My daughter bought a new car the other day and I took it for a test drive.
In an utterly unremarkable way I put the key in the ignition turned the engine on, put it in gear, flicked on the right indicator and took off. It was a bit warm so I hit the button for the electric window. Then I washed the front window. It was an ordinary Japanese Hondoyitshi car.
In 1961, my father bought a second-hand Morris 10. It was in fairly good condition. Even the manual was in the glove-box.
The manual showed you where to find the crank-handle and how to work it, if the starter motor did not work. It showed you how to wind down the windows and described the workings of clutch and gear lever.
In 1958, I watched the end of the London-to-Brighton vintage car race. My Grandfather, who lived in Brighton, recalled the days of the first cars and how, on the rare occasions they actually started, a man with a red flag had to walk in front of them to warn pedestrians and horses, and that in any event the horses and even many pedestrians could go faster than the cars.
I mention these items of family trivia because if I had put the dreaded words “”information superhighway” in the first paragraph, I would have about three readers left by now. At least now I have still got the family and perhaps a few others still reading.
I’ll come back to the family automotive history in a moment, but first to that other highway.
The information superhighway has come in for a bucketing recently. The commentators say that it does not exist, or that it is a long, long way off or may never happen.
It depends what you mean by “”information superhighway”. If you mean a magic cable into the home down which is fed any amount of text, sound and vision at the users’ demand, then, yes, it is a long way off.
If, however, we talk of an electronic evolution, it is happening all around us all the time.
In evolutionary terms, if the superhighway is my daughter’s Hondoyitshi _ easy to use by anyone, no need for instruction manuals and faster and more convenient than most other ways of getting there _ we are at the stage of waving the red flag.
But it would be just plain blinkered to say: those contraptions will never beat horses.
So where are we on the electronic evolutionary table? And where is it heading?
The human communications story so far: grunting, speaking, drawing and carving pictures on rock, drawing and carving words on rock and clay tablets, writing on paper, printing, radio, telephone, film, tape-recording, video, the computer, and now digitised convergence.
Digitised convergence means that any words, pictures or sounds can be converted to strings of 1s and 0s and placed on computer disk or sent from one computer to another where they are unravelled as the original words, pictures and sound.
The digitised form can be copied millions of times without deterioration. This is very important for the superhighway.
Why is it so? Do this experiment. Draw a wavy line with about twelve varying height and length waves on a piece of paper. Copy it on to another piece of paper. Put the original out of sight. Copy the first copy and throw the first copy away. Do this half a dozen times, preferably passing the copy from one person to another. Compare the end result with the original.
Then write the string. Copy it the same way. Compare it with the original.
When you copy wavy lines you make mistakes. Audio tape is like wavy lines. Copy from one tape to another a dozen times and the sweet wounds of Sibelius turns to something the Sex Pistols would put out on a bad day. Computer and CD information, however, is like the 1s and 0s. You get exact copies every time. A 1 is a 1 and 0 is a 0. A 1 is sent as a high-voltage signal and the 0 as a low-voltage signal and there is no mistaking which is which. The 1s and 0s are called bits.
The alphabet, upper and lower case, the numbers 0 to 9 and a set of odd characters like $@&*/< add up to 256. This is two times two eight times or two to the power of eight. So you only need a string of eight 1s and 0s to provide enough combinations to describe all the keyboard digits. Eight bits is called a byte.
So if a disk has a one megabyte (one million bytes) capacity it can hold one million characters. A typical disk holds 120 megabytes. Much of this, however, is taken up by program code. Also there are ways to compress the alphabet code to fit more in each byte.
This article contains, say, 1500 words. That is about 7500 characters, which is 7500 bytes, or 60,000 bits. I can copy it from my home-office computer to the computer at the Canberra Times by sending it down the phone line via modem in a series of 1s and 0s of high and low voltage pulses. The Canberra Times has some old modems which receive at 2400 bits a second. This means it takes about 25 seconds to send the article from my home-office to Fyshwick. That is a lot faster than getting in the car and hand delivering it.
But what if I wanted to deliver a novel. (Some of the sub-editors chide me for writing novels instead of newspaper articles). That would be about 4 million bits and take the best part of half an hour. Quicker to drive.
Most modems, however, now run at 9600 bits a second, so the novel would be sent in about nine minutes.
So we have a highway of sorts. If everyone just sent text, we could transfer huge amounts of information quite quickly, presuming, of course, that the modem connected quickly and easily every time.
But life is not like that.
First, people want to send sound and graphics files which are a thousand times bigger than text files. More of that anon.
