A Brief History of the Internet Part 1

A Brief History of the Internet.

by Michael S. Hart.

Preface.

The Internet Conquers s.p.a.ce, Time, and Ma.s.s Production...

Michael Hart called it NeoMa.s.s Production [TM] in 1971... and published the U.S. Declaration of Independence on the and no one was listening...or were they? ???careful!!!! If the governments, universities or colleges of the world wanted people to be educated, they certainly could have a copy of things like the Declaration of Independence where everyone could get an electronic copy. After all, it has been over 25 years since the Internet began as government funded projects among our universities, and only 24 years since the Declaration was posted, followed by the Bill of Rights, Const.i.tution, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.

Why do more people get their electronic books from others than these inst.i.tutions when they spend a TRILLION DOLLAR BUDGET EVERY YEAR pretending their goal is some universal form of education.

This is the story of the Bright Side and Dark Side of the Internet...Bright Side first.

The Facts: The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."

Communicator.

The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth, as long as they, too, are on the Internet.

Transporter.

The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any Netter.

Replicator.

The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa" to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer," and the library never closes, the books are always on the shelves, never checked out, lost, in for binding, and there is never an overdue fine because you never, ever, have to take them back.

The Bright Side and the Dark Side.

For the first time in the entire history of the Earth, we have the ability for EVERYONE to get copies of EVERYTHING as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of the people on the Earth, via computers [and the devices a person might need to make a PHYSICAL, rather than VIRTUAL copy of whatever it might be...

Think about what you have just read for a moment, please, EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE...

as long as the Information Superhighway is not taken over by the INFORMATION RICH and denied access to others other than for a fee they may not be able to pay, and shouldn't have to pay...since the INFORMATION RICH have had rides for free for the first 25 years of the Internet.]

From 1969 to 1994, most of the traffic on the Information Superhighway was generated by individuals who did not pay tolls to get on the ramps to the Information Superhighway ...in fact, ALL of the early users were paid to get on, except one...they were paid...BY YOU!

Michael Hart may have been the first person who got on as a private individual, not paid by any of the 23 nodes, or the Internet/ARPANet system, for his work; but who at the time of this publication might have given away 25 billion worth of Etexts in return for his free network access.

[i.e. Mr. Hart was the first "normal" person to have this access to the Internet, a first non-computer-professional for social responsibility; "We should provide information to all persons, without delay...simply because WE CAN!" Just like climbing Mount Everest or going into s.p.a.ce, and this is so much cheaper and less dangerous.

[For those of you considering asking that his accesses be revoked, he has received permission from CCSO management, previously CSO as indicated in his email address, for the posting of this doc.u.ment and has also received permission from several other colleges and/or universities, at which he has computer accounts and/or is affiliated.]

In the beginning, all the messages on the Net were either hardware or software crash messages, people looking for a helping hand in keeping their mainframes up and running-- and that was about it for the first 10-15 years of cyber- s.p.a.ce...cyber-s.p.a.ce...mostly just s.p.a.ce...there was nothing really in it for anyone, but mainframe operators, programmers, and a few computer consultants who worked in multi-state regions because there weren't enough computer installations in any single state, not even California or Illinois, to keep a computer consultant in business.

The Bright Side.

Mr. Hart had a vision in 1971 that the greatest purpose a computer network would ever provide would be the storage, transmission, and copying of the library of information a whole planet of human beings would generate. These ideas were remarkably ahead of their time, as attested to by an Independent Plans of Study Degree in the subject of Human Machine Interfaces from the University of Illinois, 1973. This degree, and the publications of the first few Etexts [Electronic Texts] on the Internet, began the process the Internet now knows as Project Gutenberg, which has caught fire and spread to all areas of the Internet, and sp.a.w.ned several generations of "Information Providers," as we now have come to call them.

It is hard to log in to the Internet without finding many references to Project Gutenberg and Information Providers these days, but you might be surprised just how much of a plethora of information stored on the Internet is only on line for LIMITED DISTRIBUTION even though the information is actually in the PUBLIC DOMAIN and has been paid for in money paid by your taxes, and by grants, which supposedly are given for the betterments of the human race, not just a favored few at the very top 1% of the INFORMATION RICH.

