The latest network (02.28.1995)

Peter Lorenzi, Dean, University of Central Arkansas

NOTE: Written in 1995, this was a prescient prediction. I was not the only person saying this, but there weren't a lot of people saying this.

Internet. You’ve probably read and heard a lot about it. What is the Internet? In simple terms, it is a massive set of electronic links between computers all over the world, links that enable huge amounts of information -- text, video, audio, pictures -- to pass quickly and at very low cost all around the system. To the user, the network has the face of a computer screen. With the right computer and connections, Internet can mean words, graphics and sound drawn from thousands of "servers” from all over the world.

The Internet began as a university-based network, tying together professors, students and researchers, at first sending verbal messages via e-mail. In the past ten years, Internet has matured and can now support simultaneous videoconferencing, home shopping, classroom instruction and musical album releases.

The Internet is intimidating to many people. There’s a huge, new vocabulary, a lot of technobabble, plenty of new, strange-sounding terms: HTML, Netscape, gophers, protocols, baud rates, slip lines, transceivers. As powerful and different as it sounds, the Internet is really just another step in the development of networks, a development that has accompanied economic development over the years. From crude foot paths through the forest, to early Roman roads, to navigable streams and rivers, to canals, to railroads, to oceangoing transportation, to telegraph companies, to a ribbon of interstate highways, to the hub and spokes of commercial air transportation systems, to the linked system of television broadcasters, transmitters and local stations, to today’s personal computers, tied together in local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) of computers, economic and social progress have been built upon an ever-expanding, increasingly sophisticated system of networks. Yet the new network that seems like a mystery to the current generation becomes old hat to the next generation. Eventually, an economically viable network is assimilated by users, especially by those who have grown up with the network, who never knew that there wasn’t always such a network. The network is just "there,” there’s no need to think about it.

Progress requires the growth of new networks. For example, well before he became supreme commander of the American European forces during World War II, Dwight Eisenhower was given the assignment as a junior officer to move massive amounts of military hardware from one end of the United States to the other, all by surface road. His experience taught him a lesson that made him the ardent supporter of the interstate highway network he began in the 1950’s. Just as military necessity drives some progress, so do networks.

A country with good networks has greater economic potential than countries lacking such an infrastructure. In the past, countries drew their wealth from physical commodities -- hardware -- they possessed: gold and precious minerals, coal and iron ore, arable land and fresh water, forests and people. If they did not possess this hardware, countries built armies to take these commodities from countries that did possess them. And to support these armies, transportation and food distribution networks were needed to move these armies. Fortunately for all, after the fighting subsided, the transportation and distribution networks remained.

A key point here is that the dominant mode of living and doing business over the years has been linked to the development and use of networks. Networks provide the social and economic infrastructure of the movement of people, goods and ideas. As the commodity to be moved changes, so has the network needed to move that commodity. Older networks moved physical things, and larger physical things as the networks improved. Modern networks maintain the traditional capacity to move huge commodities -- factory machinery, tons of wheat, millions of people -- around the world, but modern networks have developed the capacity to move ideas around the world, by moving electrons, not just electric railroad engines. While travel and tourism today represents a global economy of two trillion dollars, the movement of ideas is growing even more quickly. With the Internet, students and professors can now develop their own "home page” or electronic bulletin board on the Internet, allowing assignments to be made, developed, delivered and stored in verbal, video or graphic form, and accessed from any place in the world, in real time or at the discretion of either participant. Student records will become colorful, interactive electronic portfolios.

Internet. You’ll be hearing more about it. For the next generation, Internet may be the dominant network in the world.