St. David's United Church Internet Resources
For those who find this computer and Internet business less than "user friendly" the following notes and references are given to reduce the confusion some. It's a kind of crash course on Internet. Don't forget it's just machinery. It's purpose is to serve you - to facilitate your need for information.
They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11:9 (NIV)

Swords to Plowshares

The Internet is a swords to plowshares story. The origins of internet were in the communications networks of America's universities, the military, and the industrial research establishment. In 1964 it had its beginnings at RAND. HISTORY LINK. Cold war fear and cold war objectives funded and steered the network. ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Agency) it was called then. 1991 saw the National Research and Education Network assume control and the term Internet become the name of the networks. One special inheritance of this Educational focus was the not-for-profit rule. And though e-commerce is a byword today, we have come this far because of so many people and organizations giving freely into the internet their ideas and their time.

The need to co-ordinate information and project management led eventually to global size networks. From the start, the net's principle use was not actual computing (as its makers had planned). Rather the engineers, scientists, students and professors invented E-Mail. That is still the major use of the net. For whatever work humans do, they need to chat! So the first plowshare was the Internet itself - built and funded by the US government and now given over to general public use, and free-market funding.

It was a military requirement that the communication system would be able to sustain nuclear attack. The solution was to totally decentralize control. It is called "packet switching". Messages are broken into tiny bits with serial numbers and addresses on each little "packet". If in the course of a message transfer, a port is busy, (or blown up by nuclear bombs), the message just goes off elsewhere in the network. Later the "packets" meet and reassemble at the destination computer. If any bits are missing, messages go back to source to get missing "packets" resent. There is no effective way to monitor or control this process - it is autonomous by design. The second plowshare was democratic expression. The natural interest of government to monitor communications and to watch its citizens had become unexpectedly hindered.

There is an great economic consequence to this design. Since no one knows who to charge for any particular transmission portion, the whole affair has become based on flat traffic rates and not distance rates. Therefore it costs no more to communicate across the world than across the city. The third plowshare is cheap global availability. A citizen or an NGO is able to afford to participate.

The last significant element was the invention of the World Wide Web protocols and the Web Browser by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at CERN Geneva (the European Particle Physics Laboratory). By 1994 the Web was running with 500 servers. This changed the Internet from being all text to the current multimedia format. But the real secret was called hypertext - and for this the protocols were developed. Hypertext is the notion that any information record can have an address in a computer anywhere in a network system. With the new protocols, simply clicking on a "hypertext link", will go to that computer and open that document and send it to you - it doesn't matter where in the world it is! This new format was so natural and useful, that after 2 decades of slow growth, Internet began to grow at incredible rates .

Vint Cerf, Father of the Internet, says, "Today, there are an unknown number of networks interconnected to form the Internet - certainly in excess of 200,000 around the world and likely more than that. There are at least 60 Million computers on the Internet and possibly as many as 200 Million. There will likely be 900 Million Internet-enabled things on the Internet by the year 2006." Visit his WEBSITE .

These then are the new things the Internet brings - that information of all sorts is increasingly public and globally pervasive, that people can communicate cheaply and quickly, that anyone can publish, that anyone can obtain, and that no one can hide this information. Internet technology presents a kind of liberation. Let us be prepared to use this new tool for good ends, and to comment upon its use for lesser ends. Let us be attentive to the Spirit of Change and also to the Spirit of Wisdom.

September 28, 2000