THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

The past, the present and the future or vice versa ?

Ramblings about the Internet.

Rolf Nordhagen

Let me present myself, I am a network grandfather, I have grandchildren

starting to explore the net. And I have been in the network game since

around 1970, when we at the University of Oslo started our first fledling

network projects. And this was also times when the minicomputer revolution

was emerging, when they developed as the small mammals under the time of

the dinosaurs. As one of the very first minicomputer owners in my country I

remember thinking, when seeing the proliferation of machines like the PDP-8

(by DIGITAL), if you could control all the minicomputers, you could control

the world.

Is this what is happening ? Let me ask the rethoric questions, what is

good, bad, and ugly, is it the past, the present and the future, or the

other way around ? For all, the answer will of course be YES, that is a

mixture. Perhaps a more relevant question is, will the future be better or

or worse than the past and the present.

At least the past, even to us reminiscensing old-timers, was not so good.

To many, in the 70s, even in the 80s, it was tough going being believed,

that networks was the path and the light. This was the time we had to fool

the unbelievers, from our university budget committees (we made terminal

connections), to higher authorities. As you know we have suceeded with that

up to recent times. Neither the worlds Telecoms, nor KGB, knew what was

going on, until recently. And that was good.

I remember installing the first electronic mail and conference system in

Oslo in 1978, Jacob Palmes COM-system. (Palme is now professor at the

University of Stockholm). Not even our own operations people believed this

was of any value. As the computer centre director I had to do it myself, my

last programming/systems job ever, with most reluctant help from the

operating wizards being brutally ordered to assist. But after a few weeks

everybody was hooked, line and sinker. We never turned back, electronic

communication was there to stay.

And we learned one important lesson. As much as networks are for transfer

of data and information, it is however the personal communication between

people which is the real benefit for us all.

Jakob Palme wrote already in 1973 that the computer would play a major role

in society, and that to avoid the control to fall into the hands of those

with power in economy and politics, the use and access to computers would

have to be open and easy enough to allow everybody to communicate. He

wanted a terminal (!) in each home. Palme was inspired by Murray Turoff,

the author of the book "Network Nation" (Still going strong, see

http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/#ab), who preached the need for ordinary

people to control the use of computers, and talked about the general public

information system. Remember, this was in the days of emerging timesharing

and even before screen terminals, and before anyone dreamed of the PC. As

the systems and the net evolved, around 1980 we, who came from punched

cards and large mainframes, thought that modern screen terminals, and to us

easy to use text editors, should make the network easily available to the

public. Little did we understand that is would take the graphical user

interface of the Mac and Windows, and the World Wide Web of the 1990s, to

realise the dream of the public information system 20 years earlier.

What was really good about the past was the cooperation towards global

communication. In the Nordic countries, even if we could not get our own

authorities to help, we managed to convince a Council of Nordic Ministers,

who had set up a money bin for cooperative projects, that a common

"datanetwork" would be a nordic thing to do. Together, the major university

network groups created the worlds first, common international network,

between the major Nordic sites in 5 countries. Our technical manager, the

unsung hero Einar L¸vdal, developed a scheme for running multiple

protocols. Thus we had no protocol wars, as in other parts of Europe.

Imaging those days, when we ran IBM protocols, Decnet (do you remember ?),

OSI protocols (X25 and all that) so heavily supported by the European

authorities - and many of our technical wizards, and of course TCP/IP. We

wanted real services, not technical wizardry. For this, we were even called

traitors by some of our European collegas. And great was the day in 1987,

when our young people could log into ftp-sites worldwide, particularly the

US, and get the last versions of a programming system, minutes after it was

opened to the world. I am not the least in doubt that NORDUnet is a major

reason for the Nordic countries being in the forefront of using Information

Technology. As you may know, it is not too many years ago since TCP/IP

services became available in countries like UK or Germany, who hung on to

their X.25 protocols.

And we did learn some lessons, which I always repeat when talking about

networking. The major lesson was that of cooperation. We realised that no

group had sufficient knowhow and manpower to do it alone. All groups

participating got a piece of the action. This created enthusiasm and

responsibility for the common goal. In networking nobody should be king,

the IETF motto, to avoid Kings, and to believe in rough consensus, was true

for our project. The catchphrase, networks are communication, communication

is cooperation, networks are cooperation, is certainly true.

What about the present ? In reality, we lived in our academic playground

peacefully until around 1993. Today we hardly remember BW, Before Web ? It

is awesome to realise that the present state of the net has developed

almost entirely over the last 6 years. In our network past we nursed a

baby, we are now watching a child, with its inevitable childhood ills, its

need for school and play, to mature. I believe the most pressing need of

our network time is to get our house in order, to create powerful alliances

to preserve the open network, freely accessible by everyone, and easily

available to the public at large.