Many of you have seen the publicity announcements of such grants in the news media, and an information professional sees them all the time.

You may have seen grants totalling ONE BILLION DOLLARS to create "Electronic Libraries;" what you haven't seen is a single "Electronic Book" released into the Public Domain, in any form for you to use, from any one of these.

The Dark Side.

Why don't you see huge electronic libraries available for download from the Internet?

Why are the most famous universities in the world working on electronic libraries and you can't read the books?

If it costs $1,000 to create an electronic book through a government or foundation grant, then $1,000,000,000 funds for electronic libraries should easily create a 1,000,000 volume electronic library in no time at all.

After all, if someone paid YOU $1,000 to type, scan or to otherwise get a public domain book onto the Internet, you could do that in no time at all, and so could one million other people, and they could probably do it in a week, if they tried really hard, maybe in a month if they only did it in their spare time. For $1,000 per book, I am sure a few people would be turning out a book a week for as long as it took to get all million books into electronic text.

There has been perhaps ONE BILLION DOLLARS granted for an electronic library in a variety of places, manners, types and all other diversities; IF THE COST IS ONE THOUSAND OF THOSE DOLLARS TO CREATE A SINGLE ELECTRONIC BOOK, THEN WE SHOULD HAVE ONE MILLION BOOKS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE TO USE.

HOW HAS THIS PROCESS BEEN STOPPED?

Anyone who wants to stop this process for a Public Domain Library of information is probably suffering from several of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, covetousness, l.u.s.t, anger, greed, envy, and sloth. Merriam Webster Third International Unabridged Dictionary [Above: Greed = Gluttony, and moved back one place]

[Below: my simple descriptions of the Seven Deadly Sins]

1. Pride: I have one and you don't.

2. Covetousness: Mine is worth more if you don't have a copy or something similar. I want yours. I want the one you have, even if I already have one or many.

3. l.u.s.t: I have to have it.

4. Anger: I will hurt you to insure that I have it, and and to insure that you do not have one.

5. Envy: I hate that you have one.

6. Greed: There is no end to how much I want, or to how little I want you to have in comparison.

7. Sloth: I am opposed to you moving up the ladder: it means that I will have to move up the ladder, to keep my position of lordship over you. If I have twice as much as you do, and you gain a rung, that means I can only regain my previous lordship by moving up two; it is far easier to knock you back a rung, or to prevent you from climbing at all.

Destruction is easier than construction.

This becomes even more obvious for the person who has a goal of being 10 or 100 times further up the ladder of success...given the old, and hopefully obsolete, or soon to be obsolete, definitions of success.

"If I worked like a fiend all my life to insure I had a thousand dollars for every dollar you had, and then someone came along and wanted to give everyone $1000, then I would be forced to work like a fiend again, to get another million dollars to retain my position."

Think about it: someone spends a lifetime achieving, creating, or otherwise investing their life, building a talent, an idea, or a physical manifestation of the life they have led...the destruction of this is far easier than the construction...just as the building of a house is much more difficult, requires training, discipline, knowledge of the laws of physics to get a temperature and light balance suitable for lat.i.tudes, etc., etc., etc.

But nearly anyone can burn down a building, or a pile of books without a fraction of this kind of training.

People are used to lording it over others by building and writing certain items that reflect their lordship over themselves, their environments, and, last/least, over other people. If they were not engaged in power over themselves [self-discipline, education, etc,] or over their environments [food, clothing and shelter], then they have only other people to have control over and that is the problem. The don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "If I did it with the hard ways and tools of the past, then YOU would threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the present has to offer, and I don't want to learn the new tools, since I have invested my whole life to the mastery of the old tools." I have literally met very highly placed souls in the system of higher education who have told me they will quit the system on the day they have to use email because it removes the control they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls and the paper mails. It is just too obvious if a big wig is not answering your email, since email programs can actually tell you the second it was delivered and also the second the person "opened" it.

This is why SOME people fear the new Internet: other people fear it NOT because they lose the kind of lord position that comes with OWNERSHIP; rather they fear, in a similar manner, they will lose the CONTROL which they have used to achieve their position of lordship, such as one kind of professor mentioned below.

