I started this book reminiscing about life 30 years ago as my father taught me about the technological wonders of the 1960s. The world seemed smaller because of the amateur radio set that kept us in touch with people that we otherwise couldn't have
known anything about. This was heady stuff for a child not yet exposed to Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Internet and e-mail. The thought that somewhere on the other side of the world someone like my Dad was busily "coding" his thoughts to us was
absolutely amazing to me. It is no less amazing to me today as I write this and know that I'll send it over the net to my editor whom I've only met over the wires that connect us. And as I said in the introduction, my son and my daughters are
admirably impressed as well!
In case my own children, or my readers, ask; of course we had a television set and a radio "way back then." Those were wonders in their own right and worthy of notice. But neither then nor now do those media offer the immediacy of the Internet or the interactive promise that virtual chat sessions do today.
Although he retired to the basement for regular HAM sessions with friends around the globe, my father also collected stamps. These were a tangible source of interest to me, especially when affixed to a postcard from one of those distant friends. These
postcards adorned the walls around Dad's HAM rig, and provided a physical connection to the person who took the time to send it. Sometimes the stamps chosen by the sender offered a colorful glimpse of an exotic country. Sometimes the stamp commemorated an
important bit of that country's history. It was a great thrill to both of us to have just received a postcard from one of these friends when we'd hear the familiar call letters of this same friend searching out a conversation with us. What the postcards
added to my experience was a tangible connection with this otherwise mysterious person. These postcards brought a human touch to our conversation
Unless the "Information Highway" somehow connects me with another human being in a tangible way that can be felt, not measured, it's overall impact in history will be minimal and minuscule. Unless our common human experience is
enriched
by these connections, though distant and remote, it will have been nothing more than a curious phenomena in this technological age. We are a social people, desirous of contact in a thousand different ways. What must happen for the Internet to become
ubiquitous is that it brings to us a richer experience of the life we live. It must enable us to enrich our lives with more than just a "cool video" or the latest breaking news. It must actually increase our knowledge, not just the information
we
can access. It is a glimpse of this promise that Internet Explorer and related technologies from Microsoft hope to bring to the world, at least the computing world. And it is a glimpse of that future that I'll try to share with you in the final chapter of
this book.
"The Internet is the most important thing to happen to [the computer] industry since the PC." —Bill Gates
When Bill Gates published The Road Ahead in November 1995 as his view of the future of computing, Microsoft had not yet announced many of the products or technologies written about in this book. Many of them were already in development, as seen
a
few weeks later when Microsoft announced its Internet strategy (see Figure 37.1). These announcements and the products that ultimately follow represent the fulfillment of many of the dreams that fill his book. What has brought about this large-scale
change
of the direction of a company like Microsoft? In one word, the Internet. The road ahead for Microsoft is incontrovertibly tied to the Internet and building the tools to realize its full potential. Let's look at some recent milestones in that road, and the
promise they represent.
NOTE
You can read the December 7, 1995 release online at
http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/press/1995/95dec/iswpr4.htm
and the many that follow on Microsoft's Corporate Press Release pages at
http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/pr.htm
The kinds of things that Gates looks forward to in his book are what he calls information appliances. Just like the appliances we use every day to cool or cook our food, wash our clothes or dishes, or dry our hair, an information appliance will be just
another tool. We have become accustomed to things like the refrigerator or washing machine. We are frustrated when the washing machine breaks down and we are forced to get it repaired or go to a laundromat and wait for what seems like wasted hours while
our clothes are done. When the Information Highway meets our TV, we will have a new information appliance. Suddenly the television will be interactive. If we need to know what the weather is like in Seattle today, but the weather isn't on until 6:00, we
either have to turn to a cable weather channel and wait for the national weather spot or turn on the computer and browse one of the weather web sites. When our TV is hooked up to the net via a cable modem, we will be able to browse the web to that weather
site, or better still, look directly at the NOAH broadcast for the latest report. And we'll be able to do that whenever we want the information.
