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

Asychnronous Availability of Information

One of the major advantages of electronic information is that you don’t have to schedule yourself to match others in their schedules.

This is very important. Just this very week I have been waiting for a power supply for one of my computers, just because the schedule of the person who has it was not in sync with the schedule of the person picking it up. The waste has been enormous, and trips all the way across an entire town are wasted, while the computer lies unused.

The same things happens with libraries and stores of all kinds around the world. How many times have you tried a phone call, a meeting, a purchase, a repair, a return or a variety of other things, and ended up not making these connections?

No longer, with things that are available electronically over the Nets. You don’t have to wait until the door of the library swings open to get that book you want for an urgent piece of research; you don’t have to wait until a person is available to send them an instant message; you don’t have to wait for the evening news on tv….

This is called Asyncronous Communication…meaning those schedules don’t have to match exactly any more to have a meaningful and quick conversation. A minute here, there or wherever can be saved instead of wasted and the whole communication still travels at near instantaneous speed, without the cost of ten telegrams, ten phone calls, etc.

You can be watching television and jump up and put a few minutes into sending, or answering, your email and would not miss anything but the commercials.

“Commercials” bring to mind another form of asynchronous communication…taping a tv or radio show and watching a show in 40 minutes instead of an hour because you do not have to sit through 1 minute of “not-show” per 2 minutes of show. No only to you not have to be home on Thursday night to watch your favorite TV show any more, but those pesky commercials can be edited out, allowing you to see three shows in the time it used to take to watch two.

This kind of efficiency can have a huge effect on you or your children…unless you WANT them to see 40 ads per hour on television, or spend hours copying notes from an assortment of library books carried miles from, and back to, the libraries. Gone are the piles of 3x5 cards past students and scholars have heaped before time in efforts to organize mid-term papers for 9, 12, 16 or 20 years of institutionalized education. Whole rainforests of trees can be saved, not to mention the billions of hours of an entire population’s educated scribbling that should have been spent between the ears instead of between paper and hand, cramping the thought and style of generations upon generations of those of us without photographic memories to take the place of the written word.

Now we all can have photographic memories, we can quote, with total accuracy, millions of 3x5 cards worth of huge encyclopedias of information, all without getting up for any reason other than eating, drinking and stretching.

Research in this area indicates that 90% of the time the previous generations spent for research papers was spent traipsing through the halls, stairways and bookstacks of libraries; searching through 10 to 100 books for each of the ones selected for further research; and searching on 10-100 pages for each quote worthy of making it into the sacred piles of 3x5 cards; then searching the card piles for those fit for the even more sacred sheets of paper a first draft was written on. Even counting the fanatical dedication of those who go through several drafts before a presentation draft is finally achieved the researchers agree that 90% of this kind of work is spent in “hunting and gathering” the information and only 10% of this time is spent “digesting” the information.

If you understand that civilization was based on the new invention called “the plow,” which changed the habits of “hunting and gathering” peoples into civilized cities… then you might be able to understand the the changes the computer and computer networks are making to those using them instead of the primitive hunting and gathering jobs we used to spend 90% of our time on.

In mid-19th Century the United States was over 90% in an agrarian economy, spending nearly all of its efforts for raising food to feed an empty belly. Mid-20th Century’s advances reversed that ratio, so that only 10% was being used for the belly, 90% for civilization.

The same thing will be said for feeding the mind, if our civilization ever gets around deciding that spending the majority of our research time in a physical, rather than mental, portion of the educational process.

Think of it this way, if it takes only 10% as long to do the work to write a research paper, we are likely to get either 10 times as many research papers, or papers which are 10 times as good, or some combination…just like we ended up with 10 times as much food for the body when we turned from hunting and gathering food to agriculture at the beginnings of civilization…then we would excpect a similar transition to a civilization of the future.

***

If mankind is defined as the animal who thinks; thinking more and better increases the degree to which we are the human species. Decreasing our ability to think is going to decrease our humanity…and yet I am living in what a large number of people define as the prime example of an advanced country…where half the adult population can’t read at a functional level. [From the US Adult Literacy Report of 1994]

***

“Now that cloning geniuses, along with all other humans, has been outlawed, only outlaws will clone geniuses, and the rest of mankind will be `unarmed’ in a battle of the mind between themselves and the geniuses.”

“Have you ever noticed that the only workers in history, all of history; never to have a guild or a union are the inventors who live by the effort of the mind?”

