What can businesses get out of the Internet?
by John S. Quarterman
Copyright COMPUTERWORLD, 1993

This article appeared in the 22 February 1993 ComputerWorld.
You are free to send it over the Internet to the appropriate lists
or to whomever, as long as you clearly mark it as copyright
Computerworld, 1993.

jsq@tic.com
+1-512-451-6176
fax: +1-512-450-1436
Texas Internet Consulting (TIC)
1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W
Austin, TX 78723
U.S.A.

What is made up of more than 8,000 connected networks, has more than 1.3
million connected computers and has users numbering about 8 million?
Answer: the Internet.  The Internet, which is the world's largest computer
network, has been doubling in size (number of hosts and networks)  every
year since 1988. Once the exclusive domain of research and education
groups, whose interest, among other things, was access to supercomputer
power on the network, the Internet is gaining stature with business users.

Companies such as General Electric Co. and Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
are being enticed by the Internet's speedy, low-cost global communications,
its appropriateness for collaborative work, its on-line software and
its unique databases. Organizations see the mega-network as a
feature-rich complement to their current networks.  ``More and more
[commercial] organizations are viewing the Internet not in its former
context as an R&E `supercomputer' network but rather as a `shared
information utility,' '' says Joel Maloff, vice president of client
services at Advanced Network and Services, an Internet connectivity
provider in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The E-mail link

With the low cost of connection -- often a flat monthly fee for leased line
or dial-up access -- business users have access to commercial and
noncommercial services in the U.S. and 40 other countries.  Electronic
mail is by far the most popular application on the network. While on some
networks an E-mail message may take hours or days to reach its destination,
on the Internet it usually takes seconds to minutes. Internet mail
protocols handle queue congestion and flow control automatically.

Images aren't an obstacle because of the Internet's Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions (MIME). MIME enables an Internet message to encapsulate
fax, sound, video and Adobe Systems, Inc. PostScript files as well as
character sets for foreign languages such as French or Japanese. The
addressee needs no special software to receive the message, although some
parts of the message can't be interpreted without special software.

Through Internet's E-mail, companies can exchange information with other
organizations, salespeople, customers and so on with the immediacy needed
to conduct day-to-day business. And they can do so on a global basis,
oftentimes at a cheaper cost than most other E-mail offerings.

According to Tom Mandel, senior management consultant at SRI
International, a research and consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif.,
the Internet's mail function enables more efficient, frequent and
inexpensive message exchange between SRI's California and London
offices than had been possible before.  Previously, Mandel's department
exchanged mail with its foreign office by having a machine in Menlo
Park call a modem on a local-area network in London. Because of the
cost of a transatlantic phone call, messaging British staffers occurred
only sporadically. But Mandel and his group switched to a public access
Internet system in London, resulting in more regular and reliable
communication.  Costs came down because Internet services are carried
over the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP),
which multiplexes mail messages (and other services) across common
links. This maximizes bandwidth use, minimizing cost and permitting
continuous connection.

Notebook computer vendor Tadpole Technology, Inc., with headquarters in
Cambridge, England, and offices in Austin, Texas; San Jose, Calif.;
Dallas; New York; Washinton, D.C.; and France, keeps everybody strung
together through the Internet. ``Even when the salespeople are
traveling, they carry a notebook and [connect to us through Internet]
from the customer premise, their hotel room or even from the airport
lounge,'' says Jim Thompson, portability scientist.

Tom Stone, senior editor at Addison-Wesley Computer Science Division in
Reading, Mass., says with E-mail over the Internet, correspondence with
authors that used to take a week for typing, printing, mailing and
waiting for replies can be finished in one day.  Also, with a heavy
travel schedule, use of the Internet allows him to keep up with
correspondence while away from the office.

``I call E-mail over the Internet `productivity software,' '' says Raj
Manandhar, research assistant at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.  Manandhar has used the system to
correspond with software technical support staffs.  He routinely sends
bug reports and receives fixes and explanations from software developers.

Mailing lists, newsgroups

Business users are not confined to one-to-one communications, however;
group information exchange happens through the Internet's slew of
mailing lists and newsgroups.  Mailing lists enable a user to send a
single mail message to a mail alias. Software then automatically sends
the message to everyone on the list, saving time in retyping
addresses.  Organizations have used mailing lists, for instance, to
announce new products to their on-line customers.  The Internet is the
biggest carrier of USENET newsgroups. Members of newsgroups receive
messages and news articles according to their specific group profile.

