There are currently over 2 millions hosts and 20 million people on the Internet, and the numbers are growing rapidly. A large portion of this growth (estimated at 40%) is now attributed to the WWW, the World-Wide Web. In this article, we consider the use of the WWW to publish hypermedia in educational environments. (Many thanks to Will Russell of UC Santa Cruz for our graphics.)

The history of the Internet

Beginning with the interconnection of machines at four universities (including two campuses of the Uni- versity of California) in 1969 under the name Arpanet, the Internet has grown by leaps and bounds, and is now a network of networks of phenomenal proportions. (See Fig. 1.) Critical milestones in the growth of the Internet include the advent of the TCP/IP standard for data packet transmission, the incorporation of these protocols in the UNIX operating system, and the development of Ethernet technology. Today, the emergence of the WWW is driving the explosion of the Internet. (For more history and help in getting your own connection, see the references in the Bibliography.)

Five steps in the evolution of the WWW

I personally experienced the creation of the WWW in five key steps:

1. UNIX in the 1970s. Through the good fortune of working at a campus of the University of California, I received the gift of UNIX early in its history. I soon learned to use UNIX utilities to move, copy, and remove files, to change directories, to edit text, to send e-mail with the UNIX mail command, and to write and compile programs in C.

2. The Internet in 1980. When my campus joined the Internet, I learned to roam the world with native UNIX tools, using telnet, or rlogin, to login to a remote machine, and ftp to send and receive files. My professional activities globalized, with creative cooperation extended around the world electronically, primarily using mail and ftp.

3. Anonymous ftp in the late 1980s. Using the UNIX command ftp requires having an account (or at least the password of an account) on a remote machine, as well as one on your own local machine. Its use amounts essentially to logging in to both of these accounts, and then transferring a file with the ftp com- mands get and put. In the long run, this is a terrific inconvenience, as I must tell each of my coworkers or correspondents the password to an account on my machine, in which I want them to be able to put or get files. In a natural evolution, people began to have special accounts for this purpose called anonymous ftp accounts, which required no password. And thus was born a most useful convention, leading to a cata- strophic increase in Internet traffic. Anonymous ftp still requires knowledge of the ftp command lan- guage, to see what files are available, to change directories, and to get or put the files of interest.

4. Gopher in 1990. Next, we discovered new tools on the Internet, such as gopher in 1990, and wais in 1991, which were turning up with increasing frequency. It appeared that the Internet was a chaos of unbridled creativity! Clever programmers, professional and amateur, were making all kinds of new tools and distributing them freely over the Internet via ftp. The gopher system replaces anonymous ftp, as a means of getting files, with a simple menu selection interface. The wais system provides an index of files available in the gopher network. Again, a tremendous increase in Internet traffic resulted from this inno- vation.

5. The WWW in the 1993. And suddenly, the WWW burst forth as a new world, within the Internet, of hypertext, hypermedia, and multimedia opportunity, with its first graphics browser, Mosaic. (See Fig. 2.) This improves on gopher by merging its menus into text, thus, hypertext.

Four levels of Internet citizenship

It will simplify matters enormously to quantify the onramp of the Internet in four steps.

1. Have modem will travel. At this level are people with a PC, a modem, and an Internet provider. This may sound like Compuserve, but it is not. Compuserve provides an e-mail link to the Internet but no file access to Internet servers. They provide their own forums, but no access to Internet news. Real Internet providers offer level 1 access to the full functionality of the UNIX operating system, including mail, telnet, ftp, gopher, and so on, as programs run on their remote machine.

2. SLIP me up, Scotty. At this level, one has all of the above, plus SLIP or PPP. This software, running on the provider's host, permits one to run programs locally which substitute for the klunkier UNIX utili- ties mail, ftp, gopher, telnet, wais, and so on. Currently, this is an elite frontier, and it is this frontier to which the flood of recent Internet access books is devoted.

3. Jacked-In to the WWW. At this level, one has all of the above, plus a WWW Browser, and multimedia Displayers for bit mapped images, digital video, and digital audio. You can browse the full multimedia wealth of the Web, discovering and learning an essentially infinite database spanning the entire globe. You can view, but not provide.

4. Totally WWWebbed. All the above, plus the ability to provide one's own hypertext, images, sounds, and videos. This represents full citizenship in the cybernautic universe.

A miniature WWW FAQ

A curious and valuable feature of the Internet, common in Newsgroups, is the FAQ, or list of Frequently Asked Questions with answers. Here is a minimal FAQ for the WWW: the top eight questions.

