The following article first appeared beginning March, 1993 in LOCUS: THE NEWSPAPER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD, which is fact a monthly magazine published by Charles Brown. Its editorial address is 34 Ridgewood Lane, Oakland, CA 94611. You may distribute the text of these articles freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Life on the Internet, Part 2: Exploring the Datasphere Tom Maddox The world's information systems are getting together in cyberspace. Huge library catalogs and collections of data ranging from simple collections of texts in the public domain to this morning's satellite photographs are available online now, and more come online each day. The layer of electronic information covering the planet -- the datasphere, the infosphere, or, as John Quarterman calls it, following William Gibson, "the Matrix" -- is constantly growing bigger and better connected. And these days the Internet is where you can get the best access to the datasphere. Above all, the Internet is big and well- connected: hundreds of thousands of computers, millions of users, billions of real-time interactions among them. Most of these connections move data quickly -- a T1 link, the standard high- quality connection, at 1.544 megabytes/second, a speed at which the usual novel would be transferred almost instantly. Because of the immensity of the Internet, it poses severe problems of orientation and navigation, which is to say even experienced users can find it difficult to know where things are and how to get to them. Just a few years ago, these problems were not addressed in any comprehensive way by mechanisms on the Internet; datasphere explorers simply had to comb through newsgroups, e- mail, and the few ftp sites they might happen to have heard of, hoping to find clues to where particular kinds of information might be found. However, in recent years a number of support systems have evolved to help even novice explorers find what they are looking for with some ease -- though I should quickly stress that the ease is relative given the still-daunting complexity of the Internet and the less than friendly nature of much of the software. To begin seeing what the Internet offers (in addition to mail and newsgroups, which I discussed in my previous column), we will look at two of the most powerful programs for exploring the Internet and bringing back what you find there. Ftp and telnet: using these, you can explore the emerging datasphere in ways that I continue to find amazing though I use them almost every day. Through ftp you can acquire files from other computers or send files to them; through telnet, you can use other computers. Ftp means "file transfer protocol," as simple, lucid, and concealing a piece of computer jargon as you could wish. What it means is that you can make a connection to another computer using ftp, and, depending on your degree of access to that computer, get files from it or send files to it. This capability in itself is nothing extraordinary, but the sheer size and connectedness of the Internet turn ftp into something fabulous. Thousands of computers sit ready to send you millions of files: text files of every imaginable kind, programs, graphics (both still and moving pictures), sounds. And by "you" I mean me, you, your brother, my cousin, and the folks next door -- any and all of us who have Internet connections, including Terabyte the Amazing Computer Using Dog, should he (or she) exist. The primary mode for acquiring files is a subset of ftp called anonymous ftp. It works like this. Through the Internet you connect to another computer and log in under the username "anonymous." You are often asked to provide your actual username -- e.g., in my case, tmaddox@netcom.com -- as a password. You then have access to a set of files on that computer that have been set aside specifically for anonymous ftp, which you can download -- i.e., transfer them to your Internet computer account. (From there you will likely have to download the files to your home computer, as I do from Netcom, my connection to the Internet, to the Mac on my desk.) What are these files? To begin with, collections of software available under anonymous ftp exist for almost every type of hardware. This includes public domain software, free for the taking with no obligation, and "shareware," software that you are encouraged to test out, with the understanding that you will pay a fee to the author if you wish to keep and use it. Also, commercial software companies provide demos, versions of their software for you to try out in hopes that you will then buy the product (demos often do not perform all the functions of the non- demo versions, or they may be programmed to function only for a limited time). Software companies also routinely provide programs that update existing versions of their software, an especially important consideration given the ever- changing nature of computer operating systems and the software that runs on them. Given that I am a Macintosh user, the machine whose collection I explore most often is "sumex- aim.stanford.edu" (at Stanford University, as you might guess), which provides an enormous archive of software for the Macintosh. I check sumex almost daily to see what is new, and I do so with the assurance that important upgrades, interesting new utility programs, and the latest versions of anti- virus programs can be found there. Other machines provide similar archives for MSDOS or Windows, Amigas, Next, and every other even modestly popular personal computer. (Also, given the near-ubiquity of the Unix operating system on the Internet, Unix programs can be found at many machines, generally in the form of source code.) If the