THE INTERNET: A MIND OF MANY ONE

Hi! :) LOL! - Where do you want to go today?

The fact that you are reading this is by nature a product of technology developed late last century, but rooted in the very birth of computers themselves. Computers originally propagated from a perceived need to maintain an intelligence advantage over enemy codes and transmissions by military agencies during the Second World War. It's ironic, how a technology first used for waging warfare became so beneficial to society and prolific. Although the government first held primative computers in laboratories and military installations, this technology worked it's way into the industrial and financial sector where such corporations and institutions utilized massive building sized computers to speed up and more efficiently process large amounts of information. The internet itself was controlled by the government for data transfer over wire, and communication between governmental agencies. It wasn't until educational universities and technical institutions in the civilian sector started utilizing the internet did it gain greater potential. The internet is now an industry and continues to evolve and expand.

I would certainly consider myself a member of the internet generation having grown up with computers, and digital devices throughout my life. The best way to describe the modern history of the Personal Computer is to relate my own experiences. I remember my first computer vividly. When I was 6 or 7 my parents got me a RadioShack Tandy TRS80 Color Computer from some aquantances they knew, actually the parents of a childhood friend named, "T.J." I think it had a whopping 14k of RAM, and programs were saved to a cassette tape recorder, no hard drive, no disk drive, but it did have some kind of expansion cartridge port on the side. The monitor was actually a small TV screen with an RF adapter, and the computer and keyboard were contained within the same unit. The only way to operate it was to write programs in BASIC computer language. There was no operating system, rather YOU were the operating system. Essentially a BASIC Program was written as follows:

I'm pretty sure there's a loop error in that, but you get the picture. There was a palette of I think 16 colors to choose from including, red, green, cyan, majenta, orange, blue, indigo, white, black, brown, purple, and grey. You can imagine a little kid just having learned to read, typing in all that and getting "Syntax Errors" and "Division by 0" errors, I remember having all kinds of fun making sounds from the computer and changing the color on the screen but eventually I found the experience so boring and complicated that I played with my LEGO's and dinosaurs instead.

I remember during the 80's there was a brief boom for Apple Computer, and man they were the bomb for awhile. I remember when the Apple IIc appeared, and how awesome people thought that was at $2000. I'm pretty sure that it worked solely off of floppy disks and had an 8 or 10 inch screen. Then there was the Commodore 64, a truly niche machine that was somewhat more affordable than the Apple's, along about the same lines as my TRS 80. A lot of IBM computers had monocrome screens, or even just one color of either green or a off yellow during the early 80's.

When I was in 5th grade I saw the first "CD-ROM" (Single Speed) on a $2700 IBM 386 Machine with a 200 MB Hard Drive. They brought it into school and were showing us it in the newly built library. It had "multimedia" with video and audio clips, and I was mesmerized by how technologically advanced it seemed. Right around this time my parents managed to get our first true PC, an Emerson (they made computers? Are they even still in business?) 286 PC with DOS 3.31. It had a 20 MB Hard Drive, 1 MB of RAM, and a 5 1/2 inch Floppy Disk drive. I think it might have had a 256 Color VGA Adapter. Yes, this is a dinosaur by today's comparisons. I had "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" on it, Solitaire, and QuickBASIC where I made more goofy BASIC programs that basically just made noises and drew odd shapes on the screen. I even started the framework for a Text, Image, and sound based RPG in BASIC, (it even had motion and cool effects) but it ran out of memory stack space and crashed a lot so I gave up on it.

By 1994 my mom bought a brand new ZEOS 486 66Mhz DX Computer, that had 16 MB of RAM, a 540 MB Hard Drive, a 4x CD-ROM, and a Diamond Stealth64-bit graphics card. This PC was listed as a PC Magazine Editor's Choice during that year and that was why my mom bought it. Interestingly enough, ZEOS was a chief competitor to today's Gateway. Dell, wasn't much of a factor back then. ZEOS vanished when it was swallowed by Micron PC, and in turn I don't think Micron Makes regular desktops anymore, or have drastically scaled back their influence on the market to almost invisibility. My mother used this PC to develop her own literary and poetry website, that was briefly online during 1996, and it became rather successful until she halted the project to move on with other endevors in her life by 1997. I remember playing a lot of Myst, DOOM, Zork, and SimCity 2000 on that Machine. My first experiences with the internet occured on this computer.

