© 1994 by Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 16, no. 5, May 1994, pp. 49-50.
No matter what you call it, the National Information Infrastructure or Information Superhighway or (quick!) a better, more manageable term – no matter what you call it, this is a Good Thing. The national datanet should provide the average citizen with staggering amounts of information, readily available at little or no cost. The world will be transformed.
Maybe. The United States pioneered free public libraries, and public schools. Staggering amounts of information is already available, at little or no cost. Yet only a minority have library cards, and a much smaller segment of that minority actually know how to use a library effectively.
This doesn’t mean that a national datanet, or even public schools and libraries, are bad, or without worth. It does mean that “at little or no cost” isn’t the same as “with little or no effort.” Learning takes work. Learning is expensive.
Sometimes, learning is dangerous. But learning about the danger can be fun, especially if it poses as fiction.
Evil on the Net
The link between science and science fiction is often quite strong. Often the link is negative — “whatever this is, it has nothing to do with science.” But sometimes the link is visionary. Even darkly visionary, as in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep.
In the far future, at the edge of the Milky Way in the High Beyond, a group of ambitious humans uncover an archive, buried for millions, perhaps billions, of years. But after the archive awakens, it proves to be a trans-human artificial intelligence, and a destroyer of worlds. It is the Blight.
And the most cataclysmic blight imaginable. It spreads by means of The Net, the galactic-wide superluminal web of data and intelligence uniting civilizations and races. Not only does The Net carry information, it also provides the basic foundation for communication between intelligent plants, animals and maybe a few sentient gases. But The Net is also known as The Net of a Million Lies, and this well-founded distrust becomes a tool of The Blight as it seeks to dominate the galaxy.
And then there’s Chapter Two…
Vinge, a highly respected computer scientist, crafts a story of incredible depth, and astonishing clarity. He also throws in some wicked, wicked humor – humor you’ll appreciate a bit more if you’ve ever read even a few Usenet messages. For the Internet, the National Information Superhighway, is a stepping stone to the galactic Net described by Vinge.
When you recover from A Fire Upon The Deep, stop by your local library and track down his 1981 novella, True Names. You’ll never look at your computer the same way again.
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep. TOR: 1992. 613 pp. $5.99. ISBN 0-812-51528-5
Who Am I? And Why Am I Here?
While Vinge’s book has just a few well-crafted, memorable characters, The 1994 Internet White Pages has over 100,000 characters, more than even a Russian novel. Alas, these characters aren’t crafted very well at all, for this volume has all the charm of a phone book, and a similar purpose.
Internet White Pages attempts to solve an interesting problem: how do you get someone’s electronic mail address on the Internet? While a bulletin board or a local area network E-mail system usually has a way to look up the names of users, the Internet has no such function. If you want someone’s address, you either ask them for it, or you stumble across their address by accident.
Seth Godin and James S. McBride found this inadequate, so they used some utilities to create a cross-reference of over 100,000 Internet addresses. First there is an alphabetical index (Charters, Lawrence referenced to lcharters@tcs.wap.org), then a domain index (the same information, but indexed by address instead of name). ”The 1994 Internet White Pages is your guide to the Internet. It gives you instant access to everyone from John Doe to Bill Gates – all you need to know is their last name or the company they work for.”
OK, let’s check it out. There are three entries for Gates, Bill – and none of them are for the billionaire. The domain listing does have bgates@microsoft.com, which is promising. But no John Sculley. No Guy Kawasaki, one of the most famous E-mail junkies. No Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs.
There is a Bill Clinton, but he doesn’t live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Al Gore, Mr. Information Superhighway, does make it (though there is no domain entry), and there are two entries for Santa Claus. But it is doubtful you’ll find too many other recognizable names. And that’s about all there is to this book: over 800 pages of names, in four columns of fine print.
I have at least a dozen Internet Email addresses; none of them (including the example shown above) are included. I also struck out on virtually everyone I know at computer companies and telecommunications firms. In fact, not even the authors of the book are listed, except in the preface!
Though a worthy attempt, and even technically interesting, the resulting book represents at best a prototype. As a guess, there are perhaps 10 million Internet users, so the 100,000 addresses in this volume are but a tiny fraction of the whole. The Internet is a constantly expanding, constantly changing entity, and any printed directory will be nothing more than a quaint artifact by the time it is published and offered for sale. There is an effort to create a standardized, automated address book called, ironically enough, “white pages,” but this effort is also in its infancy.
James S. McBride and Seth Godin, The Internet White Pages. IDG Books, 1994. xxiv, 812 pp. $29.95. ISBN 1- 56884-300-3.