Somewhere else entirely

ON THE INTERNET, everyone's in the same place. Or so it appears at first sight. It could the the least geographic place ever to exist; and it clearly is a "place", to anyone who's spent any time in it. Physically, the Internet stretches from the South Pole to 77 degrees North, and almost encircles the globe. As an experience, it's somewhere else entirely.

Once you've connect your computer to the Internet and set out searching for information, you rapidly get a "feel" for "where" you are in this web connecting over 20 million users around the world. This sense, though, is based more on logical connections between pieces of information than on physical location.

As I write this, the library at the University of St. George (in Utah? Canada? don't know!) is, because I hit one key too many, trying to locate every book it holds on geography. Sorry. If I remember rightly, my connection to St. George runs from London through Koeln in Germany and Las Vegas in Nevada. It's quite possible that alternate chunks of information are coming back from Nevada to Germany in different directions round the globe.

At the same time, an electronic mail message which I forwarded to myself is on a journey from London to London via Frankfurt and Manchester. The original author of the e-mail composed it in a word-processor in Toronto and "up-loaded" the text to a computer there, instructing the machine to send it to a dozen people around the world. I want to "publish" it to another 100 people linked to a different computer network. Both networks are connected to the Internet: sending a message to myself via Germany is easier and cheaper than fetching it onto my computer and up-loading it again.

Despite surface popularisation by US Vice President Al Gore and Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau, it's probably in order to explain a little of what the Internet is.

HISTORY

The roots of the Internet lie in the US Department of Defense's attempts in the late 1960s to construct a command and communication system which would function after a nuclear attack. The result was ARPAnet, named after the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this deeply decentralised structure, messages are divided into "packets". Each packet is sent off in the general direction of its destination, by whatever route is available. On the way across the US, each packet might be handled by half-a-dozen or more different computers. Each one detects a surviving link and forwards packets towards the destination, where they are re-assembled in order.

The ARPAnet technology is indeed robust. A columnist in the Communications of the (US) Association for Computing Machinery reported that the Iraqi military command uses it, and that this is why their communications held up under massive bombardment in 1990.

ARPAnet was taken up enthusiastically by computer programmers working on DoD contracts, who began the tradition of using the system to circulate gossip and arguments as well as working data. US universities adopted it next, as a means for enabling researchers to share computers across cities, and then across the country.

Technology-based companies set up connections to maintain high- speed communications with the DoD and the universities. As students left university and lost their precious Internet connections, a burgeoning industry provided access over the public phone network from modems attached to personal computers at home.

TOPOGRAPHY

The physical layout of the Net was first determined by the location of US military bases. It's still the case that you're more likely to find a high-quality connection to a region with a US base than to one without. The major determinant for the current Net has been the location of super-computer centres.

The "backbones" of both the US academic Internet and JANET (the Joint Academic Network) in the UK were originally funded and built to share out super-computer resources. In the US "pork- barrel" politics -- elected representatives lobbying for lucrative or prestigious projects in their districts -- have more to do with the location of such sites than the more mundane concerns of efficiency or cost.

Universities and government establishments with super-computers are often connected by physical links of copper or fibre-optic cable. Other establishments, and commercial operations, usually connect to their nearest point on the backbone through data links, leased from public telecommunications providers. These also send packets of data by the best or cheapest currently available route.

An estimate compiled for the 1993 edition of the publication TeleGeography shows eleven million megabytes of data moved within the USA in June 1993. (The text of a fat paperback is about half a megabyte.) Traffic between the US and the rest of the world was about one million megabytes, and that between European countries about half a million megabytes.

TERRITORY

This balance of trade reflects the Internet's origin as a network of local computer networks in the US. A significant step in its evolution into a global network of national networks came with the first links to JANET, using a transatlantic cable shared with NASA, in 1979.

By the end of February 1994, national computer networks in 72 countries had full connections to the Internet. Cyprus, Fiji, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, the Ukraine, and the US territory of Guam had joined this list since June 1993. One country had been added as Czechoslovakia divided, and something had gone wrong with the connection to the United Arab Emirates.

A "full connection", in this context, is one which can handle high-speed transfer of large files, such as satellite images. From a site with a full connection, you can (given the right passwords) use the computers at any other such site as if you were there.

A professor of mathematics from Maryland recently spent a week in London without colleagues realising he was away. He continued work on the university computer with no sign -- to anyone except the computer network administrator -- that he'd gone off campus. His colleagues mostly communicate with him by sending electronic mail messages, even to a different floor of the same building.

It is currently possible to send electronic mail to at least a few people in a further 56 countries -- an increase of 21 in eight months. At the current rate of growth, there will be e-mail to essentially all the 239 countries and territories in the International Standards Organisation list by the end of the century.

According TeleGeography, the furthest northern reach of the Net and its connected nets (sometimes collectively called "the Matrix") is at Thule (Qaanaaq) in Greenland, at 77 degrees N. There are sites at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji (178E), and in Honolulu (157W). In between, obviously, is mostly water -- with a few ships running e-mail over Inmarsat satellite links.

The southernmost point on the Net is at the US South Pole base. Indeed, the Net is the only public means of communication with Antarctica -- you can't phone, you can't post a letter, but you can send electronic mail there.

Some of the world's poorest countries are among those already connected, for the benefit of the aid and development organisations which can afford to use e-mail. The Rio de Janeiro- based Association for Progressive Communications, through its UK affiliate GreenNet, is setting up low-cost "FIDOnet" links to countries from Ethiopia to Bangladesh. FIDOnet consists of programs running on extremely basic personal computers, which dial each other up over the public telephone network to exchange messages every few hours. Hobbyists in the developed world run thousands of such machines.

POPULATION & LANGUAGE