1. Why call it the World-Wide Web?
   Well, the Internet, as seen in Fig. 1, looks like a world-wide web. But I am not sure how this name got attached to the social organism called the WWW which is now self-organizing within the Internet. Per- haps it was just a synonym of Ēnetē not yet claimed.

2. What is the WWW?
   The WWW currently is estimated to comprise about 100,000 browsers and 5,000 server sites, with no comprehensive, up-to-date index. We may compare this to the telephone system of a medium-sized city in which you must call every store to inquire for help in locating another store, as there is no directory assistance! Eventually this may be rectified, but meanwhile the chaos can lead to some amazing discover- ies. One can actually find almost everything within about a dozen jumps. Getting started is the hard part. After a month of browsing, what will you have found? A personal and totally unique universe of interac- tive information.

3. What is unique to the WWW?
   Recently, gopher connected us to menus of plain text and multimedia files, which we could transfer to our own computer. Now WWW browsers give us hypertext instead of menus, and automatically display the files in addition to transferring them to our machine.

4. Who is on the WWW?
   The WWW sites include a large proportion of the governments, universities, science establishments, libraries, and large businesses of the world, as well as thousands of small businesses and individuals. Each site, of course, publishes only a limited amount of information. Larger institutions have larger hard disks to devote to publication on the WWW. Considering the federal fact books, tables of contents of magazines and journals at libraries, and so on, which are found on the WWW, you could regard it as the world's largest encyclopedia. And it is undergoing continuous revision, which makes accurate indexing impossible. It cannot be trusted for accuracy like an authoritative printed book. Further, it has interactive environments as well as encyclopedic data, and has a life of its own.

5. What is on the WWW?
   The World-Wide Web is a simple invention, and yet a gigantic innovation. It consists of three pieces which extend beyond the ftp and gopher of Level 2:
   • a new concept, the hypermedia browser,

   • a new standard for hypertext files, HTML, and

   • loose conventions for multimedia file types (image, sound, video).

6. What is a browser?
   A browser displays hypertext files. The elevator bar (or scroll bar) represents the length of the entire file, so the height of the elevator itself is adjusted to indicate the portion of the file currently visible in a scroll- ing window. The first browser was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, in Geneva, in 1989. The first graphical browser was developed by Marc Andreeasen at the National Center for Supercomputing Appli- cations (NCSA) during 1992 and released in January of 1993. The browser he developed is called Mosaic. It launches other programs to image, sound and movie files.

7. What is hypertext?
   Hypertext is familiar to many PC users through HyperCard, and other similar programs. This is a text file with some words, symbols, or phrases identified by a change of font or color as hot links. After moving the mouse cursor to a hot link, a click of the mouse button initiates a jump of the mouse cursor to a differ- ent location in the file, or to a different file.The HTML format is a standard way of indicating hot links and their destinations, or anchors. Inline graphics are also supported: an image may appear on the page amid the text. These images may also be hot, that is, clicking them results in a jump to another file. It is this standard format for hypertext (HTML) that brings the second piece needed to build the World Wide Web.

8. What are the file types of the WWW?
   The file formats chosen will evolve over time, but the most common are:
   • hypertext: *.html (displayed by browsers such as Mosaic)

   • bit mapped images: *.gif or *.jpg (inline or launched)

   • digital audio: *.snd or *.au (launched)

   • digital video: *.mpg or *.mov (launched)

Multimedia in the classroom

At UC Santa Cruz I have been projecting multimedia and computer-based materials in specially equipped classrooms for six years. Each year, I have experimented with different combinations of hardware and software, with disappointing results. My first real success was last year, using the technology of the WWW. I was able to prepare materials in my office, and project them in the classroom, without the neces- sity of carrying a portable hard disk, or struggling with ftp just before classtime. This requires level 4 cit- izenship. In fact, the advantage of Level 4 citizenship in the Internet is the opportunity to publish your own text, hypertext, and multimedia materials electronically, where they may be indexed, found, and accessed by anyone in the world who is on Level 3. In an educational context, this means that the teacher may make available to all students and colleagues, hypermedia courseware, either locally produced, or found anywhere on the enormous WWW. Further, in a classroom equipped with a video projector, com- puter, and Internet connection, all this courseware may accessed within a lecture.

Conclusion

The explosive growth of the WWW is a crucial and revolutionary event in our cultural history. It brings an enormous new freedom of information into homes and schools, requiring very little effort or cost. In the educational sphere alone, it provides a new track, within or without our established school system. And its future is up to us.

Bibliography

Abraham, Ralph, Frank Jas, and Will Russell, The Web Empowerment Book, Santa Clara, CA: Telos/ Springer-Verlag, 1994.

Wiggins, Richard W., The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers, New York: McGraw- Hill, 1994. Fig. 2.A WWW browser.