The effort to create new regimes for domain name registers, the important

.org, .com etc. names, is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen

when the powers of commerce and all kind of authorities start to demand

control and power. The all powerful International Telecommunications Union

(ITU) is now, after years of ignorance, taking an active interest in the

Internet, in the discussion. Is this good or omnious ? And what about the

common user ? Who cares for the guys with their modems at the end of the

line ? Who have been snared by the hype of all the Internet Service

Providers ? At least not us in the universities, who sit on our

institutional Ethernets.

At home we have been trying to forge an alliance between all major players

representing users and providers, under the aegis of Internet Society, as a

national Chapter. We need a foundation for common handling of all the

technical challenges of an open network, from neutral inter-connection

points to routing and similar services, safety and technical standards, not

the least in the multimedia, high capacity world. We need to have a

consensus voice on matters of copyright, intellectuel properties, and on

the proposals of lawmakers and government. We need to preserve our local

cultures, and to work for quality of service for all. And above all, we

have to cooperate to find solutions to our worst problem, ethics and the

self-discipline needed to avoid the worst excesses of a completely

unregulated medium, and the spectre of censorship.

This is difficult indeed, as none of the present threaths to an open net is

perceived as urgent. But if such alliances are not created, one day our

networks will fall into the hands of commercial, or governmental dominance,

or content regulations, and our times will be regarded by those believing

in an open net, as ugly indeed.

But something good has been happening. We have seen the power of the net

going east. The first outside data connection came to the Baltics in 1991,

when the Norwegian government gave an institute in Vilnius a powerful

publishing system, based on the Norwegian Nord-computers, to produce

printed material under local control. Also a satellite dish was placed on

the roof of their parliamentary building, and linked by phone to Oslo. In

October 1991, Vidar Bjerkeland, the project manager, turned on a X.25

connection, winding up in UNINETT and NORDUNET, over this link. Since then

we are grateful to the Nordic Council of Ministers for having funded the

BALTnet project, which I believe has had a major role in making the Baltic

countries full members of the Internet community. And today a large number

of European and International organisations and institutions are actively

supporting the development of the Internet among the Eastern countries.

As you may know, the NATO organisation has a Science program, from the very

beginning of the North Atlantic alliance, to promote friendship and

understanding between scientists of the alliance. This program was turned

east when the cold war was over, with cooperation between NATO countries

and partner countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. One,

all to small, part of this program is turned to supporting networking in

the partner countries, through an Advisory Panel on Computer Networking,

where I happen to be a member. We firmly believe that this program is among

the best we networkers can do to support peace. As we recently wrote about

the case for Internet connectivity:

Internet connectivity is NOT research.

BUT it is today the most effective tool to access and release the research

potential of talented, highly educated people, trained in science and

technology.

There is NO cooperation in science and research, on a national and global

scale, that does not use the Internet extensively. ALL international

cooperative science projects depend on Internet access.

Additionally, Internet access can promote availablity of content and

information and thus open societies, democratic processes and improved

education.

Closing the gap between information rich and information poor societies

promote peace.

To illustrate some of the challenges confronting us, I believe similar to

the situation in the Baltics not so many years ago. I recently was in

meetings with people from academies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. They are

highly educated people, recently having emerged from Russian dominance, and

eager to develop their own culture and institutions. But they have scarcely

any travel money, hardly any funding for their libraries, and very

expensive or non-working international phone lines. Internet trickles in

through very, very expensive services from Moscow, charged per kilobyte. To

create a cooperation among funding bodies to get a satellite link down in

Tashkent and other major sites in Caucasus and Central Asia would be a

major breakthrough for them.

My naive belief is that the best way the network community can support what

we all want, peace and the understanding among people, and in our own

belief in an open world, is to use our network technology to enable full

communication for all nations of the world. There are wide areas still

unable to benefit, such as in the Middle East, and particularly in Africa.

And indeed, the last amazing thing that has happened is that the all

powerful gathering of the 8 major nations, in the last G8 meeting in

Okinawa, decided to take Internet to the developing countries. Reading

their document:

http://www.g8kyushu-okinawa.go.jp/e/documents/it1.html

is for an oldtimer to meet oneself at least 10 years ago. Finally even

politicians are seeing the light !

What then about the future. In our more euphoric moments we feel we can

fulfill the promises of the next millenium. That is, provided we get enough

bandwidth, and we see no technical reasons why not, only obstacles like

narrowminded politics, telemonopolistic attitudes, and gross commercialism.

