WHAT a title: Internet Dreams. It conjures up images of late-night
forays into deepest cyberspace, returning with wild tales of nightmare fantasies
conceived in the arcane jargon of IRC and hidden in the deepest forests of
steganography. Sadly not. Although a couple of the readings included in Mark
Stefik鈥檚 compilation (MIT Press, 拢17.50/$30, ISBN 0 262 19373 6) do
venture into those realms, most soberly consider matters like the future of
libraries in an electronic age鈥攁nd what may become a New Age conundrum:
how to make money on the Net. The 鈥渄reams鈥� of the title refer not to the Net
itself but to its extreme malleability as a brand new medium. We may shape it
with our thoughts. Computers themselves were like that once.
In Computer (Basic Books, 拢20/$28, ISBN 0 465 02989 2),
Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray travel back to the beginning. It鈥檚
strange to find IBM and the development of the personal computer described in
the style of historians: even the computer on my desk took on the distant
quality of a BBC period drama. This book traces computers back to their human
origins, travels through the work of early pioneers such as Charles Babbage, and
winds up with the beginnings of the Internet and the World Wide Web. It may be a
little too soon to write this, as the authors surmise in the chapter on personal
computers, but it鈥檚 a glimpse of what our technology will look like to future
ages.
Also serious and research-oriented is Digital Media and Electronic
Publishing (Academic Press, 拢35/$49.95, ISBN 0 12 227756 2), a
collection of papers from researchers round the world put together by British
academics Rae Earnshaw, John Vince and Huw Jones. It鈥檚 a great source of ideas
both cheap and expensive. So in between discussions of how to define interactive
media or construct virtual libraries, you find a short paper on low-cost
hypertext authoring using . . . Windows Help files. Any collection that
speculates about the future but remembers the tools to hand has something going
for it.
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Internet telephony may be one of those futures for people who like the idea
of paying local rates for long distance calls. Jeff Pulver鈥檚 The Internet
Telephone Toolkit (Wiley, 拢19.99 with CD-ROM, ISBN 0 471 16352 X)
glosses over regulatory issues and skates straight into the realities of
reaching out and touching Netheads. You do need a fair bit of equipment: full
multimedia PC, including sound card, microphone and either speakers or a
headset. Pulver was definitely the person to write this book: one of the
earliest users of Internet telephony, he runs several electronic mailing lists
dedicated to the subject.
Gary Gach鈥檚 Pocket Guide to the Internet (Pocket Books,
拢4.99/$5.99 with Pipeline disc, ISBN 0 671 568 507) covers the more
mundane business of getting out onto the Internet and doing something useful
with your connection. Gach, an Internet trainer in real life, aims to teach you
enough for you to get your bearings on any system you happen to encounter. About
half the book is taken up with this, the other half is an introduction to
resources in specific subject areas. Gach鈥檚 book is readable, full of genuinely
interesting information and鈥攁 big selling point this鈥攕mall. For
newcomers to the Net I鈥檇 recommend it over any of those tombstone-sized
things.
On the other hand, why plough through a lot of serious stuff when for twice
the price you can deter yourself altogether? The best thing about Dave Barry
in Cyberspace (Crown, $22, ISBN 0 5175 9575 3)is that he鈥檚 not
making anything up. This is the man whose column about the exploding whale
(based on a true story) recycles through cyberspace so often it鈥檚 been banned
from alt.folklore.urban. Barry makes fun of real Web pages with pictures of
types of crackers, a full collection of banana labels, and photographs of the
鈥淔laming Pop-Tart Experiment鈥�, then comments that 98 per cent of online Web time
is spent waiting for downloads鈥攜ou know he鈥檚 been there.
The more you know about computers, the funnier the book is (鈥渢he more memory
a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages鈥�), even if Barry slips
up once and mistakes CompuServe jargon for Internet jargon. He鈥檚 written better
books, but this would still sit well under the Christmas tree.