Not Yet Net

by James Fallows

HOW out of it should you feel if you’re not connected to the Internet? Not very. A few years from now high-speed Internet connections will be common, especially for the professional class. But for the moment most of what’s valuable about the Internet is available elsewhere with much less bother. Using the Internet remains harder than most other feats in computerdom. If you work at a university or a corporation that already has full Internet access, you’re all set. If you don’t, your desire to say that you, too, have surfed the Net can be thwarted by the system’s architecture.

Unlike most telephone transmissions, the Internet works on a “packet-switching” protocol. A packet-switching network is so decentralized that it is practically indestructible—the reason the Defense Department paid to create and expand the Internet, starting in the 1960s. Each message sent over the Internet is broken into its constituents—that is, into small units of data, or “packets.” Each packet that is sent from your computer may take its own independent path to its destination, through different phone lines and connected computer networks. On arrival the packets, from a few to many hundreds, are reassembled into a complete message.

This is a technical marvel, and it keeps the entire network as bottleneck-free as possible, since each packet follows a path that is, at the instant it departs, less crowded than all the others. But the Internet’s version of packet-switching doesn’t work on normal “dial-up” phone connections like those used by such mainstream services as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online. Anyone with a computer, a phone line, and a modem can use one of these dial-up services. But it’s hard to make a direct connection to the Internet without arranging for special service from a local Internet provider. For the record, the necessary service is SLIP (“serial line Internet protocol”) or PPP (“point-to-point protocol”). In addition, your computer must be able to run packet-switching software known as TCP/IP, for “transmission control protocol/Internet protocol.”

FORTUNATELY, the services you can use with a normal dial-up line allow you to do most of what you would want to do if you were on the Internet. Of the four main categories of online activity, the three most important are now possible through mainstream online services.

By far the most important electronic function is E-mail, which is changing the way the world works almost as much as the telephone did. Yes, E-mail has its drawbacks. The addresses look ugly on your stationery and business card. People are tempted to log on neurotically to see if there’s anything in the in-box. E-mail adds to the distractions of modern life, because people often respond to E-mail messages and message-senders they would otherwise ignore. Still, the telephone has far worse side effects, and both it and E-mail are here to stay.

E-mail is of course available from any online service, and it has recently changed in a profound but underpublicized way. Even two years ago the reach of many E-mail services was limited mainly to other people on the same service. If you were enrolled in MCIMail, you could easily send messages to other MCIMail users—but not, without problems, to someone on America Online or a university network. Now E-mail has the equivalent of international direct dialing, with the “@" symbol as a way of reaching addressees on any network. The worst reminder of the old days is how difficult it is to send anything other than normal text messages (program files, say, or documents in the format used by a particular word-processing program) to people on other networks.

THE next most important electronic function is bulletin boards and online discussion groups. These sound frivolous to people who haven’t explored them, and part of their role is to satisfy the basic human demand for frivolity. (I can’t help following a discussion about the Fox-network program The X-Files, in which debate rages about whether the show is losing its stylish Twilight Zone-like edge as it becomes a mainstream hit.) But the boards can be of great practical value. There is no better way to solve a computer problem than to post a question about it on the CompuServe forum. Even more than E-mail, bulletin boards allow for a kind of interaction that simply was not possible before: the pooling of people with common interests from widely scattered corners of the globe. I rely for computer advice on four people I’ve never met, who live in central Ohio, central Texas, Vancouver, and Sydney. The closest counterparts to these “virtual communities” in the pre-online age were subscription lists for magazines, but the members of such communities had no way of reaching one another.

Bulletin boards on the Internet come in several varieties. The two main ones are “newsgroups,” in which members post messages for others to read, and “mailing lists,” whose members send messages in the form of E-mail to all other members. In these areas the commercial online services are actually an improvement over a direct connection to the Internet. CompuServe has the best “threading” system for its message boards, making it easy to follow the subjects that matter to you. America Online has done the most aggressive and successful job of recruiting magazines to host discussion groups. (This magazine operates a forum on AOL.) Since the middle of last year AOL has also made it easy for its members to join newsgroups and mailing lists on the Internet itself, again without the headache of SLIP or PPP.

THE third important function is finding graphic, program, or text files on a remote computer and transferring them to your machine, by means of what the Internet world knows as FTP (“file transfer protocol”) and Gopher services. FTP transfers files from a site whose electronic address you already know. Gopher is a way of locating the right site. For instance, if you instruct Gopher to look for information about “earthquake,” it will bring up a list of computer centers in California, Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere, whose directories you can search until you find what you want. (The name Gopher refers to the origin of this software at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers. In a typically lame bit of nerd humor, the system will “go pher” the information you need.) Software companies increasingly make updates and bug fixes available for transfer through FTP. You can receive them instantly rather than waiting for a disk in the mail. I have texts of old presidential speeches gathered from the White House FTP site. FTP is also the basis of the thriving pornographic-picture exchange over the Internet. Like the Internet’s bulletin boards, its FTP and Gopher functions are easily accessible through America Online and Prodigy, and can be used in a slightly more cumbersome way through CompuServe.