program I am looking for is obscure or old, I might not find it at sumex, in which case I use the archie Internet resource. Archie is a database of most of the software available on most of the anonymous ftp sites over most of the world; it is one of the earliest guides to the Internet and one of the most consistently effective. You give it the name of a program (or part of the name), and archie tells you where it is to be found. It is simple to use and inclusive enough to be reliable. However, the possibilities of anonymous ftp extend far beyond acquiring software. In fact, the Internet startles precisely by how much information it makes available, not only concerning computers and allied topics, as one might expect, but also concerning a wide variety of subjects from Dante to agriculture. One of my favorite finds lately is "The Electric Mystic's Guide to the Internet: A Complete Bibliography of Networked Electronic Documents, Online Conferences, Serials, Software, and Archives Relevant to Religious Studies," compiled by the (apparently) indefatigable Michael Strangelove and available via anonymous ftp from the site panda1.uottawa.ca. By way of introduction to the document, Strangelove says It is interesting to note that the majority of the approximately 200 files documented herein have been placed on the Net in the last twenty four months. This would suggest that the end of this decade will see well over two thousand networked documents relevant to religious studies. The number of religious studies and related scholars presently online is unknown but certainly exceeds ten thousand. I think it is remarkable that anywhere near ten thousand religious scholars are on the net (Strangelove is referring not only to the Internet but also to Bitnet and other such networks connected to the Internet), and almost as remarkable the wealth of papers, conference proceedings, bibliographies and so forth documented by Strangelove. Another document I recently acquired (from ftp.msen.com) is the electronic version of Factsheet 5. In the words of its current editor, Jerod Pore, FactSheet Five is the central clearinghouse of information about zines, those opinionated publications with press runs of 50 to 5000 (often done through surreptitious use of on-the-job supplies and xerox). Mike Gunderloy of Rennsalaer, NY published 44 editions of F5. Hudson Luce published the final issue, #45. I opened my big mouth (or, rather, let my fingers blab away) about doing an online, net-accessible version of FactSheet Five. One of the categories treated by FactSheet Five is science fiction. This file begins with a brief discussion of fanzines by Pore, then includes a discussion and set of corrections by Leah Smith, the publisher of Stet, in which she gives definitions for "personalzines," "genzines," "clubzines," "apazines," and "newszines." A long list of 'zines of all kinds follows, with accompanying details on where and how to get them. Other things I have snagged via anonymous ftp include guitar tablature and lyrics (from ftp.nevada.edu), back issues of famous hacker 'zines, papers from the Second Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, from eff.org -- one of my favorite sites because of its concern with freedom of speech issues in cyberspace and its extensive collection of electronic 'zines, or "e- 'zines." Telnet also gives access to a remarkable variety of information, but does so in a different way. When you telnet to another computer, you are in fact logging on to it, and if you have an account on that computer, through a telnet session you can do pretty much what you would through any other log on. For instance, I have an account on the 'WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), but the phone call from my home to the 'WELL is a toll call, so I log on to Netcom and telnet to the 'WELL. However, telnet becomes an important tool in exploring the Internet when it allows you to connect to computers around the world to which you probably do not have full access, computers that have made special capabilities available to the Internet. For instance, info.rutgers.edu provides a nice package that includes a dictionary, thesaurus, CIA world fact books, and an extensive quotations database, all of which can be accessed through telnet and used online. Or if you are interested in flights of the Space Shuttle, or other NASA news, you can telnet to spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov, and register with the Spacelink BBS -- run through the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Or you can telnet to dra.com and access the Library of Congress catalog; to fdabbs.fda.gov for recent information from the Food and Drug Administration; to downwind.sprl.umich.edu for the latest weather forecasts . . . In short, like ftp, telnet provides extraordinary possibilities. But I am hoping that at this point, even with only a brief glimpse into possibilities on the Internet, you can feel something of the vast and arbitrary nature of the resources contained there. The "information explosion," which was often discussed some years ago, has become so much a fact of our lives that we no longer mention it -- we simply take it for granted -- and the Internet is the information explosion on steroids. Hence the development of tools that help you search for information the way that archie helps search for software. Information search environments are recent and still very much in process; Gopher and WAIS are the two most commonly used, thus the two that provide the most coverage. I remember when I first read about WAIS a couple of years ago thinking that it seemed like the kind of high-tech magic that computer industry hustlers had been promising all along