The first computer I personally bought with my own money was a used 486SX 33Mhz machine with two 255 MB Hard Drives, 8 MB of Ram, a VGA card up to 256 Colors, and a Hayes 9600 Baud Rate External Modem. I got all the way up to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on that one. After I upgraded the graphics card, I was able to play DOOM. I remember loathing when people had a large .jpg or animated .gif on their grey background webpage while surfing in Mozilla and Netscape Navigator 2.0. Some of my first experiences with the internet were simply posting on bulletin boards and surfing rudimentary websites. Interestingly enough, I sold the same machine to someone else, for about the same price I paid for it about a year later.

After diligently saving a substantial amount of money by 1997 from my job as a cashier at Albertsons, I was ready to get something new and current. I was looking to get the best machine I could afford in the $2000 range. There was some debate during the time as to how I would get the computer. I was looking at ordering a Gateway2000 or Micron Millennia Tower, or having someone build it. The husband of a coworker at my job just so happened to be a computer programmer and he said that he could have someone build it for me and get everything I want at a good price. As it were I did get a great system with the monitor for about $2000 built locally. My Dream Machine of that period of time had a Pentium 233Mhz MMX processor, 6 MB Hard Drive, 64 MB of RAM, Intel TXPRO Board (33 or 66Mhz bus I believe), 6 GB Hard Drive, Diamond Stealth 3-D Graphics Card with 8 MB of Ram, a MAG Innovision 17 Inch Monitor, Yamaha Speakers, Sound Blaster AWE 64, a 56k Flex Modem, 32x CD-ROM Drive. It came with Windows 95 Second Edition. Back in the Day, this machine was smokin'. I thought I had the most kick ass computer around - however... this bliss was of course short lived when the Pentium II came out a month or two later. I still have this machine today, but alas I don't use it that much considering how limited its capabilities are in comparison to todays 2.0+ Gigahertz behemoths.

This computer played an integral role in my presence online. A large majority of my sites and online projects were contructed on that machine. My very first site was "The Epic of Final Fantasy VII" a very modest game specific site, that you can still find online today. If you have been following my sites then you know the rest of the story. I produced and continue to create websites devoted to video games, fantasy literature, the paranormal, and philosophy.

From 1994, I gained a great familiarity with the internet, and watched so many things emerge, change, and shape it into what it is today. I've observed the popularity of BBS and ".alt" newsgroups diminish, openly available info on .mil domains, the development of personal "home pages," animated .gifs, the metoric rise of AOL's use, the expansion of Yahoo from a grey page with some links to some websites of their choosing to the massive multibillion dollar enterprise it became, chat rooms, message boards, banner networks, hit counters, polls, ROMs and Emulators, hacking, cracking, the creation of RealAudio and RealPlayer, the growth of Internet Explorer, the monopoly of Microsoft and MSN, the appearance of mass market online retailers like Amazon.com, the migration of America's fortune 500 companies online, and the proliferation of commercial websites and porn, the birth of Ebay, the late 90's internet boom, Napster and the huge popularity of MP3's, the spread of broadband, "spam," the great internet recession and massive flop of sites like etoys.com and pets.com.

Somewhere during 1992 and 1993, I kept hearing "visonary" terms coming from Washington and various groups on the news about the growth of the "information superhighway." Remember that? It was the true buzzphrase to represent the potential of the internet. Al Gore didn't create the internet, much as he would profess otherwise, but he was a definite proponent in the beginning. Mind you during the early nineties very few families in America or the world for that matter were online, let alone even had a Personal Computer. Most ISP's in the beginning were very small, with a at most a couple hundred members, but soon ISP's grew larger. The first of the largest companies that I can remember was Prodigy, then America Onlne, and Mindspring.

The early boom of the net was most notably propagated by pornographic websites. During those years the most frequently queried theme on search engines was "sex," followed by "UFOs." I imagine this instant success for these sites stemmed from their easy accessability and total anonymity of patrons as well as the usual curiousity factor of people who could access these things from the privacy of thier own home instead of going into an adult store on the shady part of town to purchase magazines or videos.

