The Times Higher Education Supplement
Page Books 25
Copyright (C) The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2000

 BOOKS:                                                               14 Jul
00
 #91  Sex and drugs and serious thought.

   By Tony Durham

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET. By John
Naughton. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 336pp, Pounds 18.99 ISBN 0 297
64330 4

John Naughton, an Open University lecturer, used to write an
excellent television column for The Observer. He now writes an
internet column in which his wonderment at the new medium alternates
with scorn for those who, because they do not understand the net,
think they can abuse it, exploit it or dominate it.

A recent target has been Jack Straw, the home secretary whose
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (RIP) could have meant jail
for anyone who lost the key to their encrypted files. The protest was
belatedly taken up by other national papers when the bill was already
in the House of Lords. Naughton's anger over RIP is easier to
understand when you have read his book. It is the story of the
imagination, invention and sheer hard work that went into this
greatest of 20th-century social inventions: an open, transnational
communication medium whose core values are freedom of speech and the
gift economy.

Democratic it is not. The internet in its early days was ruthlessly
meritocratic. Naughton tells how Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the
worldwide web as a tool for furthering serious research
communications, had a row with Marc Andreessen in 1993, over his
Mosaic web browser, which could show pictures. Berners-Lee regarded
this as desperately frivolous. Yet it was precisely this feature that
caught the world's imagination and initiated the web's phenomenal
growth.

This was not the first clash between elitist and populist views of
the net. In the previous decade, the net's snobs tried and failed to
control the anarchic, nonstop, global electronic discussions known as
Usenet newsgroups. In the early days of Usenet, messages were
propagated between computers running the popular Unix operating
system, using dial-up phone connections. But control of Usenet fell
into the hands of a group of big computer sites with superior
communications, nicknamed the Backbone Cabal. When Brian Reid created
the alt.sex and alt.drugs newsgroups on April 3 1988, he cleverly
ensured that the messages would find alternative routes. The Backbone
Cabal, which did not think sex and drugs were suitable topics for
discussion, could do nothing. "At the time," Reid later recalled, "I
didn't yet realise that alt groups were immortal and could not be
killed by anyone."

Equally immortal is Fidonet. Launched in California in 1983, Fidonet
was even more grassroots than Usenet since it used personal computers
rather than professional Unix systems - it still has 3 million users.
Naughton comments: "At a time when governments and multinational
corporations are itching to get the internet under (their) control,
it's deeply reassuring to know that the framework for an alternative,
free communications system not only exists, but thrives."

But dialled calls between computers are a poor way to route
information from millions of sources to millions of destinations. The
way the internet now works is to chop information up into
standard-length "packets", label each packet with a destination
address and let the packets find their own way there.

Paul Baran proposed this idea in the United States in 1964, and
Donald Davies had the same idea independently in the United Kingdom
in 1965. Davies's team forged ahead with what they called "packet
switching" and, ironically, it was the British engineers who
persuaded the Americans to use packets on their new research network,
the Arpanet. The internet's TCP/IP protocols were originally
developed for "internetworking" between the Arpanet and other
networks. The US defence department placed the Arpanet contract with
Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a much more laid-back outfit than the
typical defence contractor.

The sites on the proposed network were mostly universities. Their
representatives on the Network Working Group were mainly graduate
students. The group, which included Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker and Jon
Postel, floated ideas in papers, called requests for comments (RFCs).
Internet technologies are still developed in the same collaborative,
non-authoritarian style. Nothing was secret, solutions emerged
iteratively and the results were in the public domain. This was,
Naughton argues, the genesis of the open source movement, the gift
economy that would drive the development of the Linux operating
system and the Apache web server in the 1990s.

The idea of the web did not come out of the blue to Berners-Lee. As
long ago as 1980 he had created a hypertext program called Enquire to
help him cope with information that was too complicated to remember.
Naughton probes deeper. The Talmud is, perhaps, a hypertext. By 1933,
Vannevar Bush had his first inklings of an instant document-retrieval
machine. His famous article "As we may think", although written in
1939, was not published until 1945.

Then came Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson (who planned a fully commercial
global "docuverse" but lost out to the web's gift economy) and Bill
Atkinson, whose brilliant 1987 Hypercard program got one thing wrong:
it "assumed that all the connections worth making resided on your
hard disk". Big mistake.

Naughton writes a particular kind of history. It stresses decisive
moments, inimitable geniuses, oaks from acorns and crucial chance
events. All of which makes a very good yarn.

What is missing is any account of the false starts and failed
projects, which could perhaps have given us a global network of a
very different kind. In the 1980s, TCP/IP still had to see off IBM's
proprietary Systems Network Architecture and the overblown Open
Systems Interconnection, an endless series of international standards
that failed to standardise anything. As late as 1988 there was a
threat that the Arpanet would be cut off from other networks and the
Communications of the ACM asked: "Can the internet survive?" Katie
Hafner and Matthew Lyon did much of the basic research on the
internet's early history, and Naughton gives generous credit to their
1996 book When Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. One
reason for reading Naughton's book is that Hafner and Lyon end their
account before the web was invented. Another is Naughton's brilliant
advocacy in distilling the ethos of the internet and persuading us
that it is precious and worth defending. He spells out the message of
a new medium more convinc-ingly than Marshall McLuhan ever did, and
in snappier prose.

Tony Durham is web editor, The THES.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
Page Books 26
Copyright (C) The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2000

 BOOKS:                                                               14 Jul
00
 #92  Social life of the worldwide web.

