Century of change

The memex is now a reality, though not in the form that Dr Bush had envisaged. It is the Internet, the first truly nonphysical invention in the history of our inventive race. Unlike radio and TV, it is not umbilically linked to its originator. It is a dataset, somewhere out in cyberspace.

The sum of human knowledge has increased somewhat in the last half-century, and the online databank is so large that it would not fit in a skyscraper, let alone a single desk. Its administration is a massive task too, which explains why the Internet isneither owned nor controlled by any single entity. In fact, the Internet is frequently referred to as the seventh continent, which is still only half-explored.

The dispersed network that the Internet lives on was made possible by the packet-switching protocol called TCP/IP. Written in a restaurant by Vinton Cerf in 1973, it permits Internet traffic to be broken up into discrete packets, which scatter and find their own way over the phone systems of the world, to be reconstituted at the receiver’s server. TCP/IP was written in response to a Pentagon request for a communications system which would survive nuclear holocaust. It was first implemented in the NATO defence network, then opened to educational institutions, and then to the public.

In the process, it has graduated from a basic and robust communications tool to a sophisticated publishing medium, which now carries everything which can be digitised, from the written word to real-time video. TCP/IP is set to become the base carrier for all forms ofcommunication, displacing the protocols that are now used by telephony, wireless and broadcasting systems. It is the Ubermedium of the future, spreading faster than any of its predecessors.

The current version of the Internet is stretched so far beyond capacity that the World Wide Web has come to be called the World Wide Wait. The solution to that is Internet II, an academic initiative restricted to universities. It is developing high-speed lines through which supercomputers can talk to each other. One day, like Internet I, it could also be open to the public.

The Internet isn’t a completely happy story. It has created a new class divide between the information haves and the have-nots. Information is power, more than ever before. And we have learned that all class divides ultimately spell big trouble.

(Next week: The skyscraper)