape became more widespread, and SpyGlass sold the Mosaic rights to Microsoft, which today distributes Netscape’s biggest competitor, Internet Explorer, in one of the biggest software distribution campaigns ever seen.
The possibility of editing practically everything that exists in print media quickly drew the world’s attention to the Internet. New concepts began to emerge, such as online publishing. One of the most recent examples is the Atlanta Olympics, where the computing work was handled by IBM, which set up a grand scheme of machines and networks and information distribution over the Internet that can be checked on the Olympics homepage, where the data is updated as soon as it is obtained, so that at the end of each match the homepage can be updated and the whole world has access to it, without having to wait until the next day to read it in the newspapers.
Speaking of newspapers, they are not far behind either, putting much of their daily publications on the WWW, like The Gate, an Internet-based product of two newspapers from the West Coast of the United States, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, complete with conference areas with discussion forums like Community, Media, Sports, Movies, etc.
The Agência Estado, which publishes famous newspapers like Estado de São Paulo, also already distributes its newspaper over the internet with the main headlines of the day and various information, including its classifieds and, during an Olympic period, with special areas for the sports in Atlanta.
Another concept that became famous with the Internet is that of online services like the giants Compuserve and America On-line, which serve people all over the world and have allies like Netscape and Microsoft. This type of organization is based on “services” that include discussion forums; libraries with up-to-date information; magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals; virtual stores that sell everything from CDs to clothes; leisure and business tips; and also services common to the Internet like email and WWW.
In Brazil, such types of service also began to spread, most notably the Folha de São Paulo and the Grupo Abril, which launched, respectively, Universo Online and Brasil Online. Such Brazilian services are still experimental and free, with no projections on costs. As an illustration, The New York Times charges US$ 30.00 per month, and America Online charges US$ 9.95 for 5 hours or US$ 19.95 for 20 hours.
Such services have very high revenues, mainly because of the world’s current excitement around the virtualization of services and the rental of digital space to companies interested in placing “virtual billboards” or even adding other services like digital stores on the main pages, given that the number of people traveling through the digital lines every day is very large. To see this, just go to the Brasil Online page, for example, and come across advertising calls from companies like Sun or Credicard. These calls are links that lead to the homepages of the respective companies.
And speaking of advertising, someone must be crafting these pages and ads. These companies are specializing in designing specific and creative pages for a kind of media that steps out of the limitations of paper and enables things like Hypertext ( words inside a text that lead to other pages ), Marquees ( phrases that move along the line ), music ( through WAVE files or the new Real Audio technology ), animations ( via animated GIF images or else using resources of the Java language ), or even fully three-dimensional environments ( using the VRML - Virtual Reality Markup Language technology ) and much more. In this market niche are companies like Vivid Studio, which has as clients the giants Silicon Graphics and Microsoft, or Razorfish, which designs for Time-Warner and Pepsi.
Commerce
The main point of friction when talking about digital commerce is security. The TCP/IP protocol is the starting point for the Internet, conceived as a universal protocol but one that falls short on the security aspect, where, unlike its siblings IPX/SPX or NetBIOS for example, it does not have encrypted data transmission. Since it is the standard protocol for data transmission, it would have been convenient to establish a standard protocol for data security as well. Since this does not exist, the impasse revolves around companies fighting to develop the standard that would cause the initial surge toward the end of printed money and the development of digital credit.
One of the oldest is cybercash, about a year old. For now, the company only works with credit card services, but it soon promises to offer monetary payment services. Currently, with a browser connected to the network, one can shop securely in virtual malls. Through the SIPS ( Secure Internet Payment Service ) protocol, according to the company, it is as easy as point and click. In this type of transaction, you buy as many cybercashes as you wish and it is charged to the credit card.
The Cybercash standard supports all types of credit card. It uses the 768-bit RSA and 56-bit DES encryption standards. All transactions are authenticated with MDS and 768-bit RSA signatures. The first step for anyone interested is to download the free program the company offers. The Cybercash server is connected to the private networks of several banks. The company’s initial services include credit and debit cards and an electronic payment system. For the services, users pay a modest amount, comparable to the value of a stamp. For the suppliers, the system represents savings on the fees charged for credit card transactions, due to the risk still present in transactions by telephone and email.
In this type of development one still finds companies like Digicash, with services centered on the First Digital Bank site, using an e-cash system ( real money converted into virtual money in virtual accounts ). Visa ( which is also already a partner of Sony - in developing a multifaceted environment of entertainment, information, and commercial transactions ) and Microsoft have STT ( Secure Transaction Technology ), the standard of these two powerhouses that wants to become an electronic version of the credit card. Mastercard is in partnership with IBM, Netscape, GTE, and Cybercash, with the SEPP ( Secure Eletronic Payment Protocol ) standard. It is an open protocol for secure online transactions.
Netscape develops the open security protocol SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer ) and contributes to the development of the SSL interface of the W3C ( World Wide Web Consortium ), a European consortium dedicated to creating a standard for the European Common Market. About 50 companies from all over the world are part of this consortium. The company will license the SSL technology to its partners for commercial use. The list of partners includes MCI, Bank of America, Mastercard, First Data Corporation, Novell, Digital, and Silicon Graphics.
Practically all the companies in the financial sector have been investing heavily in developing a platform secure and reliable enough for financial transactions of every level of importance. Hackers aside, business over the Internet does not differ much from that done outside it. That is, the best way to stay free of problems is to trust in the credibility of serious companies. It is unlikely that anyone will want to compromise their good name by failing to deliver the goods on time or by “trading” the credit card number.
In Brazil, Mappin was the first large company to enter the business of computer sales. It is also possible to choose sweets and pies at Confeitaria Brunella in São Paulo, or make reservations at Marcellu’s Bar in Rio de Janeiro. The consumer chooses the sweet or pie they want to buy through the photos and descriptions on Brunella’s homepage, then the store telephones to confirm the order and sends the goods. In the case of Marcellu’s Bar, the reservation is made by email.
If someone is moving to the United States, or simply needs to compare prices, they can consult the For Sail By Owner Connection. It is a site specialized in home sales, with photos and specifications. If you actually need to sell your house, you can also advertise on this page.
Thinking about travel, Cruisin is the first tourism agency specialized in cruises that serves exclusively over the Internet. But there are already many hotels and agencies on the network. There really are alternatives for every bank limit: from Ceará cashews for less than R$ 3.00 to a house in Florida for US$ 329 thousand. These days it is virtually possible to buy anything on the Internet.
Afterwords
Created for military purposes, then expanded to academic circles, and finally reaching the general public, the Internet marches on in accelerated evolution, covering practically all sectors of society, where the foundations of what can be considered a virtual world are being built.
When the Internet evolves enough, the new technologies will build the awaited Information Super Highway where, then yes, a truly worldwide network will take shape, using not only computers in the way we know them but also any electronic equipment, like set-top boxes ( the replacements for VCRs and video-lasers ).
In this next generation, “strolling around” will be putting on a virtual reality suit and visiting virtual places with friends from other continents in a digital meeting. And this is not science fiction delusions: we are so close to it that such technologies are real and already exist, all that remains is the time to make them accessible and operational at the level of mass distribution.