"You'll know the information highway has become part of your life when you begin to resent it if information is not available via the network. One day you'll be hunting for the repair manual for your bicycle and you'll be annoyed that the manual
is
a paper document that you could misplace. You'll wish it were an interactive electronic document ... always available on the network."
The Road Ahead —Bill Gates
In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95 with a new "usability tested" Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a robust TCP/IP stack. The GUI was to assist new users, and the TCP/IP stack to lure existing customers with the promise of connecting to
the Internet. The Microsoft Network was installed on the desktop to further lure those customers to the promise of the Internet. Over 40 million copies later and over 1 million MSN users and Microsoft has made a significant accomplishment of increasing
mind share for the potential of the Internet for Windows users worldwide. That the Internet Explorer was available only in the separately purchasable "Microsoft Plus!" seems an incredible lack of foresight a short year later.
However, soon after the release (and today), the Internet Explorer is available free on the Internet for all the Windows platforms and even the Apple Macintosh. There's even indications that Microsoft is interested in porting Internet Explorer to UNIX
platforms. Today Windows 95 is pre-installed on 80 percent of all shipping PCs, and that percentage is growing. MSN is moving its operations from a proprietary service and taking its content to the Web. What this move accomplishes is the important step of
expanding MSN's user base by enabling anyone with an Internet connection to connect to MSN. Don't think that the changes in MSN are a step backward for Microsoft. The changes in MSN and the forthcoming changes in Windows 95 later this year are all tied to
the vision of "Information At Your Fingertips," or IAYF, which Microsoft has been preaching for several years now. Microsoft is intent on participating in and leading the revolution that the Internet promises.
Microsoft has been described in the trade press as "re-inventing itself around the Internet" as it reorganizes its development to retool every piece of software to be Internet-aware. This development is more of the same IAYF that is happening
with Windows 95 and MSN. The Internet offers a great way to extend the business enterprise beyond the LAN and WAN. In fact, the resources of the Internet give even small corporations the capability to on a global scale in a way that was impossible a few
short years ago. Microsoft's retooling of its applications is meant to expand on those possibilities.
The popular Microsoft Office suite illustrates this direction well. The Internet Assistants that you learned about in Chapter 25 that enable authoring in Microsoft Office are now being integrated as base capabilities of Office 97. Office 97 will enable
users to embed hyperlinks in any Office document as shown in Figure 37.2, as well as integrate the importing and exporting of HTML. Internet Assistants helped to automate the generation of content for the Web; these new features use the Web as a transport
for world-wide linking within the document itself. What we're seeing is an Internet enabling of unprecedented scope.
In addition to hyperlinks within a document, Office 97 will provide tools that enable users to collaborate on a single document; even allowing simultaneous edits in that same document! All this over a Web connection using Point-to-Point Tunneling
Protocol (PPTP) or maybe the newly announced Common Internet File System (CIFS). FrontPage will be an integral component of Office, adding its obvious interface into any corporate Web. Microsoft also has announced a new Web search engine that will have
the
capability to search the content of all the documents on a web site including all the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office documents.
The Internet itself has changed. The hardware that actually comprises the Internet hasn't changed much during the year. But this past year companies like Netscape have risen from a single-product company (and that one was free!) to a company
with
a suite of products targeted at some of Microsoft's own products. The popular search engines like Yahoo!, WebCrawler and Lycos have gone public, making instant millionaires out of investors. Mark Andreeson, Netscape's 20-something VP of Technology, has
stated that what we are seeing is a redefinition of computing. What he believes is occurring is a shift from a client-centric model to a web-centric model.
1996 has seen the big three long distance phone companies, many of the regional Bells, and even the major TV cable operators announce Internet Access services. The small "hometown" ISP is seriously challenged by these developments, and even
the largest online services like CompuServe and MSN announced that the Web is the place to do business. Companies like @HOME promise Internet access with your cable TV.