With mailing lists and newsgroups, not only do customers have the
option of getting information such as problem or benefit reports
directly from individual customers,  but firms can also sponsor
customer mailing lists or newsgroups.  In this way, they can keep
abreast of what their customers need and want by posting questions and
collecting responses.

For example, certain major newspapers, such as the Houston Chronicle,
The Village Voice, the New York Times and The Economist, query readers
on their interests or ask them specific questions that might help with
a story. ``I can post a question on various lists or groups and in 24
hours have several excellent answers,'' says Dan Gillmor, regional
affairs writer at the Detroit Free Press.  Companies can also receive
information from experts on a variety of topics. Gillmor says he
prefers the Internet to other services such as CompuServe because it
``contains the narrower specialties.'' For instance, there is a
geographic information systems mailing list as well as others that are
``populated with real experts,'' he explains. ``It's a tip sheet, and
it's full of sources.  Not a bad resource.''

Businesses may find it useful to join mailing lists to stay on top of
general issues affecting their industries. For instance, there are
lists associated with topics such as technology transfer, Japanese
business studies and the oil and gas industry, which includes a daily
posting of oil prices financial companies may need to make investment
decisions.

The newsgroup setup tends to be more efficient than mailing lists and
can support more participants. The reason is that while a copy of a
mail message is sent to each list subscriber, newsgroup messages are
sent to each machine that subscribes to the newsgroup. A large number
of people in a newsgroup can read the same copy of the message or news
article. For instance, the USENET network has more than 2,000
newsgroups and more than 2 million users.  There are newsgroups
specific to computer operating systems, other groups that distribute
software and still others that discuss specific products. Help wanted
and position open newsgroups are among the most popular.

For a fee, services such as ClariNet enable users to pick and choose
among traditional wire service news, sports, features, syndicated
columns, business news, newsletters and other packages. In essence, the
ClariNet subscriber gets a tailored newspaper carried in a selection of
newsgroups.

Because the Internet is attached to the global Matrix of networks that
includes CompuServe, MCI Mail and Bitnet, among others, businesses sending
mail have the potential to reach 20 million people.

Broad capabilities

Internet mail, combined with fast interactive protocols such as TELNET and
File Transfer Protocol (FTP), encourage collaborative work over the
Internet. FTP and TELNET permit resource sharing by making resources on
one machine available across the Internet to users of other machines.  FTP
enables users to connect to other computers and perform certain actions,
such as listing the files in a directory and copying files back and forth.
The TELNET protocol connects users to a remote machine and lets them log
on as if they were on a directly connected terminal line.

Because it is suitable for collaborative work, the Internet has been a
boon to far-flung businesspeople, writers and authors who need to pass
draft documents and comments back and forth by E-mail and FTP. The
Internet enables ``joint writing of papers, sharing of data,
coordinating -- you name it,'' says Dick St. Peters, physicist at
General Electric Co.'s corporate research and development group in
Schenectady, N.Y.

Paul Betz, copy chief at the Oxford University Press in Cary, N.C.,
coordinates text from 7,000 contributors in collaboration with advisory
editors and the general editor, John A.  Garraty of Columbia University,
according to Naomi Courter, network services specialist at the CONCERT
network, a North Carolina statewide data network connected to the
Internet. Much of this coordination and copy editing is done over the
Internet.

Addison-Wesley's Stone says potential authors submit proposals on-line,
which he reviews on-line.  By using mail and FTP, Addison-Wesley can
now handle copy editing without any paper passing between author and
editor.

``We used the Internet extensively to exchange drafts and iterations of
our book, writing and producing it in two months' time, from contract
through delivery to the publisher,'' says Laura Fillmore, president at
Editorial, Inc. in Rockport, Mass., which produced The Internet
Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking.

The use of the Internet to collaborate on producing a book, business
document or any other related report saves time, eliminates express
mail expense, does away with multiple error-prone manual transcription
steps and reduces the need to pass floppy disks back and forth.

Free software

Beyond mail-based capabilities, companies can use the Internet as a source
for state-of-the art software that is often available at no charge. Using
the anonymous FTP convention, companies can retrieve software from
publicly available files. Anonymous FTP enables users to retrieve files
with FTP without having a login account on the Internet server.

