A Resource Guide to the Internet

Introduction

A few weeks ago I and a number of other colleagues were shocked to be
informed that FSU was even considering the option of not continuing its
participation in Suranet, our major path into the Internet. As a result of
that experience, I decided that perhaps those of us who use the Internet
daily have not done a very good job of advocating the value of the Internet
within the University. This document is intended as a start toward changing
that situation.

This document is, at first glance, forbiddingly long. I certainly don't expect
otherwise busy people to sit and read the whole thing. Perhaps the most
realistic hope is that a quick scan will first, identify some Internet
resources that interest you personally, and second, give some feeling for the
breadth of the Internet usefulness. The Internet is useful for much more than
computer related things. For example, you will find in
Chapter 1 a long list of libraries whose catalogs can be accessed via the
Internet. Also, you will learn about large databases of information in areas as
diverse as Medieval and Early Modern history, genetic sequences, astronomy,
molecular and general biology, agriculture, ancient commentaries on Dante's
Divine Comedy, Latin America, and many others. The material in Chapter 2 is
a further sampling of the great variety of uses of the Internet. Some of the
included articles explain far more eloquently than I can why the Internet is
important. I hope you will at least skim the pages and see for yourself.

Although this document concentrates on resources that can be accessed through
the Internet, there are two immediate benefits of the Internet that many FSU
faculty and students already use daily: electronic mail (email) and
remote login to computers around the world. The use of email for professional
business is important today and rapidly growing. For example, many FSU people
participate in research collaborations that are conducted in part or in whole
over email. Email response time is short enough to support electronic
'conversations' that can involve two or many people. Last year several of us at
SCRI organized a large international conference almost entirely using email.

Remote login is also important to the FSU community. Although FSU is fortunate
to have one of the best university computer environents in the world, it is
still important to be able to access other computers, e.g. those at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado; those at the NSF
supercomputer centers in San Diego, Illinois, Pittsburgh, and Cornell; those at
any of the DOE national labs: Fermilab, SSC, Brookhaven, SLAC, Argonne, CEBAF,
Oak Ridge; even international sites such as CERN in Switzerland, or 
Rutherford Laboratory in Britain. I am sure there are a large number of other
remote sites that are important to various FSU individuals.

The present Internet extends around the entire Earth, includes most countries,
and is composed of many thousands of institutions (a list of the US and world
membership as of June 1991 is provided in Appendix A). Use of the Internet is
growing at about 10% per month, which works out to an annual threefold
increase! Furthermore, the rate of increase is itself increasing, and so on.

Both houses of Congress have recently passed a major bill to fund the
Internet followup, the National Educational and Research Network (NREN),
which will cost about $390 million dollars over five years. The chief proponent
of the project, Senator Al Gore, calls the NREN "the smokestack industry of the
information age".

The NREN will be a prototype of what is variously called the Network Information
Superhighway, or the Network Information Superstructure, or the National
Public Network. Whatever it is finally called, this network will bring
digital service into most American homes, and that service is likely to have
profound effects upon our society. Those of us who are now using the Internet
are, knowingly or not, pioneers in this new world.

The world of the Internet is often called 'cyberspace' (a word borrowed from
the science fiction writer William Gibson). Cyberspace
is described by Mitch Kapor and John Barlow as "the repository for all digital
or electronically transferred information, and, as such, it is the venue for
most of what is now commerce, industry, and broad-scale human interaction."

Living in cyberspace is often likened to living in a global village, complete
with virtual townhalls, village greens, and coffee houses. You can get some
feel for what this means by perusing the lists of Usenet and email interest
and discussion groups that are described in Chapters 3 and 4 below.

Already the Internet is playing a role in changing our world. To cite only a
very recent example, the September 2, 1991 issue of InfoWorld reported that 
during coup week 'within hours of Gorbachov's removal, messages were humming 
between the Soviet Union and abroad via telephone and such computer networks as
Usenet. One note from Moscow underscored the importance of the link: "Please
stop flooding the only narrow channel. We need the bandwidth to organize the 
resistance."'

Although we are today limited largely to text messages, the next generation of
communication in cyberspace will be multimedia. The information we receive will
be in the form of images, voice, and video along with the text.

The September, 1991 issue of Scientific American is devoted to Communications,
Computers, and Networks, and gives wide-ranging descriptions of what life in
cyberspace will be like within the decade. There are also large and complex
economic, social, political and ethical issues that must be addressed as we move
into the information age, and many of these are also discussed in the SA issue.

Just to give some idea of the depth of the revolution that is happening, I offer
two quotes from the SA issue. According to Michael Dertouzos, Director of the
Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, "The agricultural age was based on 
plows and the animals that pulled them; the industrial age, on engines and the
fuels that fed them. The information age that we are now creating will be based
on computers and the networks that interconnect them."

And Senator Gore writes "New technologies that enhance the ability to create
and understand information have always led to dramatic changes in civilization.
The printing press unleashed the forces that led to the birth of the modern
nation state. It made possible the widespread distribution of civic knowledge
that enabled the average citizen to affect political decisions.
  Now come distributed networks connecting a myriad of computers, ranging from
megaflop machines and workstations to desktop and personal laptop units. All
are becoming less expensive in each successive generation that emerges. There
is no longer any doubt that such machines will reshape civilization even more
quickly and more thoroughly than did the printing press. Gutenberg's invention,
which so empowered Jefferson and his colleagues in their fight for democracy,
seems to pale before the rise of electronic communications and innovations,
from the telegraph to the television, to the microprocessor and the emergence
of a new computerized world - an information age."

How dramatic these events will actually be, and when they will happen, are
certainly debatable points. But it seems to me, and to many of my FSU 
colleagues, absolutely unthinkable that we should be anything other than
leaders in the events. Our responsibility as teachers who prepare students for
life in the modern world, indeed for leadership in the modern world, demands
no less of us. To drop our participation in the Internet, even to play anything
other than a leading, major role, would be grossly irresponsible.