Surfing the Internet, Then, Now, Later.

Like the Land of Oz, cyberspace was originally the invention of a writer, the science-fiction novelist William Gibson. While Oz remains the domain of a wizard and a little girl from Kansas, however, cyberspace has leapt off the page to become a subject of wide public interest and debate. As both a dream and a reality, it has sparked renewed discussion about the social and economic assumptions underlying our present means of communication, as well as the role of technology in our lives. By the beginning of 1995, there was a growing consensus that cyberspace had become a region that could significantly affect the structure of our economies, the development of our communities, and the protection of our rights as free citizens.1.2 NOVELSGibson's cyberspace, as described in his book Neuromancer (1984) and several later novels, was an artificial environment created by computers. Unlike a motion picture, which presents moving images on a flat surface, a cyberspatial environment would convey realistic detail in three dimensions and to all five senses. It would also allow for a degree of face-to-face intimacy between people in remote places. In one of Gibson's novels, for instance, a woman "meets" a mysterious financier outside a cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, though in fact she is sitting alone in an office in Brussels. Research continues into ways of realizing this type of cyberspatial experience, which has come to be known as virtual reality. By 1994 virtual reality machines had begun to appear in amusement parks and shopping malls, though a full experience of Gibson's vision has so far been frustrated by the crude state of the technology and by the physical disorientation, bordering on nausea, that some machines provoke. Moreover, users of virtual reality devices are usually communicating not with others but only with the computer.1.3 CYBERSPACE AND NETWORKSCyberspace as a present reality has come to be associated primarily with networks of computers linked through telephone lines. The biggest and most familiar of these, the Internet, was developed in the 1970s to assist U.S. military and academic research. As recently as 1990, the Internet was almost unknown to the general public. By the end of 1995, however, the network had absorbed millions of users with no affiliations to defence institutions or universities. The volume of exchanges between these users, who numbered at least 20 million-30 million in 1995, surpassed 30 terabytes per month, or enough information to fill 30 million books of 700 pages each. For many of those involved in these exchanges--and for millions more who have no experience of computer networks--cyberspace and the Internet have become nearly synonymous terms.1.4 HYBRID MEDIUMThe Internet is a hybrid medium, combining aspects of the printing press, the telephone, the public bulletin board, and the private letter. It also permits crude radio and television transmission without the physical plant required by conventional broadcasting. Indeed, some commentators have predicted that the Internet or a successor network will eventually absorb the functions of television, telephone, and conventional publishing. They speak of an "information superhighway," a term coined in 1992 by then senator Al Gore, Jr., to refer to a unified, interactive system of electronic communication. The prospect of such a system, with the capacity to deliver an unprecedented range of informational services to the home, school, or office, has provoked a flurry of strategic alliances between major commercial interests in the telephone, software-programming, and entertainment industries. By 1995 the business world was beginning to regard the largely non-commercial Internet as the electronic equivalent of China: a huge, ever-growing, and virtually untapped market.