Energy company Unocal Corp., for instance,  uses the Internet to get
state-of-the-art software from Caltech for modeling seismic data,
according to  Peter Ho at Unocal in Brea, Calif.  One Houston company
says a single free software package it got off the Internet was worth
more than the cost of its 56K bit/sec. Internet connection. Such a
connection usually costs about $12,000 a year.

GNU Emacs, a popular text editor and formatter, is available without
cost on the Internet from the Free Software Foundation. Companies can
get it from a machine called PREP.AI.MIT.EDU as well as from FTP.UU.NET.

GE's St. Peters says his group has used and retrieved ``hundreds or
thousands'' of software offerings from the Internet.  Hundreds of
people in GE's R&D and medical departments use GNU Emacs alone.  That's
not to say GE doesn't give anything back; St. Peters and his group
wrote and maintain a software package for research medical imaging that
is distributed to medical R&D sites on the Internet.  ``We use the
Internet to remotely log in and help them when they have problems,''
St. Peters says.

There are approximately 2,000 anonymous FTP servers worldwide on the
Internet, including the following:

	For general MS-DOS PC software, look on wsmr-simtel20.army.mil.

	For NCSA TELNET, a TCP/IP package for PCs, try ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu.

	For general Apple Computer, Inc. Macintosh software, try
	sumex-aim.stanford.edu.

	For Columbia University's AppleTalk Package, try rutgers.edu.

Vendors are also getting in on the act, cutting down on distribution
costs by placing software on the Internet. Apple has made its System 7
operating system as well as early versions of its MacOS available for
free by anonymous FTP from apple.com.  (However, System 7.1 is not
available this way.) Digital Equipment Corp. maintains a large
collection of non-DEC-developed software on its gatekeeper.dec.com
machine.

----------

In the end, the Internet is not about free software or mail functions or
supercomputers or any individual service it offers. The bottom line is
that the Internet supports the largest and most directly connected
community in the world. It might be to your business' advantage to become
a part of that community.

SIDEBAR

So many resources are available on the Internet that a slew of index and
search services have cropped up to help users. They include the following:

Archie: A service that indexes more than 1,000 anonymous FTP servers
worldwide -- about 150G bytes of information. Basically, you ask archie to
locate a program or other package by name, and it responds with a list of
all the hosts that have it, which directory and file it is in on each host
and when it was last updated.  Public archie servers in the U.S. are in
Maryland (archie.sura.net), Nebraska (archie.unl.edu), New York
(archie.ans.net) and New Jersey (archie.rutgers.edu).

Wide-Area Information Servers (WAIS): WAIS can index any piece of text and
report to you passages that match key words. It lets you search for
information in databases located on servers. Users have access to The
Bible, current weather forecasts, documents about the Internet and so on.
Users can try a WAIS terminal interface by remotely logging on to
quake.think.com. Use the username ``WAIS.''

Gopher: Gopher helps you find the right menu and keep track of the various
servers and information sources.  Gopher ties all these items together in
a worldwide distributed menu system.  Archie, certain libraries and many
WAIS servers are available through gopher, as are text files and software
packages.  You can get an idea of how gopher works by logging on to one of
the public gopher sites. Try gopher.uiuc.edu.

Hytelnet: Hytelnet helps you find the right library catalog. This program,
which can run on the PC, Macintosh, Unix or several other operating
systems, helps users find the appropriate hosts and login names for
library databases. Information is built into menus.

SIDEBAR

Many companies have extensive research needs, whether it's intelligence
gathering on competitors, research to help create a new product or finding
out the latest on privacy laws. The Internet lets employees check the
Library of Congress, search for relevant book titles and even retrieve
information directly, all without getting out of their chairs. The
Internet's various indexing and search aids can help locate these
resources (see story page XX).

Quiet, please!  The Internet TELNET protocol, which connects you to a
remote machine and lets you log on just as if you were on a directly
connected terminal line, lets you search through the Library of Congress'
catalog (telnet dra.com).  One company that finds library research over
the Internet key to its product developments is General Motors Corp.,
which uses the network to get at university and government libraries for a
lot of its car research.  From Cary, N.C., Paul Betz, copy chief at Oxford
University Press, is using the Research Libraries Information Network
databases to do research for the American National Biography, according to
Naomi Courter, network services specialist at the CONCERT network. The
work, to be published in 1995, will consist of 20 volumes containing
20,000 articles about Americans from the Viking times through 1990.  Other
on-line libraries include those at Harvard University, the University of
California and the University of Texas.

