ISA Seattle Section Monthly Meeting

Our November meeting was an overview presentation and online guided tour of the Internet by Walt Boyes.  As chairman of the ISA Online committee, Walt has been instrumental in establishing the ISA Online World Wide Web site as one of the renowned sites on the Internet.  As a long-time Internet enthusiast, Walt had a lot of information to impart on us "newbies" in a very short time.

First we had to learn a little geography…of the "Wired World".  In the wired world your computer may connect to online services which connect you to other users or to the Internet backbone, or it may connect to Internet Service Providers (ISP's), which connect you to other ISP's and/or the Internet backbone which connects to the millions of other users around the world, or it may connect to other network connections and yet more users on those networks.  (You really had to see the picture…you know the saying about pictures versus words.)

OK, fine, there are millions of connections, so how do they work?  This is where we learned some of the fundamentals of how your computer communicates with the online services, ISP's and networks.  We started with the modem, or modulator-demodulator, and its many variations, ISDN, multiple T1 connections, Direct PC, and much more.

Currently, most personal computers come with 28.8 Kilobit per second (Kbps) modems, and that's not too far from the maximum practical limit of 40 Kbps for the standard analog home telephone line.  The bad news is that while you may have a fast, 28.8 Kbps modem, your data isn't moving at 28.8 Kbps.  This is due to bottlenecks in the telephone system (TELCO), in the Internet connection (ISP), in the routing and backbone, or in the ISP or server or TELCO at the other end of the line.  You might actually be getting throughput of 0.1 Kbps!  This is why the graphics still load slowly sometimes when you are surfing the Web!

ISDN is a digital technique that can achieve 64Kbps on a single line or 128 Kbps using dual phone lines, and DirecPC is a new technology that promises to allow a 1 Mbps download transmission rate using a satellite dish similar to the ones used for DirecTV.

The protocol that makes all of the Internet communication work is called TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol.  With this protocol a unique IP address identifies each computer connected to the Internet.  This address consists of four numbers, each from 1 to 256, usually separated by periods (for example 128.51.106.230).  IP addresses (and network names) are assigned by the InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center).  In simple terms, TCP/IP processes messages by chopping them into multiple pieces, multiple times and sending them randomly in separate directions.  This way the message will get to its destination even if an Internet node gets zapped by a nuclear blast.

Going back into some history of the Internet, it was interesting to note that it was not designed for bandwidth.  Instead, it was designed to be a very robust way to get data from satellites to the NORAD headquarters deep within Cheyenne mountain in Colorado in the midst of a nuclear war.  Yet it has held up surprisingly well with the phenomenal growth it has experienced in the last few years.  The Internet is now handling about a million times the "traffic" it was designed to handle!  Another interesting point was that although the Internet began as a government project to network Department of Defense (DOD) and university computer systems, the backbone of the Internet has been almost completely privatized in the last 5 years.

What is the most important ( "killer") application on the Internet?  E-mail. But, we also learned about UseNet and newsgroups.  And a little about proper "netiquette" and "emoticons" and "spam" and "Cancelmoose", and lots more.  (We could have used much more time!)

The online tour of the Internet began with a look at an online service, America Online.  The key feature of an online service is the specialized services it provides exclusively to subscribers of that service.  (The services are too numerous and varied to list here.)  Of course, subscribers are also provided access to the Internet.

Next stop on the tour was a look at an Internet Service Provider (ISP), Netcom.  As indicated in the name, ISP's only provide access to the Internet.  Some provide additional features over others, such as space for personal and/or commercial homepages and related services.

Our online tour took us to the ISA Online web site, which is located at http://www.isa.org, which was become one of the more acclaimed sites on the web.  World wide web (WWW) documents have links called URL's, or Uniform Resource Locators, that are used by Web Browser programs (like Netscape Navigator) to locate documents, or pages, on the WWW.  The tour finished with a quick look at the newly established ISA Seattle homepage at http://www.isa.org/~seattle.