A Brief History of the Internet, Maxwell Fuller [most interesting books to read TXT] 📗

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 space, 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 document 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 cyberspace…cyberspace…mostly just space…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 spawned 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, lust, 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. Lust: 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 latitudes, 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 sexism, or denied the right to a contract, even legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an assortment 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 assortment 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