You want data, we got data.  There is a variety of specialty databases on
the Internet with information on everything from molecular biology to
agriculture.  WAIS (see story page XX) lets users search 400 databases
located on servers. Users can access information on molecular biology,
recipes, ZIP codes, science fiction reviews and so on.  Dialog made a name
for itself by providing databases and sophisticated retrieval mechanisms
using dial-up telephone and X.25 connections.  Last year, Dialog connected
to the Internet.  Searches of patent databases are also possible over the
Internet. Access to state-of-the-art information -- and the desire to get
knowledge about competitors' research and development strategies -- has
speeded up patent research by up to 40%, according to Advanced Network and
Services. One company claims it will save at least $15,000 in annual
searching and legal fees by going through the Internet. Additionally, it
may be able to double or triple the number of patents for which it
applies, and bringing these new products to market could increase annual
revenue by as much as 20% to 30%. The result could be $10 million in
potential new business.

Books! books! books!  At least two projects are in the works for putting
books on the Internet for free: the Online Book Initiative (OBI) and
Project Gutenberg. Because of copyright concerns, these services will
concentrate on books whose copyrights have expired. Also available will be
standard reference books and Internet material.  For instance, The OBI
offers the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 on-line.  There
is also an Online BookStore for-pay service that offers the Internet
community full texts and book illustrations and gives authors or
electronic rights holders royalties.

SIDEBAR

Because the Internet had its roots in the open and information sharing
world of academia, security has typically taken a backseat. However, this
is an area of concern for many business users sending mail over the
network.  Password protection is the common security measure on the
network today. You can also set up other defenses, including prohibiting
incoming  network connections, limiting incoming connections to specific
services or prohibiting incoming connections for certain hosts or networks
for each service.  In the works is a security feature known as Privacy
Enhanced Mail (PEM) that should protect users even further. PEM uses
public key encryption to ensure that users know who sent a mail message.
The mail message itself can be encrypted to keep anyone else from reading
it.

SIDEBAR
Internet misconceptions

The Internet is owned by the government.

The Internet is owned by approximately 18,000 organizations worldwide,
from large corporations to military services and government agencies.
The U.S. government was very influential in the development of the
Internet but currently owns or funds only a small fraction of it.

Commercial use is prohibited.

Most of the Internet is privately owned and consists of local-area
networks inside companies. In fact, commercial connections are growing
faster than educational ones. Most wide-area Internet connectivity
providers are privately owned and operated and will carry any traffic
users pay for. Some parts of the Internet (including the fastest parts)
restrict use to research or education.

The Internet is just U.S.-based.

The Internet extends to more than 40 countries currently, and
expectations are that 100 more will come on board.  After the U.S.,
the countries with the most Internet hosts are Australia, Canada and
Germany.  The countries with the most hosts per person are Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland.

The Internet is the same as the ARPANET.

The ARPANET was merely one network within the Internet. Started in
1969, the ARPANET was the first distributed packet-switched computer
network.  In 1977, the ARPANET became one of the Internet's backbone
networks, and the protocol research done on the ARPANET was very
influential in the development of the TCP/IP protocols currently in use
on the Internet. ARPANET's technology became obsolete, however, and it
was retired in 1990.

The Internet is the same as the National Research and Education Network (NREN).

First, the NREN, which is expected to be the fastest wide-area network
on the Internet, does not yet exist. However, interest in creating the
NREN has reached fever pitch because one of its proponents is Vice
President Al Gore. When (and if) it finally gets here, the NREN will be
but one of the thousands of networks on the Internet. Also, the NREN
will likely be limited to the U.S.

SMALL FACTS

How do you know whether your machine is on the Internet? If you can use
the Internet FTP to retrieve files from machines such as nic.ddn.mil,
ftp.uu.net, or ftp.psi.com, you're on it.

Some of the commercial Internet connectivity providers support large
anonymous FTP servers that collect information from many sources. These
servers include ftp.psi.com, which is run by Performance Systems
International and ftp.uu.net, run by UUNET Technologies.  Information
available from these servers includes software, Supreme Court decisions,
book publisher catalogs, network maps, technical reports on protocol
specifications and several TCP/IP implementations.