We have workers who live by the efforts of their bodies, whether dock workers or professional athletes who have a set of established unions, pay dues, have gone on strike from time to time, and all the related works of unions— but we have never had a union of those who change worlds from Old World to New World****

Appendix 1

The Growth of the Internet

Date Hosts

–— ––– 05/69 4 10/69 5 04/71 23 06/74 62 03/77 111 08/81 213 05/82 235 08/83 562 10/84 1,024 10/85 1,961 02/86 2,308 11/86 5,089 12/87 28,174 07/88 33,000 10/88 56,000 01/89 80,000 07/89 130,000 10/89 159,000 10/90 313,000 01/91 376,000 07/91 535,000 07/91 535,000 10/91 617,000 01/92 727,000 04/92 890,000 07/92 992,000 10/92 1,136,000 01/93 1,313,000 04/93 1,486,000 07/93 1,776,000 10/93 2,056,000 01/94 2,217,000 03/95 ~4,000,000

[Multiply hosts by 100 to get approximate numbers of computers in the world at the time. For instance we should be approaching about 400 million computers in the world at the time of this first edition.]

[Multiply Hosts by 10 to get an approximation of the total number of people. Early on, this was probably a smaller multiplier, as there were only 7 people on the UIUC login list at the time: half of these were not logging in on a regular basis. Thus my estimate that I was about the 100th person on the Internet as I presume our site was not the first nor the last of the 18 new sites in 1971, so approximating 9th, plus the 5 already there, we were probably around 14th or so, though they tell me we were actually earlier, to facilitate transcontinental traffic.

Sticking with the conservative estimate of 14th, and with the same numbers of people on each of the other nodes, that would have made me the 99th user.]

Television versus Education: Who Is Winning? [As If You Had To Ask]

Basketball, Football, Baseball, Hockey and Golf [Live and Video Games]

versus

Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Verne and Hugo

You would think that some operation that spends a hundred times more than another would not fear much competition— especially when the deck is stacked in their favor as the following examples demonstrate:

1.

There is always great battle between Macbeth and Macduff; Macbeth never gets blown out in the first quarter and the author never jacks you up for higher royalties.

2.

Shakespeare was DESIGNED to be entertaining, so you don’t have to change the rules every season to make things more exciting. Of course, if you WANT to, you can always turn Romeo and Juliet into a story about New York City warfare between street gangs instead of noble families of Verona.

If the US actually spends a trillion dollars on education every year or two, and major sports franchising spends in the neighborhood of 1/100th of that amount, and the video game businesses spend even less, then why is it that your exposure to Michael Jordan was a given, and his paychecks were higher than any other college graduate in his class?

Ten to fifteen year old basketball shoes are nearly all a forgotten item, rotting away in landfills while computers the same age are still available for studying Shakespeare more efficiently than any paper copy can ever provide and less expensively.

Those computers are more than fast enough for the kind of studying most kids do in school, and they cost no more on today’s market than a pair of basketball shoes.

Why is the centuries old blackboard still the default for classrooms around the world, when they cost much more and do much less than computers one tenth their age?

Why do we have physical Olympics and no mental Olympics?

Why do trivia games shows thrive on the market, and shows featuring our brightest students die on the vine and then get relegated to local programming on Sunday morning?

Outfitting a kid with a decade old computer costs no more than outfitting that kid with basketball shows, much less a basketball and a hoop, and the kid doesn’t outgrow that computer every year or wear it out, and regulation height of the monitor doesn’t change and make all the older ones obsolete just due to some rule change.

Throwing billions of Etexts out there into cyberspace can not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more than throwing a billion basketballs out there should be a guarantee that there will be another Michael Jordan: nor will it guarantee a new Einstein, Edison, Shakespeare, or any other great person…

…BUT…it will increase the odds.

Someone still has to pick up the books, just as there has to be someone to pick up the basketballs, for both remain dead until someone brings them to life.

Television, on the other hand, natters on into the night, long after you have fallen asleep.

Education has all the advantages in competition with ball games and video games, not only those listed above, but a whole world insists on education, forces edcuation, which just might have caused some of the problem.

Perhaps education has too many advantages…so many, in fact, that education has never realized it is competition bound with other messages.

A hundred years ago there were no industries vying for an audience of kids, life outside the schoolhouse was boring and there was very little to bring to class to compete in some manner with the teacher, other than a bullfrog. The massive variety of things kids have competing for them is something educational systems have not taken into account and they still rely on the threat of truant officers, not on earning the attention of