New meanings have been defined for words that have been added to our vocabulary because of the 'net: Surf, Spam, E-mail, Emoticon, Browser, Website, Post, "Nicks and Addys," Download, MP3, Screenname, Chatroom, Webmaster, Cybersex, "Cookies," and SearchEngine. Sending an email is commonplace, and browsing a website is a daily routine for many people.

Chatrooms have, since their inception, been a way of viewing the unclouded window of a person's true personality and level of intelligence. Often times in daily society, people don't say what they mean, or express their true feelings because they are afraid of embarrassment, ridicule, or intolerance, however online all inhibitions are off, and in chat rooms people's true selves become evident, however paradoxically there is another side of the same people that play roles and don persona's other than their own. I've often found myself observing a chat room or message board like a biologist monitors a pitri dish. I found it sometimes amusing and intellectually gratifying to introduce various unannounced stimuli into the fray of a seemingly cohesive (or contradictive) conversation or group of obviously emotionally and mentally weak individuals prone to self centered blurts of their own egotism and delusional personal vainity. There was one specific chat room that I remember using in 1996 that was actually ahead of it's time in terms of what companies like Sony are doing with EverQuest and the trend of MMORPG's. There was this website, www.worlds.com where you could download this chat program called "WorldsChat." In WorldsChat you could select from a set of "avatars" and you could wander around in a 3-D world or SpaceStation. I actually had some truly interesting conversations in WorldsChat until the program wasn't supported and discontinued by 1998. There were times that I took on the persona of the opposite sex of my actual sex and see how people responded to get an insight into the way people interact socially. One thing that always confounded me about behavior in many of the major chatrooms was "cybersex" where two chatters would type sexually erotic words, emoticons, and sentances to each other in an effort to arouse themselves, however there was no physical interaction, rather just these words on the screen. I assume that maybe these people gained something from this, but I never did and often found it easy to prey on these people with the right combination of sexual themes and images, then just vanish.

Chat rooms and the innate anonymity of them beget the formation of a new language, that of "emoticons" and abbreviations to express the prevailing mood of the individual communicating with the other person using various combinations of characters on the computer keyboard. It's a kind of bodyless bodylanguage or digital heiroglyphics. For Example if you put this: :P, it means you are sticking your toung out. Some others include: ;) - Wink, 8 -) - Wearing Glasses, >_< - grimace, ^_^ - Girly face, :( - sad, LOL - "Lauging Out Loud", BRB = "Be Right Back" ASL = "Age, Sex, Location" This dialect of symbols and acronyms is used to personify the individual using it to the person he or she is communicating to and this language has expanded greatly. I don't even know all the emoticons anymore there are so many that people use.

The actual framework of the endless pages of information online is based in a computer programming language called HTML, or Hypertext Mark Up Language. HTML since it's inception has gone though many revisions and updates to code and in tandem browsers have supported new commands. As far as computer programming languages go HTML is not all that hard to learn. I will confess that I come from the old school of website development where you typed the code yourself and developed the pages based upon what you knew of the code rather than let a program like FrontPage or DreamWeaver do it for you. To this day I don't use these programs because my knowledge of HTML usage and programming tricks is far more efficient than the pages of wasted and useless code that these programs produce. A practace commonly used during the "homepage boom" of the mid to late ninties was to integrate animations using JAVA and JavaScript, another programming language. You can do a lot of neat things with Java but as a practace information oriented sites tend to stay away from tricky bells and whistles on their pages that might otherwise destract readers from the website's content.

As the speeds of modems reached 56k and personal computers became the most desirable new appliance in the home, the internet exploded with growth, as tens of thousands logged on every day. Personal homepages popped up everywhere, and many sites started by a small group of people eventually became hubs for thousands of internet readers. Yahoo! began as a student hobby founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. It began as a campus trailor in February of 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, essentially a "Favorites" page. It wasn't long that the database of sites became too large so it was separated into categories and eventually subcategories. The site's original name was "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but was eventually changed to Yahoo! which is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchial Officious Oracle," The site was original hosted on Yang's student workstation. By late in 1994 the popularity of the site had grown predominantly from word of mouth and interaction within the growing online community.