   By Jonathan Bowen

WEAVING THE WEB: THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB
BY ITS INVENTOR. By Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fishetti. Orion244pp,
Pounds 12.99 ISBN 0 75282 090 7

The worldwide web is a technology that has impinged on a remarkable
number of lives in an extremely short space of time. How did this
come about? The ingredients have been available for some time. The
internet has been expanding exponentially since 1969, way before the
advent of the web, and hypertext was prophetically proposed by Ted
Nelson with his Xanadu project, but unsuccessfully promulgated.

Luminaries such as Vannevar Bush and Marshall McLuhan foresaw the
coming of the digitally connected revolution, but were not in a
practical position to capitalise on this. How did Tim Berners-Lee, a
physicist, manage to set the wheels in motion that have spawned this
information revolution?

This book goes some way to answering these questions. As its title
suggests, it covers the past, present and future of the web. However,
this division is not explicit from the book's contents, which are not
subdivided in this way. It begins with a background to how the ideas
for the web built up in Berners-Lee's mind and then moves on to his
experience at Cern, the particle physics facility near Geneva, where
the web initially started to take shape.

This was obviously a fascinating environment for the author. He could
see that physics and physicists could benefit from a system that
would allow them to record and transfer ideas to each other in as
simple a manner as possible.

Convincing others of the benefits was much more difficult. However,
to Cern's credit, the environment was sufficiently flexible for
Berners-Lee to try out his ideas, even if these had to be carried out
in a rather underground manner with the constant possibility that he
could be stopped from pursuing his goals.

One of the early papers on the web by Berners-Lee was actually
rejected, yet he still decided to attend a conference to demonstrate
the then-prototype web, despite the problems of modem connection,
different voltage and such. Within a year or two, papers concerned
with the web dominated subsequent conferences in the same series.

The historical progression of the book makes fascinating and
addictive reading for anyone who has become involved with the
development of the web. As an academic computer-science researcher, I
became aware of the web in 1993 with the release of Mosaic, the first
freely and widely available graphical web browser. However, like many
others whom Berners-Lee had to convince initially, the web did not
seem very exciting, mainly due to the slow speed (especially for
transatlantic access) and lack of content.

To help rectify the problem of locating content on the web,
Berners-Lee started the "WWW Virtual Library" to provide an
encyclopedia of links to online resources, maintained by experts from
all over the world.

The success of the web was by no means assured during its gestation,
but Berners-Lee is a man with a mission. He has carefully charted the
web through difficult waters to bring it to where it is today. He
realised that a universal naming mechanism that could also encompass
other technologies, a fast access protocol for the internet and a
simple document structuring mechanism for providing hyperlinks, were
all important constituents to success. What is more, he formulated
and implemented the initial versions of these almost single-handedly.

Berners-Lee never lost sight of the importance of free access to this
new technology, and he convinced Cern to sign away any rights to the
web. He himself has extremely altruistic goals and has never formed a
dotcom company even though he was eminently placed to do so - thereby
maintaining an independent non-partisan approach to the development
of the web. To help avoid any one company taking over, he initiated
the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), based at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in the United States. W3C continues to
coordinate new recommendations for additions to the web in a
pan-industrial manner.

The last third of the book is more philosophical in nature, covering
recent web technology and Berners-Lee's vision for the future. He
addresses more general social and political concerns, such as
privacy, access by children, and so on. Indeed, he states: "The web
is more a social creation than a technical one," and that this is why
he designed it. He also outlines a view of the web that may be
possible in a further decade of development; he terms this the
"Semantic Web".

Much knowledge buried in the web is difficult to access without
considerable expertise and human input. This is partly because the
encoding of most of the existing web is in the ubiquitous HTML
format, which loses a significant amount of the underlying
information's semantics.

XML (Extended Markup Language) is designed to allow encoding of
documents (and information in general) in any desired markup, with
associated Document Type Definitions to prescribe allowed markup, and
style sheets to perform formatting for transformation and viewing.
W3C is developing a Resource Description Framework to allow the
relationships between shared data to be formulated. These, and
perhaps future technologies, could allow computers to extract
information from the web in a much more automatic and intelligent
manner than is possible at present.

Although this book is probably of most interest to computer
scientists, I believe most academics from whatever background will
gain something from reading it. It does contain technical jargon, but
it is written on a level that allows it to be appreciated by experts
and non-experts alike. This is a book from the horse's mouth and
deserves to be read as such.

Others may agree or disagree with Berners-Lee's views, but he has
been proved right more often than not. What is more, he has the
technical know-how and personal determination to see his visionary
goals through to practical fruition on a timescale that would have
seemed breath-taking only a decade or two ago. I recommend this book
as a glimpse of how this has been practically achieved in practice.

Jonathan Bowen is professor of computing, South Bank University.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
Page Books 26
Copyright (C) The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2000

 BOOKS: THES COMPETITION.                                             14 Jul
00
 #93  First Impressions.

This week's competition, in which you have to identify a book from
its opening sentence, is from a work that has a winged Cockney
heroine...

"''Lor' love you, sir!' Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like
dustbin lids..."

* Entries should be sent to First Impressions, The THES, Admiral
House, 66-68 East Smithfield, London E1W 1BX, faxed to 020-7782 3300
or emailed to [log in to unmask] The winner receives a Pounds 25
Blackwell's voucher and the closing date is July 18.

The winner of last week's competition, who correctly identified
Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm, was Brian Wynne, of Cefn y
Bedd, Flintshire.


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