A Brief History of the Internet by Maxwell Fuller (good non fiction books to read TXT) 📕

will inspecting farm areas in the South for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1866. In the 1870’s the Grange was prominent in the broader Granger movement, which campaigned against extortionate charges by monopolistic railroads and warehouses and helped bring about laws regulating these charges… . Although challenged, the constitutionality of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Munn v. Illinois (1877).

[1994 Grolier Electronic Enyclcopedia]

***

The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production

The Internet is a primitive version of the “Star Trek Communicator,” the “Star Trek Transporter,” and, also a primitive version of the “Star Trek Replicator.”

The Internet “let’s” you talk to anyone on the Earth, as long as they, too, are on the Internet.

The Internet “let’s” you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any Netter.

The Internet “let’s” you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from “The Mona Lisa” to “The Klein Bottle” if you use the right “printer.”

Don’t forget the “SneakerNet” is part of the Internet and let’s you get information to or from those who do not have direct Internet connections. SneakerNet was a term developed to describe the concept of sending a file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the disk down the street for you. From my experience, it was incredibly obvious that SneakerNet traversed from East to West and West to East around the world before the Internet did, as I received letters from the East and West as the Project Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland Etext circled the globe long before the Internet did.

This is very important to know if you consider that a possible future development might keep you from using the Internet for this, due to socio-political motions to turn the Internet into a “World Wide Mall” [WWM] a term coined specifically to describe that moneymaking philosophy that says “Even if it has been given away, free of charge, to 90% of the users for 25 years, our goal is to make sure we change it from an Information Superhighway to an Information Supertollway.

I said “let’s” you do the Star Trek Communicator, and Transporter, and Replicator functions because it will soon be obvious that those “Information Rich” who had free access to the Internet for so long want to do an Internet Monopoly thing to insure that what was free, to the Information Rich, will no longer be free for a class of the Information Poor.

This is serious business, and if you consider that it would cost the 40 million Netters about $25 per month to “subscribe” to the Information Rich version of the Internet, that means one thousand million dollars per month going into the hands of the Information Rich at the expense of the Information Poor; we would shortly be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be on the order of the one recently broken up in a major anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand of the telephone company.

Hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now, but it will take far more power than I have.

People will tell you “No one can own the Internet!”— but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not “Own the Internet” any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your “rights” to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them.

The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth, which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every Congress of the United States isn’t meant to educate, it is meant for something else. After all— if a Trillion dollars were really being spent on this process of education every two years, should literacy rates have plummeted to 53% and college level testing scores fallen for many straight years?

[Oh yes, I heard yesterday’s report the tests were up for the first time in decades…but what I did NOT! hear was ANY reference to the fact that the score was “inflated” not only by the “normal” free 200 points a person gets for just being able to sign their names— but by an additional 22 points for math, 76 verbal.] [Written February 5th, 1995]

This kind of “grade inflation” has been going on in a similar, though less official manner, in our schools, for decades. There are schools in which the averages indicate more “A”s are given out than all other grade points combined, not just more “A”s than “B”s or “B”s than “C”s. Some of the most importanted studies were never published, even though they were tax funded.

Watch out, the term “grade inflation” is “politically incorrect” to such a degree that it does not appear a single time in any of the encyclopedias I have tried, although it does appear in my Random House Unabridged and College Dictionaries, but not the Merriam-Webster Ninth New College Dictionary, American Heritage or in any other references I have searched. Please tell me if you find it in any.

“The awarding of higher grades than students deserve either to maintain a school’s academic reputation or as a result of diminished teacher expectations.” [1980-1985]

I can personally tell you this was a huge concern in 1970-1975 when the average grade at some colleges in question had already passed the point mentioned just above, yielding averages including all undergraduate courses, including the grades of “flunk-outs,” still higher than a “B” which means more “A”s were given a whole undergraduate student body than “B”s and “C”s. [Actually it means worse than that, but point made.]

So, we reached the point at which large numbers of a nation’s high school graduates couldn’t even read or fill out a minimum wage job application form, while, on paper, we were doing better than ever, excepting, thank God, the fact that testing scores showed there was something incredibly wrong, and businesses would notice they were having to interview more people for a job before they could find someone to fill it.

 

This is what happens when we separate a country into the “Information Rich” and the “Information Poor.”

Don’t let it happen to the entire world.

For the first time in ALL history, we have the chance to insure that every person can put huge amounts of “Public Domain” and other information into computers that should be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. I would like to insure these people actually have material to put in those computers when they get them.

Example:

Some Shakespeare professors believe that the way to be a great Shakespeare professor is to know something about a Shakespeare play or poem that no one else knows.

Therefore they never tell anyone, and that knowledge can quite possibly die with them if it is never published in a wide manner. Example: Damascus steel was famous, for hundreds of years, but the knowledge of how to make this steel was so narrowly known that all those who knew that technique died without passing it on, and it was a truly long time before computer simulations finally managed to recreate Damascus steel after all those centuries when a person had to buy an antique to get any.

Some other Shakespeare professors believe that the way a person should act to be a great Shakespeare professor is to teach as many people as possible about Shakespeare in as complete a manner as they want to learn.

The Internet is balancing on this same dichotomy now….

Do we want Unlimited Distribution…

Or do we want to continue with Limited Distribution?

The French have just given us one of the great examples: a month or so ago [I am writing this in early February.] they found a cave containing the oldest known paintings, twice as old as any previously discovered, and after the initial month of photographing them in secret, placed an electronic set of photographs on the Internet for all of us to have…ALL!

This is in GREAT contradistinction to the way things had been done around the time I was born, when the “Dead Sea Scrolls” were discovered, and none of you ever saw them, or any real description of them, until a few years ago— in case you are wondering when, I was born in 1947; this is being published on my 48th birthday when I officially become “old.” [As a mathematician, I don’t cheat, and I admit that if you divide a 72 year lifespan into equals, you only get 24 years to be young, 24 years to be middle aged, and 24 years to be old…after that you have the odds beaten. If you divide the US into young and old, a person has to be considered “old” at 34, since 33 is the median age [meaning half the people are younger than 33, and half the people are older. The median Internet age? 26. Median Web age 31. Some predictions indicate these will decrease until the median Internet age is 15.

Who will rule the Internet?

Will it be the Internet Aristocrats…

or an Internet Everyman?

The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate.

For the first time we actually have an opportunity for a whole world’s population to share not only air or water, but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music and other sounds…anything that can be digitized.

Do you remember what the first protohumans did in “2001” [the movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark] ?

They chased their neighbors away from the water hole.

Will let the Thought Police chase us away from this huge watering hole, just so they can charge us admission, for something our tax dollars have already paid for?

The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production…

Think of the time and effort people save simply by being able to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia, thesaurus or other reference book, a newspaper or magazine library of vast proportions, or a library of a thousand books of the greatest works of all history without even having to get up and go to the bookcase.

Think of the simple increase in education just because a person can and will look up more information, judgements become sharper and more informed….

Unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions and people want to limit this flow of information.

Yet a great number of our institutions, and even some of the people who run them, are against this kind of easily available information…they either want to control it— or they want to maintain their “leadership” in fields of endeavor by making sure we “have to do it the hard way,” simply because they did it