Although the Internet is the subject of every conversation about the computer industry, the Intranet is more and more the focus of many new announcements from the computer industry itself. The Internet is where an increasing number of us will
look for information on travel destinations, concert schedules, or the latest national news. The Intranet is where an increasing number of us will interact with our colleagues, learn about employee benefits or job postings, or even the menu in the company
cafeteria. All the information that a company needs to communicate to its employees can be disseminated on the Intranet. Whether it's the latest regional sales numbers or the score of last night's company softball tournament, the Intranet is where we'll
look for the information.
Many corporations have already installed proprietary solutions for this kind of communication, but many of these solutions are high-priced and support-intensive. Because the Web browser is an easily learned interface, it lends itself extremely well to
affording access to an Intranet. A company can choose to provide a central web site for all company information, or more typically, several distributed servers with one main home page with links to all the others. It's common to have an
"official" corporate intranet and a larger unofficial intranet contributing to the larger scope. Within departments or regional offices of a large corporation there might be smaller subwebs of information that is needed only by the local
employees, and is therefore of limited interest to the rest of the corporation. What happens with an intranet is a small microcosm of what is happening on the Internet as a whole. People discover how easy it is to "publish" information, and
suddenly information that you never knew was available surfaces.
Microsoft is leading the computer industry with a wealth of innovative technology and tools to enhance and expand the use of an intranet. The collaboration offered by Office 97 will be enhanced by the use of Internet Explorer because the ActiveX
documents these applications produce are easily reviewed and referenced. It will be relatively easy for a company to use ActiveX scripting and create applications that combine information from several sources to produce unique views of otherwise unrelated
information. On the server side, Peer Web Services will give any Windows 95 or Windows NT user the ability to host a web on their own machine as easily as they share a document today. Extending the current peer-to-peer networking to a new level of
interaction will bring a new range of options for the corporate intranet or even across the Internet. Using ActiveX components, an individual will easily be able to create custom applications that meet unique needs not answered by any other application
alone—all within the familiar interface of the browser.
On June 13, 1996 Microsoft hosted an Intranet Strategy Day to detail the company direction concerning the Intranet (see Figure 37.3). Bill Gates, Paul Maritz, and Pete Higgins detailed the technology and direction that Microsoft is pursuing to provide
the tools needed to help companies create their own intranets and take advantage of this exciting new source of intra-company communication. If you want to read about the announcements and the products involved, as well as ongoing developments, look at
http://www.microsoft.com/intranet/
Figure 37.3. The details of Intranet Strategy Day are online at Microsoft corporate web site.
Besides the Internet itself, the biggest single subject in the computer press is Java. You learned about Java earlier in the book, but Microsoft's particular approach to this ubiquitous language is unique among the other adopters. You know that Java is
meant to provide a "platform-neutral" application development language. Because a Java applet isn't compiled, it is possible to code a Java applet that will run the same way on any platform. A programmer can develop his applet on a Windows 95
machine using Jakarta, but that same applet will run on an HP UNIX computer or even a Sun SPARC. The Java runtime is the only part that is compiled for a specific hardware platform.
There has been a lot of hype about Java; much of it from Sun, its developer. There has been speculation that Java will bring about a change in the way we use and purchase software. For example, you might need to use a typical spreadsheet function like
columnar data manipulation, but might not need to illustrate the data graphically. An application like Excel enables you to do both, but might seem to be overkill when all you really need is the single function. Java promises to provide just the tool you
need. You can write a Java applet to easily manipulate columns of data. You could then distribute this applet to anyone who also needs that functionality. The applet could be associated with the data itself, and provide any required manipulation. In fact,
this function could be offered to anyone over the Internet for use with their data. The only problem with this Java applet is that Java cannot write to any local resources. There's no way to save your work!
