SAN JOSE, CA: The Internet World show just concluded its' three-day run in San Jose. Unless you were there, you can't fully appreciate the excitement, innovation, and large quantities of statistics at the show. Plus, long registration lines.

From my notebook:

• Attended Press breakfast with Jim Clark of Netscape Communications Corporation and Scott MacNealy of Sun Microsysystems, to announce that they were going to do business together and that they were both mutually grateful that they were going to do business together. No wedding date was announced. Nor was any breakfast. One reporter, after listening to the two industry heavyweights restate their mutual admiration for each other for a half hour, asked the question that we were all thinking: "Is there an announcement here, or what?". They announced that there would be an announcement on May 23rd, but it probably would not include breakfast.
• Attended keynote presentation by Gordon Bell, one of the real industry pioneers. He was formerly a Vice-President at Digital Equipment Corporation where he was responsible for the VAX. He also was one of the co-developers of NREN, the pre-curser to the Internet, and was introduced as being one of the "most-quoted people in the Internet World". Through a fascinating collection of statistics, conveniently presented in graph format, he showed that the total population of the Internet will surpass the total HUMAN population by the year 2003, and at that time, the Internet will likely be run by Organized Crime. He went on to say that the Phone Company and Internet Service Providers are currently capable of delivering data to our homes and offices at the rate of 25 Megabits per second, but that they were holding this back so that they could sell us ISDN services, which they have not been otherwise able to sell for the past ten years. Perhaps his most compelling remarks were in his closing statement: "I"m kidding! Really! Now untie me!!" He was escorted off the stage by four burly AT&T account reps.
• From Jim Clark: "The World Wide Web is currently doubling every 57 days".
• From AT&T and Pacific Bell, in a joint presentation on ISDN at Home: "Every house in the state of California (Motto: "It's been 4 days since our last crisis!") will have ISDN in the next 10 to 15 years." My advice for you stock-pickers: invest in John Deere. They'll be needing hundreds of thousands of backhoes to dig up and replace EVERY inch of copper telephone cable with new wire (and fiber optic cable). This is probably not going to sit well with everyone, particularly those with yards. They will need to trench from the street right up to your house, but I digress.
• Pac Bell announced that they were donating four ISDN lines to every school in the State of California at the VERY reasonable rate of $45 per month. The only catch is that the schools will have to use student labor to dig the trenches for the new wire (and fiber optic cable) to the schools and surrounding neighborhoods.
• ISDN is becoming hot. AT&T developed this technology ten years ago, yet still has only a small installed base. Due to the growing demand for bandwidth, the phone companies believe that people will be willing to have their yards trenched to lay new wire (or fiber optic cable) in exchange for being able to play Doom five to ten times faster than over a conventional modem. Plus, with the ability of ISDN to carry both voice and data signals at 56K (roughly ten pounds per minute) over two separate wires, it will be possible to call Pizza Hut without interrupting Doom.
• Your "ISDN at Home" program will also require rewiring your house with "Category-5" industrial-strength twisted-pair wire. Perhaps you can hire a student to help.
• Newt Gingrich is "pro-ISDN". It was suggested that we all E-mail Newt indicating our support for ISDN, and to make a reservation for his brother-in-law to bring his backhoe to your house for trenching.
• The number of vendors doubled this year, to 200. So did the number of attendees, to 15,000. So did Rush Limbaugh.
• The number of people making up statistics about the growth of the Net reached 20,000, and is growing at the rate of, ummm, 25% per month. (Source: WAG)
• As of Tuesday, there are 76,000 registered domain names at the Domain Name Server (DNS), and the number of Web Sites is estimated at 5 million.
• From Scott MacNealy, speaking on the Internet: "Europe doesn't get it. The Pacific Rim does".

From the Show Floor:

• IBM was there. In force. They are now an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and are doing a huge push of "Warp", with its' built-in Internet capability.
• Microsoft: See IBM. Replace Warp with Win 95.
• CompuServe: See IBM, Replace Warp with Spry Mosaic.
• All the remaining vendors: See IBM, replace Warp with NetScape.
• NetCom: Dozens of friendly, cheerful, audio-animatronics were on-hand, explaining how they could EASILY share one modem between 200 users, using their new "Time-Shifting" technology, called "TS, Sherlock".
• Web Browsers: There were many companies showing many Web Browsers. Curiously, NetScape, who owns 75% of the Browser market, didn't have a booth. Their people were apparently too busy making deals with EVERY vendor on the floor, including the concessionaires, that they forgot to get one.
• Web Authoring Tools were a hot commodity. Now, everyone can build Web Pages, just like everyone can design a car if they buy an Auto-CAD package. There were a number (2) of interesting options, ranging from "Internet Assistant", a "free" add-on to MS-Word For Windows 6.0 to "WebAuthor", a free stand-alone (beta) program from Quarterdeck. There were a number (>200) of commercial alternatives as well, but the crowds appreciated the pricing on the previous two, apparently. Plus, Microsoft was giving out digital wristwatches that, curiously, did not have a 95 on the date calendar. The first available date was '96.

The show attendees seemed to be stratified into three statistical groups:

• Vendors: 2-5% of the attendees, easily identified by all having a median age of 22 and wearing matching bowling shirts.
• Press: .01% and surly, because all REAL stories had already broken on the Net, reaching more people in the first ten minutes than all those who walked through the show over three days.
• Everyone else: Wandering around, dazed at the bewildering array of providers, routers, browsers, and statistics, and wondering to themselves: "If there really ARE ways of making money on the Internet, maybe it won't be so hard to explain to my wife or husband why we have to dig up the front yard.

See you next issue

Jon Sisk
www.jes.com

Original article for Computing News & Review, April 1995

Copyright © 1995 Jonathan E. Sisk.