Having an intemate familiarity with the internet there are various specific events online that became moments in the history of internet culture, some silly. Remember back a couple years ago when there was the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" craze. It was just one of those odd circumstances where bad grammar became so massively humorous that it swept the net almost overnight and left people in the media scratching their heads. If you weren't there then, basically a gaming message board posted some Photoshopped images based on a phrase from a poorly translated Japanese video game called "ZeroWing" in which the evil character comes on the viewscreen and says to the crew of a ship, "How are you Gentlemen!! All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Ha! ha! ha! Make your time." etc. The game pretty much sucked, and the poor translation proved this. This game would have all but been forgotten entirely without its discusson in online message boards. Someone made a flash animation of "All Your Base" and it became everyone's favorite download, and the big joke around the office watercooler. A lot of websites picked it up and used it, and it even made it to Time Magazine. There were also those nutty animated .gif sites like www.hampsterdance.com, and of course the "Frog in a Blender" from JoeCartoon's website.

After the dotcom bubble burst and website fever evaporated, there were investors who pulled out, and advertisers soured their view of the internet as a sustainably viable medium for ensnaring consumers. Although some sites withered due to finanicial loss there are still many that retain their presense although some sites have become more direct in reaching for a visitors wallet. It's not hard to find previously free sites trying to take money from visitors or apply service fees to previously accessable FREE information and services. For example Yahoo now charges for Personal Ads, Hotmail Charges for email, The Wall Street Journal charges for full access, internet greeting cards at AmericanGreetings.com and BlueMountain.com used to be free but not anymore, ABCNews.com charges for multimedia content, IGN games charges for up to date information, Videogames.com charges for Multimedia and access to archived news and material. Many websites are innundated with pop-up and invasive cookie based advertising. To this day I refuse to pay a single penny to a website that asks for a service fee when they do in actuality make a great deal of money from sponsorship. Don't let those sites trick you, it doesn't cost a massive amounts of money to host something like a video game site. Now-a-days, everyone's email box is spammed with tons of bulk mailed trash claiming you can enlarge your penis, make $3000 a day by only working 3 hours, lose 30 lbs in 1 week, refinance your mortgage, or get a platinum credit card with bad credit. Who cares? Tell it to my delete button, I say.

The once unfettered liberty of downloading files and MP3's from sites like Gnutella, Morpheus, LimeWire, WinMX, and KaZaa has been tarnished by the pervasive presense of viruses and trojan worms most likely contracted by overcapitalisic corporations like the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the major software companies like Microsoft and Adobe. These companies are now feeling the heat for years of price fixing and vastly bloated profits as consumers raise a proverbial middle finger and download what they want for free. Shawn Fanning's Napster let the genie out of the bottle and there's no stopping this digital revolution now, but don't think that the war is one sided. Large corporations are attempting to lobby Washington lawmakers as you read this to put an end to file sharing and allow them to invade your computer and find ways to disable your ability to use or play downloaded music or shut down your computer permanently. As a consumer, the way I see it, if I buy something, it's now mine, and if I share that with a friend, a family member, or a total stranger for free, then that's my decision, and no company has the right to take away my freedom in doing this. Interestingly enough those who have lived with and become familiar with technology as an integral part of their lives occupy an age group between 10 - 30. These are the people who download the most music and files. Until the recording industry drastically lowers pricing on music CD's they will continue to face the consequences they are now enduring. I think the motion picture industry is learning as DVD prices seem to be falling gradually. I was able to get a DVD for $5.88 at Wal-Mart, and this is acceptable considering the cost of recordable DVDs, burners, and the time involved in reproducing a downloaded DVD warrents a purchase of a DVD movie in the $10 or less range.

The internet itself is an actualization of true unfettered liberty, and to some who would like to remain in control of massive groups of people through propaganda and indoctrination it represents a great threat while simultanously it is an acheivement of democracy. In no other time in history has it been possible to communicate with so many people in different places simultaneously. Information has become instantally accessable to anyone who wants to search for it. In many ways people can congregate anonymously online and some even conduct illicit activities out of reach of law enforcement. In recent times there's been a lot of question as to how much privacy should be taken away from websurfers and the government is actively seeking invasive monitoring systems for internet traffic and the activities of it's users. Some countries require filters to block certain online material that contradicts the regeme of the nation, while others block material considered socially detrimental like Nazism and the KKK. What this brings into question is what kind of control can you have on something so dynamic as the internet. Websites appear and disappear daily, even hourly. Yes there will be those who extange information on constructing bombs, hacking corporate and government databases, conducting acts of terrorism, or jpegs of child pornography, but from what I know of the 'net, there are a lot of ways for people who conduct these activities to burrow into various digital crevices of this World Wide Web and mask their true intention and identity with otherwise mundane information while there will be also be people that create a new movement of freedom for themselves as individuals and society as a whole. The internet is a moving target and I don't think any one national agency can police it without major policy change and vast alteration. The internet is a freedom in its most pure form, the freedom of expression and diversity of human thought, although there are some socially injurious results to this state of affairs it also brings to fruition the greatest social advantage for the common man. Time has shown that anything that continues to change goes through growing pains, and much of what happens online, is a reflection of the diversity in the real world.

The internet is similar to any tool human beings have invented, it can be used for the progression of society or its destruction. There's never been a time in history where any one single person has the capacity to have their voice heard by the entire world until now. Such luxury was once limited to those of fame and political prowess but with the ubiquity of the internet ordinary people have become empowered like never before. One single voice can reverberate across the entire world just from a website online. An opinion can become a movement. How the future of the internet will progress is open to a lot of speculation, but I know based upon the correllation so far that the differences between cyberspace and reality will eventually become indistinquishable. Information will be as accessable as water and air, and our entire lives will be revolve around the mind of many one. The foundation that has been laid today will tomorrow bring innovations that will shape new ways of living.

The internet to come will be far more integrated into our surroundings, escaping the confines of the personal computer. Many devices will share data with each other and be able to cooperate and coordinate themselves to fulfill the needs of people and progress. Your own body will contain and be covered with a wireless data network and your surroundings will be augmented by eyepieces that display information that the brain is otherwise unaware of or has difficultly remembering. Augmented Reality will truly be the brain's assisted memory, capable of capturing the image of peoples faces and storing it for later retrieval when you see that person again. The physical condition of your body will be monitored by nanomachines and data will be relayed to your augmented reality headset indicating when medical attention is recommended. As you walk down a street data will appear in your field of vision to inform you of location and specific details. It will be impossible to get lost, and built in translation will subtitle any spoken or written foriegn language. Through facial recognition computers will talor interactive advertising to your habits and interests. A walk in the mall will trigger an array of advertisements with you in mind. Like bees and ants computers across great distances will work in hives and large collectives to act as supercomputers, and any task undertaken by one will be distributed to any computer accessable to the network, even idle computers inside your future digital TV recorder, Playstation, and refrigerator will be working or processing a tiny piece of data for a specific task somewhere on the network.

The birth of human superconsciousness in the distant future will have one of its many roots in the internet, as information is infused into the human brain via a mental/digital transceiver, computers will download memories and upload experiences and information. Eventually, artificial intelligence will interact with biological humans through this mental telepathy. Knowledge and experiences will be accessable to anyone who wants to share those experiences. Dreams will be saved onto a storage device for later review. Under the same model as the collective computing network uses, millions of brains will act in tandem capable of getting thoughts from another brain that is connected to the "network" and sharing thoughts from itself. At this level of interconnectivity, I've found myself wondering where the human "soul" lives. What if the day comes when as the physical body deteriorates and the data collected in the brain is stored inside of a hypothetical supercomputer at the very limits of anything we can conceive today and those memories are then uploaded to a artificial body or cloned body after the physical body dies? Does this actualize immortality? Under this scenario it is possible that there will be a way to duplicate or copy thoughts just like we can copy a folder of files to another folder of files with absolute consistency. Can there actually be two you's? If there are two you's what will you and your exact duplicate talk about - probably the same thing I would imagine. If there is an afterlife or another dimension to existence it would seem that human superconciousness will exist with a constant awareness of this shape and construction of reality. Linear time will become meaningless as the collective mind grows and explores itself and the depths of space-time. When I think in this domain, I reach a massive convergence of technology and evolution, humanity, the mind of many individuals becomes the individual of many minds, a self invocable force - a god? This is perhaps the conclusion of things, or the beginning of something else, but beyond this infinity my puny isolated human brain is incapable of venturing.

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