Because Java applets are designed to be downloaded from the Internet and run locally, the design of the language is fraught with all manner of security concerns. People are worried about malicious applets or even badly written applets. What if a Java
virus applet was written? Because of these concerns, Java had to be decaffeinated! JavaSoft developed Java in such a way that it cannot write to the local machine, cannot use resources such as e-mail, cannot communicate to any machine except the machine
from which the applet originated, and cannot even communicate with other Java applets!
Microsoft is responsible for the "reference implementation" of Java for the Windows platform. This reference implementation will be freely licensed back to SUN as the standard Java implementation for the Windows platform. Because of this,
Microsoft intends to "wrap" Java as an ActiveX component so that Java applets can communicate with any other ActiveX component on the user's system. This implementation also means that applets can be scripted. Your Java spreadsheet applet will
be
able to send its information to an ActiveX graphing component that will be able not only to communicate with another component or application, but also be able to save the information. Microsoft also intends to provide a "just-in-time" Java
compiler as part of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in Windows so your Java applets will be compiled on the fly to increase performance.
Perhaps no Java tool is as anxiously awaited as the Java Development Environment from Microsoft Visual J++—previously known by its code name Jakarta. Visual J++ is mentioned in Chapter 36, "New Technologies and Internet Explorer," but
its
features can revolutionize the creation of Java applets in the same way as the Visual Basic and Visual C++ Developer Studio changed those environments. For the first time, Java developers will not have to re-create all the standard code required for each
Java applet. Java code wizards will enable you to concentrate on your application and let the wizard handle the generation of all the other code. It will even create a skeleton HTML file with the all the correct constructs. The integrated debugger will
enable you to create breakpoints, step through code, and trap errors. With this development effort, Microsoft has shown that it is serious about the future of the Internet and its place as a major player on that future.
ActiveX technology has generated more excitement than any other single announcement in Microsoft's Internet strategy. Because ActiveX encompasses other successful Microsoft technology, it's important to understand just what is being talked about. You
learned in Chapter 36 about ActiveX components, which were formerly known as OLE components. This isn't the only technology that has been renamed, redesigned, and recast as an Internet technology. ActiveX is the umbrella that includes ActiveX Scripting,
the ActiveX Server Framework, and ActiveX Documents.
ActiveX technology will enable you to embed anything from Excel spreadsheets to a Visual Basic list box control in an HTML document. You could build an application that uses JavaScript to interact with a user, pass information to a embedded Java
applet,
and drive the whole thing using a Visual Basic form using radio buttons and command buttons. ActiveX will enable you to take advantage of any OLE application on your machine and harness its capability. If you are creating an application for use on an
intranet, you will be able to take advantage of applications that are in use throughout your corporation and script active pages using components of those applications.
ActiveX Scripting enables you to plug in any scripting language. VBScript and JavaScript are the popular scripting languages available today, but future scripting languages will take advantage of ActiveX Scripting to interact with any ActiveX component
or Java applet. The ActiveX Server Framework will enable you to create server-side scripts using the language you are most familiar with to replace CGI and take advantage of the ISAPI interface in Internet Information Server.
When Tim Berners-Lee developed HTTP, the majority of information that flowed across the Internet was in the form of ASCII text. No graphics, no audio files, no multimedia files; certainly no applications. With the advent of Mosaic, these simple
text-based web pages evolved into multimedia extravaganzas. We have background images, background sounds, background video—all downloaded and played as the web page is downloaded. We have GIF and JPG images, RealAudio, WAV and AIFF audio. We even
have
simulcast video presentations being broadcast all over the world! One thing that the future must hold for the Internet to really become ubiquitous is that the infrastructure that comprises the Internet must be shored up. Some have used the analogy of a
pipe to describe what needs to happen—we need bigger pipes to carry all this extra data. The analogy of a fatter wire has been used as well. A cable can hold a certain number of individual wires within its protective casing. More information requires
more wires, more wires require fatter cables.