*****As Hart's DOS prompt sometimes states:*****

"Money is how people with no talent keep score!" "Control is how others with no money keep score!"

These Seven Deadly Sins, while named by various names and by most civilizations, have nonetheless often been actual laws; in that certain people were required, by law, to be victims of the rest of their populations in that a person might be legally denied ownership of any property, due to racism or s.e.xism, or denied the right to a contract, even legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an a.s.sortment of rights to vote, contract and own property-- there have even been laws that forbade any but the "upper crust" to wear certain types of clothing, a "statement of fashion" of a slightly different order than we see today, but with similar ends.

You might want to look up laws that once divided this and other countries by making it illegal to teach any persons of certain races or genders reading, writing, arithmetic, and others of the ways human beings learn to have a power over their environments.

Power over oneself is the first kind of power...if you do not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control of anything.

Power over the environment is the second kind of power... if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are going to have a hard time controlling anything else.

Power over other human being is the third kind of power-- described above in the Seven Deadly Sins, a third raters' kind of power. Those who cannot control anything else... must, by definition, have others control things for them. If they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation of others, then they must find some way to control them.

We are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't BUILD the Internet to control it, and the 40 million people who are on it; people from the goverment to big business, who feel "Freedom Is Slavery" or at least dangerous; and, who feel the Internet is the "NEXT COMMERICAL FRONTIER" where customers are all ready to be inundated with advertising, more cheaply than with junkmail. Fortunately some of the other Internet pioneers have developed ways of preventing this sort of thing from happening BUT I am sure we aren't far from lawsuits by the cash rich and informattion rich, complaining that they can't get their junkemail into "my" emailbox. We will probably all be forced to join into an a.s.sortment of "protectives" in which we subscribe to such "killbots" as are required to let in the mail we want and keep out the junkemail.

These same sorts of protectives were forming a century or so before the Internet, in a similar response to the hard monopolistic pricing policies of the railroads which went transcontinental just 100 years before this Internet did.

I suggest you look up Grange in your encyclopedias, where one of them says: "The National Grange is the popular name of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, the oldest general farm organization in the United States...formed largely through the efforts of Oliver Hudson Kelley, a Minnesota farmer who was deeply affected by the poverty and isolation of the farmers he saw will inspecting farm areas in the South for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1866. In the 1870's the Grange was prominent in the broader Granger movement, which campaigned against extortionate charges by monopolistic railroads and warehouses and helped bring about laws regulating these charges... . Although challenged, the const.i.tutionality of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Munn v. Illinois (1877).

[1994 Grolier Electronic Enyclcopedia]

The Internet Conquers s.p.a.ce, Time and Ma.s.s Production.

The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."

The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth, as long as they, too, are on the Internet.

The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any Netter.

The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa" to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer."

Don't forget the "SneakerNet" is part of the Internet and let's you get information to or from those who do not have direct Internet connections. SneakerNet was a term developed to describe the concept of sending a file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the disk down the street for you. From my experience, it was incredibly obvious that SneakerNet traversed from East to West and West to East around the world before the Internet did, as I received letters from the East and West as the Project Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland Etext circled the globe long before the Internet did.

This is very important to know if you consider that a possible future development might keep you from using the Internet for this, due to socio-political motions to turn the Internet into a "World Wide Mall" [WWM] a term coined specifically to describe that moneymaking philosophy that says "Even if it has been given away, free of charge, to 90% of the users for 25 years, our goal is to make sure we change it from an Information Superhighway to an Information Supertollway.

I said "let's" you do the Star Trek Communicator, and Transporter, and Replicator functions because it will soon be obvious that those "Information Rich" who had free access to the Internet for so long want to do an Internet Monopoly thing to insure that what was free, to the Information Rich, will no longer be free for a cla.s.s of the Information Poor.

This is serious business, and if you consider that it would cost the 40 million Netters about $25 per month to "subscribe" to the Information Rich version of the Internet, that means one thousand million dollars per month going into the hands of the Information Rich at the expense of the Information Poor; we would shortly be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be on the order of the one recently broken up in a major anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand of the telephone company.

Hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now, but it will take far more power than I have.

People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"-- but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them.