Why should this be denided us at a reasonable cost ?

The net is already a vast storehouse of knowledge, from the writings of the

ancient Greeks, to the last theories of the universe, with everything

possible inbetween to know and read, trivia and trash, funny or profound.

We are beginning to see the drastic changes we believe our educational

systems may experience, no longer requiring people to come to the

educational institutions, but bringing education out to the people, so

necessary when we change from a production-based society to a

knowledgebased one. Will the net enable us to be free ? to work and play,

to educate our childeren and pursue our intellectual interests werever we

want to live, independent of time and location ?

Indeed, in my own country, so thinly populated, with so many regions were

people want to live, but being depopulated after small, local production

facilities are becoming uneconomical, may this be a new vitalising

opportunity, to create competence cooperations between centres and

districts, and new services were the network removes the need for the

traditionally centralised organisation of work ?

What is essential, is to bring the network, at adequate capacity out to

reach every corner of our societies. All Nordic governments have produced

ambitious plans to make Information Technology a cornerstone in their

policies towards better economies, better services and better societies. To

me, as expressed everytime we are asked to comment on such plans, the most

important contribution towards this goal, is just this, bring the network

out, soon. Dont wait for the telemonopolies, even if deregulated. They want

to to ensure their commercial safety and vast income.

But it is coming ? The promises are of the cabel networks, the beamings

from satellites in the sky, Internet on demand, vast number of channels and

entertainment. This leaves me cold. To us who are born in the traditions of

network cooperation (and I hope this includes you), the most important role

of the network is communication, two ways, between people, between people

who learn and people who teach, between people who cooperate in pursuing

knowledge or helping each other, between people who govern and people

participating in the governing process, between people who serve and people

who demand service. All supported by the storehouse of information. If this

happens, the future should be good.

But we are facing another important challenge at these times, the challenge

of high capacity bandwidth. Remember what happened 30 years ago, when we

started the puny efforts at networking. We only needed simple leased lines,

and really very few understood what we used them for. Were are the

opportunities today that allow our most talented people to think in terms

of applications and services which will carry the day 25 years from now. We

have no idea of what that will be, we only know the process, to let talent

meet opportunity !

In the US and in Canada this is understood. They are creating large

organisations, Internet2 by university consortia, the Next Generation

Internet (NGI) by (vice) presidential initiative, and a very high speed

Backbone Network Service (vBNS) . Our part of the world will must meet this

challenge, or we are doomed to be for ever behind those who have the

bandwidth opportunity. In other words, we in our parts of the world have to

meet the challenges of the Internet2 efforts of US research, or we will

fall behind.

In Europe, also in the Nordic countries, the telecoms have always carefully

guarded their bandwidth resources by high prices, undoubtedly to somehow

keep for themselves the potential of the new services. This is

self-destructive. Only by open cooperation with the most talented research

and development people, can their business survive in a competitive world.

Again we have raised the call for action. As we learned during the NORDUnet

effort, cooperation and shared responsibilities made the new opportunities

come true. Again each of us may not have enough clout and power to convince

our funders of the new challenges. And the Nordic networkers have again

created a NORDUnet 2. We have challenged our own network providers to

create a high capacity backbone between our universities. When this gets in

full swing, we may again experience good times, and not bad.

Are we moving to fast, is change to rapid ? As we know the first industrial

revolution took 90 years, at least. And in 1893, at the Chicago World Fair,

the young engineer Westinghouse introduced alternating current to transport

electricity, and outdid Edisons heavy direct current machinery. Think of

your use of electricity today, everywhere, not only running our factories

and heating and lighting our homes. Think of the myriad of devices, in your

kitchen, in your daily life as TV and radio, in your automobiles, and your

computers and PCs. Remember, we are only 40 years into the computer

revolution, the very beginning of the presence of what we may term

intelligent computer assistance in all facets of human activities.

Many of the ideas we thought about 20 years ago is happening now. The open,

global network is surely taking on the task of moving us into the

information society, and linking us together worldwide, hopefully towards a

more peaceful world. And here I am, talking to you. Would this ever have

happened if it had not been for our mutual, and global, cooperation through

Internet ?

Rolf Nordhagen, Oslo August 2000

----------------------------------------------

Rolf Nordhagen, University of Oslo Information Technology Services, P.O.Box

1059 BLINDERN, 0316 Oslo, Norway, Ph: +47 22 852485/70, Fax: +47 22 852730,

Rolf.Nordhagen@usit.uio.no

----------------------------------------------