THIS leaves the fourth online function, which is the most appealing but (for now) has the least compelling practical use. You know you’re really an Internetage person when you can use the Web.

The World-Wide Web, as I explained briefly last year ("Networking,” July, 1994, Atlantic), is a graphics-based system that reduces the world’s interconnected computers to what look like a series of Macintosh or Windows display screens. Each “home page” on the Web is full of icons or highlighted phrases that will lead you to some other screen. A Web screen differs from other Internet features in relying far more on graphics, much the way a Macintosh differed from an early IBM computer. Some pages—from museums, for instance—may be full-color and nearly full-screen renderings of works of art. The home page for Thomas, the new Web site for the Library of Congress’s legislative information, displays a small graytone rendering of Thomas Jefferson along with menus for searching the library’s vast archives. HotWired, a Web-based offshoot of Wired magazine, has shocking-pink and neon-green icons that lead to various discussion areas, serialized novels, and many other features; graphics and content seem less at war in HotWired than in the original magazine. Using the programming language for Web pages, called HTML (“hypertext markup language”), you can even create icons that, when you click on them, will play music or produce digitized speech.

Dozens of new sites seem to come onto the Web each day. Government and academic facilities were the Web’s original base; now a huge boom among commercial organizations is under way. You can order flowers on the Web, after looking at photographs of various bouquets. You can see maps of vineyards in California or Australia and order wine produced there. Sooner or later the Web will certainly be the main electronic-information conveyor.

You can do all this with the original Web “browser,” which is a program called Mosaic, or with any of a number of analogues and offshoots. The best known of them is Netscape, which was designed by Mosaic’s main creator and, like Mosaic itself, is available free to individual users. (You can download Netscape by FTP from the site ftp://ftp.mcom.com. Commercial users and large computer centers have to pay.) Mosaic was created at the federally supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois, and has been available as a free, public-domain program. (You can get it from the site ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu.) The University of Illinois has licensed its technology, and dozens of other enterprises are now rushing for shares of what will eventually he a huge Web-browser market.

You cannot, however, easily do anything involving the Web over normal telephone lines. If you want to use the Web, your main options are to arrange a SLIP or PPP connection or to buy the new version of IBM’s operating system, called OS/2 Warp. Warp comes not only with a builtin Mosaic-like Web browser, called Web Explorer, but also with TCP/IP software that lets a normal telephone line handle Internet-style packet-switching. (A program called SlipKnot does the same thing for Windows, though more slowly.)

If you don’t want to take either of these options (and choosing Warp involves bucking the conventional wisdom that it is about to be quashed by Microsoft’s Windows 95), you can wait for the online services to develop full Web connections. Prodigy was the first to offer a Web browser. early this year. America Online says that its version should be functioning by the end of this month. CompuServe has promised one but has not named a specific date.

In the meantime, you can console yourself by remembering the drawbacks of the Web. The main one is the other side of the Web’s strength: its reliance on icons and graphics. Little pictures make the screen look bright, but because images take so long to transmit, they can also make Web browsing agonizingly slow. In fact, the best browsing software, including Netscape and Warp’s Web Explorer, allows you to cut off the graphics before they come lumbering down the line. When I log onto Thomas to read the text of the Contract With America, I can get a textonly menu of search options in two or three seconds—or I can wait twenty or thirty seconds for the little portrait of Jefferson to be drawn. And this is with a modem operating at 14,400 bits per second.

The other problem with the Web is the sheer popularity of the Internet. For all the genius of the packet-switching system, traffic is growing so much faster than capacity that the entire system is showing signs of rush-hour gridlock. (America Online, which tripled its user base in 1994, has also added customers faster than capacity and suffers brownouts more often than the other services.) When getting constant busy signals from local access numbers or failing to connect to popular Web sites, I amuse myself with the old joke about the restaurant no one goes to anymore because it’s so crowded. Congestion affects everything that happens on the Internet, from E-mail to file transfers, but its impact is magnified for the Web by the extra burden of transmitting graphics.

Sooner or later these problems will work themselves out, as high-speed modems become cheap and plentiful and as phone systems install higher-capacity lines with built-in packet-switching support. When that happens, you’ll be able to use the Internet almost without noticing, as many people use E-mail today. Until then, don’t worry. If you’re one of the millions of subscribers the big online services brag about, you’re not missing that much.