"Bruce Sterling - Internet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

run programs there or write their own. Scientists can make use of
powerful supercomputers a continent away. Libraries offer their
electronic card catalogs for free search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs
are increasingly available through this service. And there are
fantastic amounts of free software available.

File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines
and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers -- some
two thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them
anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge.
This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through
direct Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there
are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for
them (and many more millions of files are available to people with
accounts). Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of
publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work
on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet
programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been
developed to catalog and explore these enormous archives of
material.

The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like
bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore
for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000
and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network,
designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear
holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child the Internet,
which is thoroughly out of control, and spreading exponentially
through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of
the Internet in the 90s resembles the spread of personal
computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more
important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those
personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is
truly planetary in scale.

The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and
exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot
topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information-
service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought
success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research
and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall
1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet
"backbone." NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest
network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks
worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular
phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-
definition television. A multimedia global circus!

Or so it's hoped -- and planned. The real Internet of the