The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth, which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every Congress of the United States isn't meant to educate, it is meant for something else. After all-- if a Trillion dollars were really being spent on this process of education every two years, should literacy rates have plummeted to 53% and college level testing scores fallen for many straight years?

[Oh yes, I heard yesterday's report the tests were up for the first time in decades...but what I did NOT! hear was ANY reference to the fact that the score was "inflated" not only by the "normal" free 200 points a person gets for just being able to sign their names-- but by an additional 22 points for math, 76 verbal.] [Written February 5th, 1995]

This kind of "grade inflation" has been going on in a similar, though less official manner, in our schools, for decades. There are schools in which the averages indicate more "A"s are given out than all other grade points combined, not just more "A"s than "B"s or "B"s than "C"s. Some of the most importanted studies were never published, even though they were tax funded.

Watch out, the term "grade inflation" is "politically incorrect" to such a degree that it does not appear a single time in any of the encyclopedias I have tried, although it does appear in my Random House Unabridged and College Dictionaries, but not the Merriam-Webster Ninth New College Dictionary, American Heritage or in any other references I have searched. Please tell me if you find it in any.

"The awarding of higher grades than students deserve either to maintain a school's academic reputation or as a result of diminished teacher expectations." [1980-1985]

I can personally tell you this was a huge concern in 1970-1975 when the average grade at some colleges in question had already pa.s.sed the point mentioned just above, yielding averages including all undergraduate courses, including the grades of "flunk-outs," still higher than a "B" which means more "A"s were given a whole undergraduate student body than "B"s and "C"s. [Actually it means worse than that, but point made.]

So, we reached the point at which large numbers of a nation's high school graduates couldn't even read or fill out a minimum wage job application form, while, on paper, we were doing better than ever, excepting, thank G.o.d, the fact that testing scores showed there was something incredibly wrong, and businesses would notice they were having to interview more people for a job before they could find someone to fill it.

This is what happens when we separate a country into the "Information Rich" and the "Information Poor."

Don't let it happen to the entire world.

For the first time in ALL history, we have the chance to insure that every person can put huge amounts of "Public Domain" and other information into computers that should be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. I would like to insure these people actually have material to put in those computers when they get them.

Example: Some Shakespeare professors believe that the way to be a great Shakespeare professor is to know something about a Shakespeare play or poem that no one else knows.

Therefore they never tell anyone, and that knowledge can quite possibly die with them if it is never published in a wide manner. Example: Damascus steel was famous, for hundreds of years, but the knowledge of how to make this steel was so narrowly known that all those who knew that technique died without pa.s.sing it on, and it was a truly long time before computer simulations finally managed to recreate Damascus steel after all those centuries when a person had to buy an antique to get any.

Some other Shakespeare professors believe that the way a person should act to be a great Shakespeare professor is to teach as many people as possible about Shakespeare in as complete a manner as they want to learn.

The Internet is balancing on this same dichotomy now....

Do we want Unlimited Distribution...

Or do we want to continue with Limited Distribution?

The French have just given us one of the great examples: a month or so ago [I am writing this in early February.] they found a cave containing the oldest known paintings, twice as old as any previously discovered, and after the initial month of photographing them in secret, placed an electronic set of photographs on the Internet for all of us to have...ALL!

This is in GREAT contradistinction to the way things had been done around the time I was born, when the "Dead Sea Scrolls" were discovered, and none of you ever saw them, or any real description of them, until a few years ago-- in case you are wondering when, I was born in 1947; this is being published on my 48th birthday when I officially become "old." [As a mathematician, I don't cheat, and I admit that if you divide a 72 year lifespan into equals, you only get 24 years to be young, 24 years to be middle aged, and 24 years to be old...after that you have the odds beaten. If you divide the US into young and old, a person has to be considered "old" at 34, since 33 is the median age [meaning half the people are younger than 33, and half the people are older. The median Internet age? 26. Median Web age 31. Some predictions indicate these will decrease until the median Internet age is 15.

Who will rule the Internet?

Will it be the Internet Aristocrats...

or an Internet Everyman?

The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate.

For the first time we actually have an opportunity for a whole world's population to share not only air or water, but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music and other sounds...anything that can be digitized.

Do you remember what the first protohumans did in "2001" [the movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark] ?