but had almost never delivered. When you connect to a WAIS server, you provide it with keywords for a search, and it sorts through a set of indexed databases to find articles containing those keywords. It then presents you with the text of the articles, which you can then use to alter your search on the basis of the found articles to enable you to focus your search more precisely and search again. The WAIS developers even provide a series of "client" software for various computers that allow you to perform the somewhat difficult task of composing a search offline. Does WAIS function as promised? Well, yes, and no. Most of us do not have TCP/IP connection necessary for running the client software on our home machines, so we are thrown into a program, SWAIS, that is clumsy and difficult to use. In addition, as the number of indexed databases for use with WAIS grows, so does the difficulty in locating which ones might have any relevance at all to your search. Still, even with these deficiencies, WAIS can perform quite remarkable feats of data retrieval. So can Gopher, which in practice has turned into the most easily usable information finder on the Internet. Gopher has no special databases, but it provides access to existing ones, sorts them out, and shows them to you on a menu. In fact, Gopher allows you to choose WAIS from a menu and perform one of its searches.In The Whole Internet, Ed Krol says, The real cleverness [of Gopher] is that it lets you browse through the Internet's resources, regardless of their type, like you might browse through your local library with books, filmstrips, and phonograph records on the same subject grouped together. . . .You can use Gopher to wonder around the Internet, looking for data. So you can use Gopher to find anonymous ftp sites containing files you might be interested in, and then to get those files (by a kind of transparent ftp) without the necessity for your going through the process of finding the site's address, logging on, and transferring the file. As I have said, Gopher and WAIS are both still in development, and in particular, Internet-wide implementation of them goes on daily, and the technical wizards who write the software, configure the hardware, and in general make it all work are still putting the systems into place and making significant changes. At present many explorations of the Internet will come up empty because the process of finding them either requires special hardware or software or is simply too delicate in that it requires sophisticated technique. However, in just the last few years the situation has grown much easier for the novice (or even the moderately well-schooled user), and I have no doubt it will continue to do so. I look forward to using WAIS in the manner it demands, and I look forward in general to faster, more powerful searches. Indeed, the Internet holds out the possibility that we can achieve something like the "Aleph-library" I discussed in a previous column -- the hypertext node through which all libraries could be easily and intelligently searched. One aspect of the Internet that I have not mentioned explicitly might be inferred from all that I have said in these two columns. Simply, it is this: a great number of people work very hard at very difficult problems for what we might call the greater good of the Internet. Even in the shark-eat-shark days of advanced capitalism, the Internet is characterized more by symbiosis and mutual concern than parasitism or predation. For instance, when particular sites become, in effect, archives of record -- that is, virtually all the public domain software, shareware, demos and so forth for a given kind of machine or operating system can be found there -- these sites are constantly in danger of being overloaded with anonymous ftp requests. The more popular the machine or operating system type, the more serious the danger of overload. Thus "mirrors" have come into existence: other sites that duplicate the overburdened archive, with the result that the burden of anonymous ftp access is shared among institutions. And in fact the very existence of anonymous ftp sites manifests the same startling principle. And while one might argue that self-interest ultimately rules here, I would reply that the existence of mechanisms such as those I am describing represents an enlightened self-interest, an awareness that all the Internet's users have a stake in the health of the Internet. Perhaps this is a transitional phase. Perhaps as the Federal Government becomes interested and moves itself to exert more controls and the various institutions that compose the Internet start worrying seriously about "cost-effectiveness" and allied matters, the nature of the Internet will change in essential ways. Perhaps it will lose its character of productive anarchy and symbiosis, and be swallowed up in the larger environment of capitalism red in tooth and claw. But I think not. While an up-to-the-minute set of quotations from the New York Stock Exchange has cash value, Future-Culture mailing lists and Electronic Mystic's Guides simply do not. Neither do texts of Alice's Adventures Underground or the King James Bible (both available by anonymous ftp from the Gutenberg Project at mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu). And neither does the experience of exploring that heterocosm, or other world, of information known as the Internet. (Department of Corrections: In my previous column, I referred to the author of The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and Beyond as Bernard Adoba. His book is still excellent, and his name remains Bernard Aboba as it has all along. My apologies.) ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .