San Francisco Examiner (EX) - Monday, May 31, 1993
Edition: FOURTH Section: BUSINESS Page: D1
By: Frank Bajak ASSOCIATED PRESSCOLUMBUS, Ohio - The room is filled with 40-odd workstations, but most of the computer engineers are in a semicircle around a single terminal. Internet Talk Radio has hit the airwaves. Well, sort of.
This isn't radio in any traditional sense. It's not being broadcast by any big radio stations just yet. But it has been sent around the world on the Internet, a rapidly expanding web of interconnected computer networks. "The first radio show designed to be played on your computer," the announcer says. The engineers grin. The voice and a synthesized jingle come from a pair of midget speakers, but all eyes follow the modulated sound readout on a monitor.
This is digital radio, a bunch of professionally mixed audio files that can be played by the synthesizers built into many desktop computers - just like the music and sound-effect files that enliven computer games.
But that's where the radio metaphor beings to blur.
"People can stop, people can fast-forward - this is random access radio," Carl Malamud says of his brainchild.
The 33-year-old writer and networking engineer has, at least initially, geared Internet Talk Radio toward computer network architects, nearly 600 of whom were in Columbus for a week-long Internet Engineering Task Force meeting.
The engineers, a supercharged species from 17 countries, have wired a Hyatt Regency with high-speed data links. Their designs must enable the big jump in scale to the networks of the future. And the tools they're developing must allow computer novices to easily browse the Internet's rich but elusive resources as one might the local library.
One topic is knowledge robots, the resource discovery tools of tomorrow that will be dispatched across networks with orders to bring back specified information or go buy or check the price on something.
Another is improving audio and video transport on the network.
A narrow interest group? Sure.
But Internet Talk Radio inhabits a medium with enormous potential as audio and eventually full-motion video enter the personal computer market and more and more people hook up to computer networks from home or work.
Wander through the computer room and you'll see the latest software packages get some rigorous testing from the best in the business.
At one workstation, Fred Whiteside is setting up his Boston company's new program that allows people to interact with the Internet via Microsoft's popular Windows operating system. Windows is in millions of corporate and home computers, widely popular because of its relative ease of use.
At another terminal, a small group gathers around Tim Berners-Lee as he guides a reporter through his 21/2-year-old software invention, World Wide Web. A dazzling research tool, it seeks out information by establishing a web of interconnections in a world of random resources.
The secret is hypertext, highlighted sections of text - or pictures themselves - that the user points to with a computer mouse and clicks on. That brings a new, more specific body of information onto the screen.
"The Web is a set of associations, and in a way the Web is a representation of mankind's knowledge," says Berners-Lee, a ruddy-cheeked Brit who has moved via the software into files at his workplace, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland.
"I'm really interested in getting this into grade schools," he says.
Eight hours later, as midnight approaches, the computer room still is packed. But now the interaction is exclusively between human and computer.
Some 50 people are riveted to terminals, and no one is talking. There is only the low hum of computer power units and the muted click of keystrokes.
"These are the people that built the Internet," says Malamud, and this is no ordinary convention. "They come here to work."
Copyright 1993 San Francisco Examiner Inc.