Because much of the Internet is composed of T1 (1.54 Mbps) lines, peak hours of activity can drive those lines close to saturation. Even with a fast T3 connection to the Internet, www.microsoft.com slowed to a crawl when Microsoft released the first
beta version of Internet Explorer 3.0. As people worldwide attempted to retrieve the file, Microsoft was forced to add 20 additional remote sources for download to offload the activity. Activities like the "24 hours in Cyberspace" project
seriously taxed the network providers for the project and the result wasn't only seen as people attempted to access that site. Performance dropped for people whose connections inadvertently caused their packets to route through the "storm!"
You see, it's not so much the connection that an ISP or Web server has that makes the difference as the speed of that connection compared to the connection speed the individual has. When the majority of users of an ISP are using 14.4 modems, a
56KB line can be sufficient for any number of those users to surf along as fast as their modems will operate. The bottleneck is on their end of the connection. If all those users upgrade to 28.8 modems, the ISP might be forced to reconfigure his service
and maybe purchase additional connections to the Internet or even upgrade to a T1. That can be fine until the users go to ISDN lines. Then the problem returns.
What happens when the popularity of the Internet, coupled with increased availability of cheap connections, bring another 500,000 users onto the Internet? What happens if a majority of those users happen to live in an area of the world where ISDN
access
is offered at an attractive low rate? As a significant number of users with faster connections try to connect to the same site, the bandwidth or the capacity of the connections becomes saturated. Everybody experiences the slowdown—not just the people
with the slowest connections.
This year has seen the announcement of new hardware specifically designed to be Internet ready out of the box. The Network Computer (NC), a stripped-down PC, will probably be available by the time you read this, and its real claim to fame is a
dependence on the Internet because it has no local storage. The NC will require a network connection to be used, so it is not likely to replace the home computer! Sales of 34.4 modems has kept manufacturers busy and even cost a couple of
manufacturers their companies as other more profitable companies bought them out. Cable modems, ISDN lines, and even satellite connections promise to bring more people online in the last half of this year.
Many people have compared the growth of the Internet to the invention of the Gutenberg press. The printing press revolutionized the world by mechanizing what up until then had been a time-consuming process. What Gutenberg's press could not do is give
the mostly illiterate world at the time a reason to read what was printed. At the recent Harvard University Conference on the Internet and Society, Steven McGeady of Intel Corporation (see Figure 37.4) said
"The Gutenberg printing press was a necessary but insufficient mechanism to make the information revolution really take off, ... It was Martin Luther who translated the Bible from Latin to German and created the incentive people needed to learn to read. He encouraged individuals to make their own interpretations separate from those of their own parish priests and, therefore, Rome."
NOTE
The Harvard University Conference on the Internet and Society was held in May, 1996, and featured many distinguished speakers and presenters. The conference pages are online at
http://www.harvnet.harvaard.edu/
Portions of Mr. McGeady's address is online at
http://www.harvnet.harvaard.edu/vpr/thurs.mcgeady.html.
He went on to say that like the printing press the Internet is just the enabling technology. What the Internet enables is worldwide communication on an unprecedented scope. What is needed is what he called a "Digital Reformation" of human
interaction and communication. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, unless the Internet enables us to grow closer, to share a little of what it means to be human, it will simply not be a revolution sufficient to last. It is that extra expression
of
human communication that the Internet needs. It is that "postcard" sent from an unknown friend across the world.
I still have the message that I received from a "net acquaintance" when I mentioned my first publishing effort. She sent an ASCII art representation of a champagne glass as a toast to the accomplishment. What did I do with it? I printed it
out! It's still in my office. It's a tangible reminder of that correspondence. I've actually used the same device for other authors that I've become acquainted with in the last year or so.
I've found it's hard to end a book. Much easier to start one! But end I must; my son and daughters have much more important things to learn about life than just e-mail and the Internet. They need to learn the love their father has for them, and the importance of sharing our lives together. Just as my father taught me those many years ago and is teaching me still.
