Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was once widely derided for famously describing the Internet as “a series of tubes.”

While such an unintentionally humorous oversimplification is particularly regrettable for legislators, it’s not really that bad as metaphors go. Anyway, many casual users don’t know much more than that, either. As long as everything works, why should they?

While a person does not need to fully understand a car to drive it, they can use it much more effectively if they know something of how it functions and what its needs and limitations are. At least they can more easily keep it fueled and in operating condition.

So too with the Internet. And since the Net is becoming an ever larger part of our lives, this is more important every day. With that in mind, as space allows here at the SWCP Portal, we will run an occasional article to explore the background of this fascinating technology.

The name says it all: an "internet" is a network of electronically linked computers. The Internet with a capital initial is the global network of all computer networks – the mother of all networks. It consists of the indefinable, ever-changing totality of all devices that are connected together in a very specific way. The World Wide Web is just a small part of it.

This "specific way" is called TCP/IP. It is a protocol, or agreed on method that allows both the smallest, most underpowered PCs and the largest, fastest supercomputers to talk to each other – and with all other computer-enabled devices online anywhere, anytime. All they need is the right connections and software.

What makes the Internet function is not electric circuits. It is voluntary cooperation by everyone involved. Agreements, not decrees, run this collective global enterprise up and down the line. Ironically, all this is possible only because even though the Net's not ultimately “free,” nobody owns it. Though it is not unregulated, there is no president or single overall ruler. Everybody involved is a citizen of a planetary community. This is why hackers, spammers, and virus creators are so generally despised: their actions directly assault the basic trust on which it all depends.

Cyberspace is the Place

If you could somehow actually see all the zillions of computers and their connections from outer space, you might realize what an incredibly huge and complex array the Internet is. It's built up out of all different sizes and makes of computers, plugged into each other by diverse types of phone and fiber lines, "backbones," "gateways," routers and cables, and even satellite uplinks.

Often described as a "cloud" of computing, the supernetwork of which the Internet is a part more and more resembles a single planet-sized hypercomputer. There are so many machines connected that Vint Cerf, the inventor of email, says that there is a real possibility that the world will run out of unique Internet addresses – as serious as running out of phone numbers – by 2010.

The statistics alone are staggering: The global network today contains approximately 1.2 billion personal computers, 4 billion landline and cell phones, 27 million data servers, and 80 million wireless PDAs. Including spam,196 billion emails are sent every day – that’s 2.2 million per second. There are 20 billion visible, searchable web pages and another 900 billion that can’t be due to password-protected access or dynamic content.

All this computer software and data floating in each memory bank in the world comprises what we call cyberspace, of which the Internet is but one type of the connecting links. Of course “space” is just a metaphor for this new electronic dimension of information. The only real space involved is that taken up by all those disks and chips.

Cyberspace is just as divided up as the hardware is too, but not in the same ways.

Science fiction writer William Gibson coined the actual term "cyberspace" in his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. Validation came from all kinds of users instantly adopting it.

While still a young idea, cyberspace was foreshadowed by a few way-out philosophers down through the ages. Plato, with his belief in the reality of the ideal, perfect abstract forms of which this gritty existance is but a poor shadow, could be said to have prefigured the concept. So could medieval scholastics with their ideas of the world soul.

Early in the last century, French paleontologist and Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin perhaps came closest with his theological concept of the noosphere, sort of an evolving layer of thought that surrounds the Earth. And it was Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s who first gave a glimpse of the coming television-saturated “post-Gutenberg” global village that we now inhabit today.

Several other key concepts were necessary. The same month as the first atomic bomb was tested, eminent scientist Vannevar Bush published an amazing article called “As We May Think.” “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability;” he wrote, “and something is bound to come of it.” He had a few ideas, even though they depended on microfilm, vacuum tubes, and photography.

Even before the transistor, when experimental televisions delivered sixteen blurry frames a second, he foresaw everything from printers to voice recognition and optical character reading software, even webcams. In the article, Bush predicted both mainframe and personal computers.

The latter he called the memex, “a sort of mechanized private file and library.” It would be a means of organizing a wealth of information built right into one's desk. The trails of linked facts would form memes, collections of knowledge as individual as each person but that could be shared freely with others. Thus Vannevar Bush even predicted Wikipedia: “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear.”

Moreover, he realized that the critical problem was information management. “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing,” he noted. From this simple truth, Google would one day be born.

And he even toyed with the idea of direct electrical communication with the brain! Well, we’re still waiting on that...

However, a simpler means to create memes was finally conceived twenty years later. Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext, referring to key words that could be symbolically linked to other related electronic texts, and hypermedia, the images and sounds that could be placed into such texts.

Meanwhile, completely unrelated to all this high-flown speculation, scientists and engineers had done a great deal of tinkering with hardware and thinking on their own. This ultimately resulted the physical means for these lofty ideas to be realized. In future articles, we’ll explore how all this allowed machines to talk to each other, what the Cold War had to do with it, and just why email is so much like postal mail.