Secondly, modems, unlike fax machines, do not connect quickly and easily. Sometimes they require strings like at&f&d0&s=980 to be keyed in before they work. Baud rates have to be set and so on.
In short, they require crank handles and manuals, like the Morris 10, or worse like the cars in 1913 with spark retarders and crash gears. Far quicker to saddle the horse.
However, modems are improving. They are getting faster and easier to use. Soon it will never be quicker to saddle the horse, and computer files containing vast amounts of information will be routinely sent over the phone lines rather than printed and sent by post (petrol engine, one of the most inefficient ways to send information).
And more people are getting modems, largely because they can be used a fax machines. With a fax modem you can send a file in the word processor straight down the phone line to a fax machine at the other end, without printing it out.
A fax modem costs as little as $199. The fancy ones with built-in answering machines cost $1000.
Once people buy a fax modem they start experimenting with the modem as well as the fax, so more people are logging on to bulletin boards and information services.
At present, Australian companies dominate the Australian market for modems. Netcomm, Maestro and Banksia have 85 per cent between them. Let us hope that silly government policies do not surrender this industry to the Japanese and the Americans. The market is growing at 50 per cent a year. Last year more than 250,000 modems were sold in Australia, the vast majority used as cheap fax machines. Modems are slowly becoming standard equipment in home computers.
Others are used to send and receive from to big computers at office HQ and others are also used to log on to what now passes for the information superhighway: Internet, Compuserve and other more specialist commercial databases, such as Info-One which has nearly all Australian law on line (quicker than going to a library for the books).
Internet is a bizarre and wonderful creature. No-one owns it. No-one knows precisely how big it is, though estimates suggest 20 million people can log in, send electronic messages to each other, download information and upload information from a loosely linked series of computers large and small all over the globe.
It started 25 years ago in the US when several universities linked their computers. Slowly more and more universities linked in and in the past half dozen years it went international. Academics could exchange ideas and theories instantaneously or if in different time zones overnight.
The net, as it became to be known, has grown and grown. Government and commercial groups have been added. Individuals in Australia can join.
You can search for files on Jupiter, Medieval history, hydrocarbons, computer software or whatever. People ask questions, send answers and send information. A whole etiquette has built up (see inset).
All the information is free. The only cost is a time charge for those who use a commercial organisation to get in and the cost of a phone call (see inset on how to get on).
Huge amounts of information are being added to Internet because there is an audience for it. It has been difficult to use, especially for occasional users who can forget key sequences, though easier-to-use Windows interfaces have been developed.
I suspect the nature of Internet will change as commercial and cost-recovery pressures get greater. It would be a shame, however, if Internet lost its essential charter: the free flow of information.
Indeed, it is a bit naughty of the big computer companies to talk of an information highway. The highway on the ground has always been free to travel on. The big commercial companies really want an information railroad, where you pay for a ticket before you get on, and the cost of the ticket depends on where you want to travel.
Compuserve, or Compu$serve as some Internet fans call it, is an information railroad.
It has far better news services than Internet: Reuters, Washington Post, United Press International, dozens of US and UK papers, medical journals, every US Supreme Court judgment and Australian Associated Press. Subscribers can instruct Compuserve to trawl these services constantly for their special interests (all stories with Jupiter and planet in them, for example) and they will be instantly available for downloading when you log on.
However, Compuserve costs about $18 an hour to log on, with further charges for many services.
It has forums on computers, games, politics, law, science etc and a message system, which can link in with Internet and vice versa. However, Compuserve has less hard academic information that Internet.
Just with these two services we have a highway of sorts. But, for practical purposes, it is a text highway only. The phone lines and modem capacity will not easily handle graphics, music and video files.
For example, a detail graphic could be as much as a megabyte (a million bytes) for one A4 page. One A4 page of text, on the other hand, is only two thousand bytes. The graphic is transferred 500 times slower than the text.
The phone lines, until we get coaxial cable or fibre optic to the home, are limited to about 144,000 bits (20,000 words) a second, though that barrier has been pushed with specialist compression software.
The highway is still evolving. Paper libraries, and indeed whole journal and newspaper publications, are slowly going electronic and on-line (as well as using CDs). The advantages of electronic information are being seen by more people: easier to search, easier to update (no costly reprints), less shelf space, no library closing times, access from remote towns and farms, less environmentally destructive paper and petrol-engine delivery.
The information rough network of roads is already here. But all the economic and social forces suggest the upgrading will gradual continue and we will hardly notice the point at which it becomes a superhighway.