Under construction: information superhighway; Internet will connect you with business colleagues around the world - for as little as $1 an hour - includes a related article listing Internet resources - Communications

Home Office Computing, August, 1993 by Daniel P. Dern

Internet Will Connect You With Business Colleagues Around the World (for as Little as $1 an Hour)

When you think about dialing an online service with your modem, you probably think of the big consumer information services, such as America Online, CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie, and Prodigy, or the thousands of local bulletin board systems (BBS). But more and more people are talking about Internet, especially after prominent mentions in Time magazine and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The Internet now counts more than 10 million users in 50 countries and is spreading like ivy. The number of users has been doubling in recent years.

The Internet, however, is not a commercial information service. It's a collection of more than 11,000 computer networks--from universities, libraries, museums, supercomputer centers, state and federal government institutions, and businesses--around the globe that are linked together. Nor is it a specific entity (although aspects of it are managed by a volunteer organization called the Internet Society)--it's just the name that has been given to this federation of allied networks, many of which are nonprofit. Even if you don't belong to one of these organizations, you can access the Internet and exchange electronic mail and files with others on the system.

The Internet is the closest thing in the world to the kind of information superhighway that the Clinton Administration has talked about developing. "The government can serve as a catalyst for the private-sector development of an advanced national communications network, which would help companies collaborate on research and design for advanced manufacturing, provide technical information to small businesses, and make telecommunicating much easier," said candidate Bill Clinton last September.

A descendant of a network started by the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, Internet was further developed by the National Science Foundation during the mid-1980s. The NSFnet, in fact, is one of the backbone networks on the Internet. Because of these roots and the number of universities connected, Internet is particularly valuable for scientists, academics, policymakers, market researchers, librarians, and technicians, who can keep in touch with their colleagues around the world and up to date with the latest developments in their fields. Nonetheless, more than half of the groups connected to the Internet are engaged in commercial activity.

Besides this global community of professionals and scientists, the Internet offers some of the same services as commercial networks: electronic mail to Internet users as well as millions of subscribers to commercial services; the ability to chat/conference with other Internet users; more than two million files and shareware programs to download; multiplayer games; several thousand special-interest groups (called newsgroups) where you can post and read messages; and access to databases (such as the Library of Congress catalog records, transcripts of electronic conferences, census data, and the Department of Commerce's Economic Bulletin Board). You can download files and access many of these services for free.

LOW-COST ELECTRONIC MAIL

Electronic mail is the most commonly used application on the Internet. Nearly one-third of respondents to a recent Internet survey said they carried out some kind of collaborative research or work with colleagues via electronic mail. Many people said they used the Internet e-mail as an inexpensive alternative to overnight mail services. In fact, for many small businesses, the Internet acts as their own corporate network. "We're located all over the globe--our main developers are in Europe and our leads qualifier is in Montana," explains Jean Hammond, vice president of marketing at AXON Networks, based in Watertown, Massachusetts. "We use the Internet to transfer work in progress and to communicate via e-mail."

An Internet user can also exchange electronic mail with members of commercial services, such as America Online, Delphi, CompuServe, and MCI Mail. An Internet user with a commercial account, even on systems such as Dialog and Dow Jones News/Retrieval, can also access that system from the Internet (often at 9600 or 14,400 bps), which may cut phone costs considerably.

THE DOWNSIDE

Wealth of information and people is one of the Internet's selling points, but it can be a drawback. With millions of megabytes of information to choose from and more than 10 million users, you can easily get lost. That's partly because of the Internet's rather unfriendly and sometimes arcane command-driven interface, in marked contrast to commercial services, which are getting more and more graphic. When sending a message from another system to the Internet, you must use the unfriendly Internet address protocol: user name-@machine name. For example, the address for the NSFnet InterNIC's information service is info@internic.net. Increasingly, however, Internet sites are offering friendly navigators, which have point-and-click menus in addition to the ability to search indexed lists of resources.