Lee A. Bygrave (red.) YULEX 2002 - Universitetet i Oslo

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Rooms for thought 87
Here, we will not trace the development of the network: how ARPA split
the network into a military and a civil part around 1980, leaving the administration
of the civil network, now re-named Internet, to the National Science
Foundation; how the NSF stopped to fund the network around 1990, and
how Tim Berners-Lee at the same time gained support from the Organisation
Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire – still known by the abbreviation
CERN – for his project World-Wide Web. Or how a young American, Marc
Andreessen, launched the first web browser, Mosaic, in 1993 – a program
that is the common ancestor to both Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
But step-by-step a situation was emerging in which a wealth of information
was created – a maze, a chaos of web sites and pages.
It is, however, rather daunting to reflect that at the end of 1993, only 50
servers were set up to browse the Internet. In a very brief time, in less than
ten years, this new inner space of information has become a universe for exploration
and discovery. Amazing things can be learned, the most whimsical
facts can be studied.
I still remember the first time a guest lecturer from the UK had come over
by one of the new, cheap air companies to Norway, and told that one of his
friends had instructed him to collect the bag for air sickness, as a bag from
this company was missing in his collection. We thought this was a rather
weird hobby until we discovered that there were at least two home pages on
the Internet devoted to such bags, reproducing them and commenting upon
their value for collectors. Or when one of my students, writing a thesis, had
taken his first expeditions into inner space, and become fascinated by the
possibilities. He had an aquarium with salt-water sea horses, and one of them
had behaved in a disturbing manner. Using his new skills, he had found a lot
of information on sea horses on the Net, including a home page with a small
expert system offering a diagnosis of the symptoms of ailing creatures. He
had described the behavior of his sea horse according to the prompts, and the
Internet service had returned with the suggested conclusion that the sea horse
was terminally ill, and probably would be dead by the next morning. His
enthusiasm in finding that the service actually proved to be right far exceeded
his grief in losing a sea horse.
Probably all of us have anecdotes like this, illustrating our experiences
from the first experimental flights in the inner space of the Internet. And this
environment was re-named cyberspace by the Canadian author, William
Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer (1984):
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of
legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathemati-