Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/bbs/society/society.lha/PUB/isoc_news/2-4/complete_issue.txt

Text File | 1995-07-21 | 130KB | 2,657 lines

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The Multiprotocol Internet
by Barry Leiner
member, Internet Architecture Board (IAB)
<[e-mail]>

In recent discussion in the IAB, we considered the subject of how the
community might deal with two pressing issues: multiple protocol
suites and the selection of a next generation internet protocol. These
IAB discussions have led to a brief Internet Draft attempting to
stimulate and focus discussion to resolve these questions. This
Internet Draft is available as <draft-iab-multiprotocol-00.txt>. The
following is a summary.

Over the past few years, with the increasing scope of the Internet,
has come an increasing need to develop mechanisms for accommodating
other protocol suites. Most techniques have fallen into the regime of
either interoperability (techniques that allow for communications
between users of different protocol suites) or resource sharing
(allowing common resources such as links or switches to jointly
service communities using different protocol suites.) It must be noted
that such techniques have been quite limited, with interoperability
happening primarily at application layers and resource sharing
happening to limited extent.

This need to deal with multiple protocol suites has led to discussion
within the community concerning the role of the IETF/IESG/IAB
regarding the TCP/IP protocol suite versus other protocol suites.
Questions are asked as to whether the TCP/IP protocol suite is the
sole domain of interest of the IETF/IESG/IAB or if the community needs
also to deal with other protocol suites, and if so, in what manner,
given these other protocol suites have their own communities of
interest pursuing their development and evolution.

The answer to this question lies in understanding the role of the
IETF/IESG/IAB with respect to the iterative process of protocol
development and evolution.  The continued success of the Internet
relies on a continued strong force for convergence, making sure that
the Internet's primary protocol suite (TCP/IP) is successful through
an evolutionary process in accommodating both the changing user
requirements and emerging technologies. It also requires that we
recognize the reality of the Internet having to deal with multiple
protocols.

Thus, we can summarize the directions for the IETF/IESG/IAB as
two-fold:

- Have as a primary focus the evolution of the primary protocol suite
(TCP/IP), acting as a force for convergence at all times towards a
single set of protocols, and

- Make provision for other protocol suites within the global Internet
through mechanisms for interoperability and resource sharing.

The principles described above for multiprotocolism can also be
applied to the discussions regarding the next generation internet
protocol (IPng). Currently, there are several candidates for IPng, which
raises the question of how to deal with multiple protocols at that
level. We note that even if just one is selected, there is an issue
involved in transitioning from IPv4 to IPng.

Selection of a single internet protocol provides considerable benefit
to the community:

- Communities of end users can select their desired applications,
independent of the technologies used to support the intermediate
networks.

- The common underlying infrastructure provides a common marketplace
upon which application developers can create new and exciting
applications. Installation of these applications does not require end
users to select a corresponding network protocol (although some
advanced applications may require enhancements, such as high-bandwidth
approaches).

Thus, the community (IETF/IESG/IAB) should continue to act as a force
for convergence by selecting a single next generation Internet
protocol and developing methods to ease the transition from IPv4 to
IPng. Specifically, at the applications layer, it is desirable to
promote different approaches and "let the marketplace decide."
However, it is unacceptable to treat the internet protocol layer in
the same way.

Historically, the IETF/IESG/IAB has acted as a strong force for the
development of the Internet by acting as a force for convergence on
and evolution of a single primary protocol suite. This has served the
community well, and this approach should be continued for the future.
In particular, the IETF/IESG/IAB should:

- maintain its focus on the TCP/IP protocol suite,

- work to select a single next-generation internet protocol

- develop mechanisms to aid in transition from the current IPv4, and

- continue to explore mechanisms to interoperate and share resources
with other protocol suites within the Internet.

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DECLARATION OF OAXACA

A landmark document was signed recently by
24 directors of institutions related to the study of biodiversity
in Mexico to establish the
Mexican Information Network on Biodiversity. The network will be
formed by a group of institutions to share information for
the benefit of scientific research on biodiversity and will
provide precise taxonomic and geographic information for users
interested in the rational use of natural resources and
biological conservation.

The network will consist on the computerized
information of the specimen labels that the taxonomists
consider: 1) scientifically sound, 2) not
likely to endanger a species (for example, by providing
localities of a comercially attractive species), and 3) not being
activey worked for research.

Such label information is
1) available for thousands of species and millions of specimens,
2) essential for taxonomic, biogeographic and ecogeographic
research, 3) of foremost importance to environmental planning,
monitoring, etc., and 4) it may be used, when not downright
required,  in many cases stipulated by mexican and foreign
legislation (i.e., the Mexican Ley del Equilibrio Ecologico or
the American Endangered Species Act).

Taking into account that Mexico has more than 150 institutional
zoological collections and herbaria distributed over the country,
and  with some very large and important collections (i. e., the
herbaria of the Institute of Biology at the National University
and the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biologicas at IPN hold more
than one million plant specimens), there are significant
technical and organizational problems to be solved. The
importance of the Declaration of Oaxaca lies on the fact that the
heads of some of the most important Mexican institutions agreed
to face the problems squarely, as a collective effort that will
provide an important tool both to Mexican taxonomy and to
conservation efforts.

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Hypertext Internet Health Resources
by Dr. Gary Malet  [e-mail]

HEALTHMATRIX-  Authors Lee Hancock, Healthtel Corp.
Healthtel announces a windows hypertext presentation of
Internet health resources-Healthmatrix! The program is
available as:
                       matrix.zip
        (Ftp this file from the ftp site ftp.gac.edu
              in the submissions directory).

      The hypertext format allows easy browsing of medical
libraries, listservs, newsgroups, data archives, gophers,
institutions, and wais based information concerned about
health. Healthmatrix gives in depth instructions to telnet
medical libraries, retrieve files from data archives, and
subscribe to newsletters and electronic journals. It
describes the character and volume of participation of health
mailing lists and newsgroups.
      Healthmatrix should be of value to medical librarians
who access Internet resources. It can be windowed to serve
as a database of addresses and commands while on line.
Healthmatrix was developed to serve as an introduction and
database for the Internet community to access health
information. The program introduces Healthtel's
communication and librarian services. Healthmatrix is
appropriate for distribution to library patrons interested
in access to health information over Internet.

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What is new in the region of Former Yugoslavia
by Borka Jerman-Blazic <[e-mail]>

After the spliting up of Yugoslavia to several countries the academic network
YUNAC as a network cease to exist despite the attempts  for reorganization
the network as a regional network. Instead of YUNAC there are several
other  networks  providing Internet services.

In Slovenia there are three service providers, the academic - ARNES, EUNet
and ABM BBS which is a member of Greenpeace net. ARNES overtook the
existing YUNAC connection to IXI which is now a part of the EuropaNET
IP service offered by Dante. The line is 64 Kbit and is expected to be
upgraded to 128 Kbit in near future.  The internal lines of the
network are leased but some customers are still using the national PPSDN. Basic
services offered are X.400 and TCP/IP (SMTP, FTP).
THe Slovene branch of Eunet is providing IP services to customers outside
the academic sector of Slovenia. The Eunet backbone is
connected with 19 600 Kbit line to Amsterdam and the customers of EUnet are
mainly using dial-up connections.
The most powerful BBS system in Slovenia  is ABM which provides to its
users many services typical for BBS and beside that international e-mail
service based on UUCP. ABM is open for any kind of customers.

In Croatia the academic and reserach network is CARnet. CARnet is IP based
network (TCP/IP is mandatory protocol for its customers but X.25 is also
available). CARnet is connected with leased line to Vienna and has
access to EBONE and to Ljubljana (to ARNES) with 9.6 Kbit lines. CARnet has
developed recently remarkable information services (several
GOPHERs with scientific magazines published in English in Croatia and other
relevant information) accessable via the network. The policy of use of the
CARnet services is relatively open as all kind of
public libraries and schools, administration offices, some kind
of industrial institutions and individual users are wellcomed.

In Serbia and Monte Negro, the two republics which constitutes the current
Federal Yugoslavia there are no international leased lines and direct
connections to Internet due to the U.N sanctions which caused Beograd-Linz
EARN line to be cancelled. However, the former users of the academic network
and customers of some BBS systems can exchange electronic mail with Interenet
by use of UUCP site located somewhere in U.S. The international
connections of the PPSDN are still functioning.

Most important changes happened in Macedonia. Macedonia was last year accepted
by U.N and was recognized by majority of European countries. The country code
MK was allocated by ISO 3166 and the TLD was registred in the Internet NIC in
October 1993. The users in Macedonia can be accessed from Internet by e-mail
with addresses based on the recently registred TLD. Currently the service
is based on UUCP over the PPSDN international links but a leased dedicated
line is expected to be set up soon. This service is offered by the BBS
network MICRONET with a backbone in Skopje and systems all over Macedonia.
MICRONET is also offering fax services for the e-mail for users not connected
to the network. The macedonian academic network MARNET is still using
the e-mail gateway between DECNET mail and X.400 offered by University
of Ljubljana. The Open Society Fund is seriously working on the
international connection of its macedonian branch office  and the Internet.
Similar attempts are also present in Slovenia  and Croatia.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina everything is destroyed and Sarajevo where we
used to have very well developed network services is transformed now
to concentration camp. The city is besieged for more then two years.

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Europe '93
by Frode Greisen <[e-mail]>

1993 was a year of Internet growth in Europe as in the rest of the
world: more countries connected, more bandwidth in the backbones, new
applications spreading and finally - more users.

It was also the year where network organizations incorporated. A large
group of national research networks established Dante Ltd., the five
Nordic countries formalized their network organization into NORDUnet
Ltd. and the good old international Unix network split off from EurOpen
and became EUnet Ltd. In addition, several national research networks
have incorporated or are working on it.

Why ? Well, as networking moves from research and pilots for the few to
general services for the many, it is natural to have professional
organizations provide the service and in addition there is a potential for
making money. On the other hand, the research networks still want
government support so their incorporation is generally with governmental
share capital and sometimes mostly motivated by tax saving reasons.

Incorporation is slow and sometimes expensive. With the right spirit as
in Ebone, a consortium can be very effective. Ebone finally moved
international IP in Europe to the megabit/s range with a backbone
Washington-Stockholm-Amsterdam-Geneva-Paris-Washington.

The COSINE project supported by the CEC, or the Commission of the
European Union as it would be called today, finally came to an end in
1993. The resulting services were taken over by Dante and the
IXI/EMPB/Europanet backbone became multi-protocol, providing both X.25
and native IP service in the 64 kbps to 2 Mbps range.

As is apparent from Larry Landweber's connectivity tables, the number of
Internet countries has increased. In some cases, this is an artificial
effect of countries breaking up such a the former Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, but even in these cases, and in extremely difficult economic
circumstances, there is a genuine spread to new sites as the technology
becomes more and more affordable.

Europe '94

In 1994, we expect more of the same: More bandwidth, more users and more
service providers. Maybe this will be the year where PTOs become serious
about international data communication services (I mean in addition to
providing X.25).

As we talked about megabit backbones for some years before they became a
reality, maybe we've now promoted a 34 Mbps backbone for so long that
it will happen, perhaps as an offering by Dante supported by the CEC.

As the Internet will not become fully operated by professional
companies, you'll still see the well known organizations: The three year
old RIPE that gathers enthusiastic IP engineers.  The eight year old
RARE which is changing from OSI goals to a more pragmatic outlook. And
the ten year old EARN that refuses to die and which is re-orienting itself
from NJE to general network application support.

The dilemma between networks being provided with an AUP (Appropriate
Usage Policy) for special purposes or special user groups and general
purpose networks will not go away. On the one hand, setting up a
sensible routing structure when there are no AUPs is so much easier, but
on the other hand the research and education sector will still want
government funds for their special purpose or front end technology
networks. And governments cannot very well support general purpose
networks.

For many reasons (technical, financial, competitive, AUP) the
development on the GIX (Global Internet eXchange) will continue. For the
same reasons (plus the need for resilience and perhaps some national
pride) this work will expand into distributed exchanges, or D-GIXs.
There will be a need for a lot of cooperation and ingenuity until the
white smoke emerges from the meeting rooms and the next generation of IP
solves all our problems.

For the globally connected Internet there can be no purely local
solutions so the Internet Society will have a unique role to provide the
overall framework for the operation and development of the Internet. To
do this, it needs broader support and guidance from both individual and
organizational members.

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NSFNET Backbone Trends
by Erice Aupperle <[e-mail]>

Over a year ago, on 2 December 1992, the T1 NSFNET backbone
service ended when all its former traffic traversed the T3 NSFNET
service provided by ANS's T3 backbone infrastructure.  With the
ANS T3 network's greater capacity, NSFNET traffic successfully
continued its extraordinarily rapid growth.  The T1 network's peak
traffic occurred in February of 1992 when it transported 11.3
billion packets.  With that load it exhibited signs of saturation.  In
November of 1993 the ANS T3 NSFNET service carried 44.5 billion
packets, nearly four times as much traffic, without any evidence of
congestion. Figure 1 reports this traffic on a monthly basis from
January 1987.  Assuming the current traffic growth rate continues,
with it doubling annually, the projection for April 1994 is 63 billion
packets for the month.  That's an average of 2 billion packets per
day.  By comparison during the first half of 1987 the initial 56 kbps
NSFNET backbone averaged 115 million packets per month, about
550 times less traffic.  Interestingly, the capacity of a T3 circuit is
672 times that of the circuits used for the initial backbone.

The second notable growth metric is the number of Internet
networks announced by the NSFNET backbone service.  This
number has grown from 173 in July 1987 to 19,664 in November
1993.  While this growth rate is somewhat less than the traffic rate
over the same period, it's still formidable.  It is both a managerial
and technological challenge to support this growth.

In addition to traffic and announced network data, Merit has
measured and recorded other statistical information related to the
NSFNET service.  Among these other data are the distribution of
backbone packets and packet bytes based on their protocol type.
An analysis of these data affords an understanding of how the
NSFNET service is used and changes with time.  Figure 2 shows
the percentage distribution of all backbone packets when they are
classified into six major categories. These data date from August
1989 when this breakdown was first recorded.  Figure 3 is similar;
it reports the same distribution based on the number of bytes
rather than packets from October of 1990.  It is useful to note that
this distribution history spans the T1 and T3 network
implementations and that there are no dramatic or abrupt changes
in either of these percentage data over time.

Trend lines for each of these protocol percentages reveal that some
are changing while others are remarkable stable.  For example, the
packet based File Exchange percentage is fairly constant at 25%,
indeed over the four year history recorded, it is slightly increasing.
On a byte basis the File Exchange percentage is slowly decreasing
from about 48% to 45%.  It has always been and remains the
dominant service on a volume basis.  By way of contrast, both on a
packet and byte basis, Network Mail has significantly decreased
from about 25% to 15% of the traffic.  The major growth category is
the Other TCP/UDP group.  It now is the leading packet
percentage at 35% and second at 25% to File Exchange when
measured in bytes.  This trend is expected to continue as new
applications continue to evolve.  There is also evidence that M-
bone traffic is beginning to be noticed.  It shows up in the Non
TCP/UDP category and that component's recent change is
noticeable.

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Internet  prospects  in  the  South:
simple  questions,  complex issues.
by  Daniel  Pimienta* <pimienta![e-mail]>
and Senaida Jansen* <jansen![e-mail]>

   The last years have shown a spectacular move of the Developing
Countries into the networks.  Depending on the region, Fidonet or
UUCP have been the preferred entry protocols  and  everywhere the
trend  is  to  migrate,  whenever  possible,  towards  TCP-IP. If
measured in term of new countries having gateway  to the Internet
the move has been impressive and one could expect  that  the same
patterns which apply  in  the  industrial  world  will  come very
shortly  in  the South (relative  stronger  growth  of commercial
nodes, use of navigating software to access the growing resources
of  the  Internet,  weakening   of  the  subsidized  patterns for
research networks, and later, conveying multimedia objects...).

   However,  a closer look in the field shows that the reality is
more complex and that  the rudimentary measurement  tools  in use
presently are not capable to sense it adequately.

   What will happen specifically  in the South in the coming five
years?  Rather than  presenting  a forecast  on  the  subject, we
decided  to  present a selected  set  of  simple  questions whose
answers will shape the future of the Internet in the South.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL IMPACT

QUESTIONS:
-Will the dominating trend for charging  the end-user  gain force
also in the South?  Will the tariff patterns converge  around the
world?   Will   the  new  fashionable   concept  of  "sustainable
development" be translated into models where subsidizing networks
is considered a sin?

-Will    the   natural   propensity  to   communicate   with  the
historical  colonizer continue  to  be  reflected in  the network
traffic (e-mail and information)  over the next five  years? Will
the proportions of national/international and south/north traffic
increase seriously within that time-frame?

-Will the growth of end-users become evenly spread by sexes?

-Will the people  from  agriculture,  health and  social sciences
become fluent Internet users  and start using the  technology for
the benefit of these crucial development areas?

-Will the South networks be  organized in user groups  capable of
participating  efficiently  in  the  reinforcement   of  national
institutionalism,  with appropriate  articulation  between public
and private sectors?

ISSUES:
-Wide and open access to the Internet vs economic  limitations of
the majority of would be users.
-Strength of the economic and social impact of networking.
-Emergence of new forms of cooperation.
-Regional integration as a tool for development.
-Integrality of social impact.
-Priority to development.
-Role of the females in the development.
-New form of institutions to answer the needs of the South.

NATIONAL INFORMATION POLICIES,  POLITICAL CHANGES AND SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT

-Will  the emergence  of  the  electronic  library  encourage the
creation and organization of information in the  South?  Will the
generalization of interactive information  access  be accompanied
by   sufficient   bandwidth   increase?   Will   the  information
specialists of the South get sufficient  skill in  time to handle
the  challenge?   Will  the  small  and  medium  enterprises  get
organized quickly enough  to  integrate the information as  a key
business asset?

-Will  the  Internet  become  a  natural  channel  for  permanent
technology transfer  and allow the  South  to  keep  up  with the
upcoming changes?

ISSUES:
-Reinforcing of national information policies.
-Requirement  for wise  management  of  costly  resources such as
telecommunication (and,  in particular, the organization of batch
access).
-Sustainable development.

We believe that:
1) The answers are not determined by  simple cause-effect models.
2)  The system theory  approach is obviously necessary,   but not
sufficient to understand the coming changes.
3) The impacts of users' global choices will probably be decisive
and the chaos theory appears to be the most  appropriate tool for
forecasting (in the sense that  small events  may have tremendous
effects  and  that  long  time  stable  and  strong  evidence may
disappear rapidly).

   This premises  makes us  conclude  that,  besides large impact
probable from technology improvements, the future of the Internet
in  the South will  strongly depend on  the decision  of the very
end-users (in the South and in  the North).  The best strategy to
influence the future of the Internet in the interest of the South
is   then to be found in the EMPOWERING AND  ARISING AWARENESS OF
THE  SOUTH END-USERS.  Thinkers and decision-makers  of the South
must come  into  the arena soon  to  give themselves a  chance to
build the tool their way.  The responsibility of institutions and
people from the North to:
a) help South end-users join the Internet,
b) be tolerant to different styles of use,
is the counterpart key factor.

   Heavy clouds can be  perceived in  the Southern skies, however
tremendous  opportunities  come  together.  One  of  the original
opportunities  is  the  coming  of  a  real  and non-hierarchical
dialogue   between  the  North  and  the  South,  thanks  to  the
Internet...

PS:  In 1994,  FUNREDES is preparing  a meeting to brainstorm and
then report on the global impact of the Internet in  the South in
the next five years.

As  authors  of  the above work,  our  submission  by  this message
operates  as  an irrevocable grant  to the Internet Society  of a
non-exclusive,  royalty-free  right  and  license  to  reproduce,
distribute,  transmit and otherwise communicate the submission to
the  public  in   any  form  whatsoever   throughout  the  world,
including  the  right  and  license  to  make   minor  conforming
modifications or adjustments,  and to authorize others  to do so.
In addition,  We affirm that this submission does not  violate the
rights of others.

*Foundation Networks and Development (FUNREDES)

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1993 is the year the Internet `happened'.
by Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>

Oh, of course, we've had networks and Arpanet and Internet and things
for decades now, but 1993 is the watershed year that the Internet
became a place to be, rather than a bunch of wires; that we found
CyberSpace, and it was us. 1993 was the year that Time Magazine, the
New York Times, and your brother-in-law found the Internet.

And, one primary reason _why_ 1993 is the year that the Internet
happened is because of the astounding phenomena of the growing web of
information that is finally conveniently available to newcomers.
Gopher grew from `yet another Campus Wide Information System' to `how
you could read about NAFTA and MTV'. World Wide Web grew; now no
longer a glimmer-of-Xanadu for high-energy physicists, it has become
the foundation for one of the slickest applications to hit the net:
Mosaic.

Mosaic, from our net friends at NCSA, wasn't the first, but it's
certainly the most polished of the convenient
browse-the-world's-information tools. Together with its cousins, it
provides access to nearly everything that is on the net, to novices
who've just discovered affordable computers and modems.

Along the way, 1993 was the year that Muds Grew Up, from games to
virtual communities, with laws and ethics, and Real World
Implications. 1993 was a year of sensational net-stories, from the
Village Voice to Newsday, telling some of the darker tales.  Oh, of
course, there are still plenty of MUDs that are hack-and-slash, furry,
or poor imitations of INFOCOM games, but there is an increasing
diversity of community, practice, and intent to use the net as a
meeting room and a meeting place.

1993 was a banner year for multi-media, as we found Dilbert being sent
by Clarinet netnews, and MIME attachments actually being the media
type their headers claimed. In 1993, you could expect even the
backwaters to have found a GIF, postscript, and HTML previewer.

1994 will bring some seriousness of purpose to the emerging chaos.

We will no longer be content to explore the wonders of the network
merely because it is there; we'll become blase' to the gee-whiz of
clicking once and actually going to Hawaii or Switzerland, and we'll
start looking for real content.

1994 will bring real commercial applications of what corporate-speak
calls `mission critical' uses, and the `this is an experimental
service' and `under construction' notices on the world's home pages
will gradually disappear.

1994 will bring New Hordes of consumers online, with the gateways from
online services and Internet-in-a-Box, and we'll rediscover why it
isn't a Good Thing that World Wide Web has no replication, and that
one little Mac II in a lab in Minnesota really can't serve All The
Gopher Servers In The World to 30 million users, even if they don't
all try to access it at once.

But, even though our systems don't scale, and we'll have more
success disasters than we would if we'd had good sense to build in
replication, authentication and the like from the start, we'll manage.
The Internet is resilient that way: broken servers will get fixed,
protocols will change, and, in 1994, new communities will connect with
information and ideas that they actually need.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reaching Out
by Steve Ruth* <[e-mail]>

       The focus of my work is helping to add very large,
difficult-to-reach user communities to the Internet.  So in
looking at the past and the future my eyes are not glued on
on the new fiber optic cabling that may someday span the Ural
Mountains or on the fully functioning, highly successful node
that will someday be operating in Islamabad, or Dacca or in
Bomako.  Instead, I am interested in what can be done
immediately for the Internet "have-nots", roughly eighty
percent of the world's population and, not surprisingly, the
lowest in all measurements: development, education, health,
etc.    So from this perspective a FIDONET site in Bamako,
Mali, is a triumph, a linkage between Niger and an Internet
host is a dream come true, a connection that brings together
a dozen high schools all over Romania is wonderful.  (All
these things are happening as this is being written.)

       I see the past few years as being very productive in
terms of setting up low unit cost, high yield connections to
some of the most difficult places on earth.   Randy Bush's
listing of the large and growing number of African
connections, fragile but functioning, is an example of how
far we have come.  My own work indicates that over the past
six years there has been an order of magnitude increase in
the initial surge of network users if good opportunities are
offered.  Chile's first months (1987) were characterized by
scores of users, the Czech Republic's (1990) by a few
hundreds and Romania's (1993) by thousands.  Data like this
needs to be tracked more closely since it can be helpful for
new implementation planning.

       For the future I am concerned that there will be too
much emphasis on that word "infrastructure".  In the broadest
sense infrastructure is the several trillion dollars that
must be spent world wide to make communications as simple in
Sri Lanka as in Shreveport.   My constituency is the four
billion people who can gain simpler network services long
before the infrastructure is ready.   In most of the fifty
Islamic nations, for instance, it is currently possible to
make user access to Internet possible at a unit cost of about
a penny to a dime per message, with no change in the current
telecommunications structure.  The major problem is policy,
not technology.  One Islamic nation, Turkey, is an exception.
Turkey  has begun its Internet journey with more messages and
registered users than was the case in the US, Germany or
France when they began.

      My vision for 1994 is major FIDONET activity in every
large city in the world.  This means a dozen sysops in Kiev,
Tashkent, Bombay, Sarajevo, Dacca, Dakar, Cali, etc.  Each of
these sysops would  aim to offer services to about a hundred
people and calls could be polled to avoid PTT problems.    It
isn't a fancy vision and anyone who is interested in
supplying a $200,000 plus VAX system to supplement the vision
in Kiev or anywhere else is welcome.

      During the past year I have come to know Mr. George
Soros and the work of the Soros Foundations.   They are
offering simple connectivity services to many of the most
destitute places on earth--Sarajevo, Kosovo, Mostar, etc.
Their view is that with connectivity as with much else it is
important to give people a sample of what's possible, help
them to learn how the networks can facilitate the arts,
journalism, literature, public broadcasting, etc.   I fully
support this view.   Strategy before structure is a good
maxim in business and it applies to networking too.

      So for 1994 I hope to see the tough cases, the "have
nots" connected to networks in huge numbers.   We need to
keep launching the satellites, laying the cables, setting
FDDI standards at the world level--but at the same time we
must be connecting the people and the countries that need the
open systems that the Internet provides.    If our score card
regards connecting a million people per month to simple
systems like FIDO as a home run, then we will win the ball
game.

*Professor of Decision Sciences/MIS
Director, International Center for Applied Studies in MIS
George Mason University

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF CRNet
by Guy F. de Teramond* <[e-mail]>

Undoubtedly 1993 represents a landmark in the history of computer
communications in Costa Rica with the interconnection to the Internet,
and the creation and consolidation of CRNet, a digital backbone linking
major institutions in the country. This development not only brings
worlwide instant connectivity to a large community, but also introduces
internetworking technology at large scale in the country.

The University of Costa Rica (UCR) was the first national institution
to be connected to the Internet, using CRNet 64 Kbps satellite link to
the NSF-Sprint-Panamsat gateway in Homestead, Florida in January 26. The
Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica, in the province of Cartago, and the
Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) soon became part of the Internet
interconnecting their high performance equipment to CRNet routing system.

The Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnologicas
(CONICIT) interconnected their National Scientific and Technological
Information System databases (SINICyT) with CRNet backbone. SINICyt
nodes provide information in the following areas: industry, agriculture,
health, commerce, natural resources and energy, and technological services.
SINICyT nodes have also access through Radiografica Costarricensa S.A.
X.25 network.

Of particular relevance is the recent interconnection of the Omar Dengo
Foundation (FOD) to CRNet, which will allow 140.000 children from public
schools around the country to have communication among themselves and
with children in other parts of the world. The FOD initiative includes
specific projects in many areas, including studies in biodiversity, the
environment and trash recycling.

The Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio), located in the Province
of Heredia, interconnected its Intergraph computers to CRNet allowing
access to its huge biodiversity databases, containing a description of
two million species, to the national and international community. INBIO,
in collaboration with Intergraph, is developing a graphical information
system including images with geographical distribution of species.

The Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion de Empresas (INCAE),
located in the province of Alajuela, and the Instituto Interamericano de
Coperacion para la Agricultura (IICA), joined CRNet at the year's end. With
a record of 97.000 business people trained at its seminars from all over
Latin America, INCAE is using the Internet as an effective communication
instrument to reach its disperse community and branch offices across Latin
America. The IICA with 33 branch offices in Latin America, Canada and the
U.S. will use the Internet to integrate its resources in the continent.
IICA will allow access to its agricultural databases through the Internet.

The number of connected nodes to CRNet increased from 12 in January 1993
to 250 at the end of the year. With the forthcoming connection of the
Universidad Nacional de Heredia (UNA), the Centro Regional Agronomico
Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza (CATIE), the Escuela Agronomica
Regional del Tropico Humedo (EARTH) and the Congress of the Republic,
the number of nodes will double during the first weeks of 1994. A rapid
expansion into the commercial sector and doubling the speed of all the links
is expected. It is also expected that the IP connection to neighbouring
Nicaragua and Panama, sponsored by the Organization of American States (OAS)
proyect Red HUCyT, will be fully operational by January 1994.

A list of CRNet connected nodes, network topology and other documents
can be obtained via anonymous ftp at prwtos.crnet.cr (163.178.8.26) or
using gopher.cr.

In 1993 CRNet received important support from the Organization of American
States, The Agency for Internatinal Development, The Ministry of Science
and Technology, the Omar Dengo Foundation, the University of Costa Rica,
and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

*President, CRNet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GlasNet
by Anatoly Voronov <[e-mail]>

In 1993 GlasNet has affirmed its position as full Internet
service provider in Russia.

GlasNet policy, based on keeping the lowest rates possible,
just to cover expenses for staff salaries, local access
numbers, local leased lines, has attracted individual users.
No other network in Russia has that high rate of private
persons online: more than 50 per cent.

The opportunity to do telnet from the home (what GlasNet
users have now) made quite a splash. The problem is the
common Internet illiteracy. When we tell a newcomer that
he/she can login to a host somewhere in the USA, eyebrows
are raised: "You're kidding!" "No kidding", we reply
proudly :-)

The "Internet illiteracy" is one of important factors which
slows down the expansion of Internet in Russia. GlasNet
would be grateful to such authors as Ed Krol (or the
publishers like O'Reilly & Associates) if they gave us
permission to translate their "Internet Gospels" into
Russian and use them in our "missionary work", to convert
the "fax-gentiles" into Internet believers  ;-)

The other factor is the notorious Russian phone lines and
switching equipment (to be exhibited in archaelogical
museum). GlasNet (due to the help of ISF, and personally
Steve Goldstein) installed ZyXel in-dial modems. They
perform well, with the only drawback: they don't support
software MNP emulation. Many of our users are not wealthy
enough as to purchase modems with MNP built in  :-(

Apple users have problems too: as the MNP or V.42 error
correction is mandatory on the noisy Russian lines, those
who have non-MNP Apple modems built in their PowerBooks,
cannot connect, because, if I am not mistaken, no
communication program for Apple has been written, with
software emulation of the error correction protocol. The
only solution we can suggest is to buy an external modem
with MNP or V.42, but many of our users cannot afford it
yet. Hey, Apple guys/girls, why don't you help buyers of
your computers who are on budget, but want to use e-mail in
Russia?

But anyhow, GlasNet host in Moscow can be reached now
through local call (X.25) from Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg
(city where the last Russian Zar was killed, and where Mr.
Yeltsin started his carreer as local Communist Party boss),
Novosibirsk, Kazan, Izhevsk, Saint-Petersburg, Voronezh,
Odessa, Kiev. Again, politics clash with common sense: as a
high-ranked representative of Russian Ministry of
Communicartions said, no plans exist to build a common X.25
network on the territory of the FSU (Former Soviet Union).

The Russian Government seems to have no interest in
fostering the new democratic communications. The only thing
the independent Internet enthusiasts like GlasNet expect
from the bureaucrats is at least to act as Hypocrates oath
suggests: If you cannot help, don't harm. But now, only the
first part of the commandment is true: they cannot help
indeed, but do harm, raising the phone rates and taxes, and
nurturing inflation by their irresponsible economic policy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mathematicians outlook
by Flemming Topsoe* <[e-mail]>

The key exponent for the world mathematical community, the
International Mathematical Union (IMU), declared Year 2000 as the
World Mathematical Year at a meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The
initiative is supported and sponsored by UNESCO and other
organizations. In June 1993 appeared the first World Mathematical Year
2000 Newsletter.  An increase in the level of activities is expected
through 1994.

Three aims are singled out. The first is intrinsicly mathematical and
evident, trying, as did David Hilbert in 1900, to envision the
mathematical challenges of the century to come. The second and third
aims, with headlines 'mathematics, key for development' and 'the image
of mathematics' are broader and more open in scope, and the entire
community is invited to cooperate in achieving the aims.

It is in relation to these two last goals that networking is of
significance in a number of instances. IMU points itself to the
importance of access to scientific information and talks about the
systematic presence of mathematics in the 'Information Society'.  And
we hear about joint efforts of UNESCO and IMU's Commission for
Development and Exchange to establish regional mathematical
information and documentation centres in the developing countries
which will be partly based on the electronic media. The African
Mathematical Union points to a project to create a mathematics
communication network within Africa and between Africa and the rest of
the world. Many other initiatives are associted with the World
Mathematical Year 2000.

The editor of this column hopes to be able to report on significant
steps taken this year on the way to realize the above outlined goals.
It apears evident that proper structuring of information and
associated design and usage of computer networking services are key
ingredients to ensure success. Many parties are expected to
contribute. Among them, though not directly linked to the World
Mathematical Year 2000 initiative, is the European project Euromath
and the associated Euromath Network and Services (EmNet) which will be
followed with interest in 1994 in relation to a major software
release.

*University of Copenhagen

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Box with Topsoe article/

Mathematics Subject Tree

   The creation of the Mathematics Subject Tree should be seen as a
step in the direction outlined by Anders Gillner, to organize gopher
servers according to their subject. After preliminary considerations
during the Network Services Conference 1992 in Pisa, the Euromath
Center, Copenhagen (EmC) agreed to do the part of the work connected
with mathematics.
   The task to realize the Mathematics Subject Tree was given to me in
the spring 1993 when I was working at the Euromath Center. By looking
around in gopher-space to trace information of relevance to
mathematicians (here, the Veronica service was useful), a general
picture of the type and the organization of this information emerged.
The gopher-servers at the Institute of pure Mathematics, University of
Heidelberg and at the Center for Scientific Computing in Finland
turned out to be particularly useful in this respect.  The task was then
to design a structure which would allow the users to get rid of as
much redundancy as possible when searching for mathematically relevant
information using the subject tree.
    The result is a structure which at the first level of the
Mathematics Subject Tree contains the following items:

1. Archives for Mathematics
2. FAQ.sci.math
3. Journals
4. Mailing Lists
5. Math Gopher Servers in Europe
6. Math Gopher Servers in North America
7. Other Related Gopher Servers

   The criteria used for grouping the links was a "type of service"
criterion. To give an indication of the data which are easily
available through this structure, we mention the following:

 * list of add-on public domain software and documenation for
Mathematica, Maple, Reduce and Matlab packages
 * some mathematical software for various hardware platforms (PC, Mac,
Unix)
 * telnet connections to e-MATH and to eLib archives
 * preprints retrieved from some (too few!) mathematics research centres
 * access to mathematics related mailing lists and gopher servers
 * the TeX archive at Aston and the SGML archive in Oslo.

 After inclusion in the overall Subject Tree structure, the addition
was advertised on the eurogopher mailing list, and on the sci.math and
comp.infosystems.gopher newsgroups.
    The Mathematics Subject Tree can be accessed directly via gopher
connection to the address gopher.euromath.dk or via anonymous telnet
access (with restricted functionality) to the same address (username
gopher) or, of course, via the overall Subject Tree root server at
gopher.ebone.net.
 In order to maintain the Mathematics Subject tree, it is important
that users and providers of services cooperate. When you
have information about new mathematics data available or any comments,
suggestions, etc., please communicate this to [e-mail].

                                        Zbynek Linhart
                                        Charles University, Prague

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/filler/

CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTS UP VIA THE INTERNET
by Bendan Kehoe <[e-mail]>

        Dec. 7, 1993 - Employees of Cygnus Support in Mountain View,
California, discovered when they came to work today that they can
light the company Christmas tree without leaving their computer
consoles. Engineers at this four-year-old software startup last night
reprogrammed the company's internal computer network to enable users
of the network to issue commands to the decorations on the tree.

        A Cygnus engineer sits in front of his Unix XWindows
workstation and brings up a windowed, mouse-drive application called
"xmastree". Clicking the mouse over the correct gadget turns on
lights on the seven-and-one-half foot tall evergreen in the
lobby of Cygnus Headquarters.  Clicking the mouse over another gadget
turns other decorations, including bubble lights and musical bells, on
or off.

        Currently, only users on Cygnus's internal network can
actually control the Christmas tree, but anyone at any Internet site
anywhere can discover the current status of the Cygnus christmas tree
by issuing the command, "finger [e-mail]". The command will
report whether the lights, bubbles, and bells are on or off.

        Cygnus engineers, when not playing with their Christmas toys,
write and maintain software tools such as compilers, tools which enable
programmers to create new computer programs. Since many of Cygnus' customers
are engaged in embedded systems programming, Cygnus uses X-10 controllers
to enable and disable target single board computers during testing.
"Cygnoids" Jason Molenda and Brian Smith extended the principle to the
Christmas tree this year and added the spiffy graphical user interface
called "xmastree" for the amusement of their fellow employees.

        The cost of the decorations plus control hardware used on the
tree itself (exclusive of the computers on the Cygnus network) was
about $100.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/box/

finger [e-mail]
[cygnus.com]
Login name: xmastree                    In real life: Cygnus Support Xmas Tree
Directory: /cygint/s1/users/xmastree    Shell: /bin/false
Never logged in.
No unread mail
Plan:

The state of the Cygnus Support Christmas Tree is:
Lights:                 on
Tacky Bubble Lights:    on
Bells:                  on

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/box/

GET WELL SOON, BRENDAN!

On December 31, 1993, Brendan Kehoe, well-known as the
author of "Zen and the Art of the Internet," was critically
injured in an automobile accident. He sustained massive
head injuries but the prognosis as of January 3 was
"cautiously optimistic." Tragically, the severity of the
injuries makes it likely that some permanent disabilities
will be inevitable, but their nature and extent are not
certain. Doctors expect him to be semi-comatose for at
least two weeks.

He is not permitted to receive flowers or other tangibles,
but cards may be sent to:

Brendan Kehoe
c/o Alice Kehoe
Penn Tower Hotel
Civic Center Blvd and 34th St.
Philadelphia PA 19104
USA

Although Brendan will not be able to communicate for some
time, his brother and other friends plan to set up an email
capability to keep his friends informed of his condition.

ISOC wishes this valued Internaut as speedy and full a
recovery as possible.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gopher and Phonebook:
Resource Discovery Analysis During 1993
by Hank Nussbacher <[e-mail]>

An attempt has been made to analyze data produced by Gopher access
logs to determine usage patterns.  During a 50 day period from
September 18,1993 to November 7, 1993, the Gopher server at Bar-Ilan
University kept track of which systems in the Internet made access
to a menu, document or phonebook (QI/PH) search.

Monitoring period: September 18, 1993 - November 7, 1993 (50 days)
Number of countries accessing Gopher:                41
Number of distinct systems accessing our Gopher:   2101
Total accesses to Gopher:                         15460
   Total Israeli access to Gopher:                 4332 (28%)
      Total Bar-Ilan access to Gopher:                  2589 (59%)
      Total Israeli access (not Bar-Ilan):              1743 (40%)
   Total foreign access to Gopher:                11128 (71%)
Total phonebook searches:                          1122

Let us first analyze the numbers presented above.  In the short
space of 50 days, less than 2 months, a small Israeli university was
able to have its information disseminated to over 40 countries who
have access to the global Internet.  Not only that, these countries
had to have at least one Gopher client available within their
country in order to access the Gopher server at Bar-Ilan University
(vm.biu.ac.il).   This shows that Gopher clients have managed to
infiltrate the Internet and it won't be long before the computer
industry says "TCPIP is telnet/ftp/smtp/gopher".

This might have a tremendous impact on the publishing industry in
the future.  The ease at which people thousands of miles away can
access information might very well change the newspaper and magazine
industry over the next 5-10 years in ways we cannot yet fathom.

Let us analyze the numbers a bit further.  Bar-Ilan actively
publicizes the existence of its Gopher server.  Nonetheless, only
16.7% of all accesses to the Gopher server were from the local
campus.  All the rest came from off-campus.  Even within Israel,
access only amounted to 28%.  Of the seven Gopher servers running in
Israel, almost all of them have customized menus pointing to the
rest of the Israeli Gophers, including Bar-Ilan's.  This should have
theoretically boosted the national Israeli access to the Bar-Ilan
Gopher.  But another lesson we can learn is that the Internet world
is so so large, that a mere 1% of it can overwhelm anything you do
locally, no matter how well planned or advertised.

Lets look at a slightly finer breakdown of the data:

Access to Bar-Ilan main menu:                5806 (37%)
Access to ILAN network info menus:           2133 (13%)
Access to Bar-Ilan English information:      3156 (20%)
   Access to Research Authority menus:          1063
Access to Bar-Ilan Hebrew information:       1576 (10%)
Access to Israeli Gopher menu:                835 (5%)
Access to other information:                 1954 (12%)

Bar-Ilan's Gopher server has a main menu, like all other Gophers in
the world.  It then contains certain subsections which I have
divided as above.  Almost all accesses come through the main menu.
The deepest level on Bar-Ilan is 4, where one can find a document.
2nd level has 27 items, 3rd level has 97 items and 4th level has
48 items.

The submenu that had the most direct access was the "ILAN network
info menus" (a menu that has general information regarding the
Israel segment of the Internet), since it appears in certain
customized menus in other systems and therefore allow direct access,
bypassing the main menu.  If we compensate for this sort of direct
access, we can say that most Gopher sessions to Bar-Ilan were
between 2-3 accesses to menus or documents (2.3-2.7 to be exact).

Next lesson learned: If information is buried too deeply within
multileveled Gopher menus, users will never find it.  Veronica is
able to compensate somewhat for that but until all Gopher systems
place a Veronica entry on their main menu, we will not see "deep"
access to deeply buried submenus via menu tree transversal. A 4th
level document/menu or lower will most probably not be seen.

What was the upper-level domain breakdown?

EDU    6461
IL     4332
CA      806
COM     699
ORG     251
NL      208
UK      175
AU      119
NET     118
SE       92
GOV      91
FI       91
US       88
DE       82
CH       73
NO       63
DK       57
PL       51
NZ       39
HU       33
TW       30
JP       26
FR       26
BE       23
MIL      19
SG       18
VE       17
SK       15
IT       14
AT       12
MX       11
CZ       10
TR       10
ZA        9
CL        8
ES        8
BR        4
IS        3
EC        3
HK        3
HR        3
TH        2
MY        2
KW        2
KR        1
IE        1

Notice that the above total does not equal 15,460? That is because
456 systems did not respond to inverse domain checks so as to
determine their true domain name.  This means that 22% of the
systems in the Internet have not registered with Internic.Net their
inverse-domain name (in-addr.arpa).  I was not prepared to run down
these 456 systems to determine which country they belonged to (1251
accesses in total to the Bar-Ilan Gopher - 2.7 per system which once
again verifies the mistake of creating too much depth to Gopher
menus).  This fact that a very large percentage of systems have
either forgotten to or were never informed to register in-addr.arpa
will make network analysis and resource usage patterns harder to
determine in the future.

Which 2nd level domains were the main ones accessing our Gopher?

AC.IL               4054
 BIU.AC.IL                2589
 HUJI.AC.IL                718
 TAU.AC.IL                 310
 BGU.AC.IL                 215
 TECHNION.AC.IL            115
 WEIZMANN.AC.IL            107
UMN.EDU              287
CO.IL                259
UMD.EDU              250
DELPHI.COM           249
COLUMBIA.EDU         209
CARLETON.CA          205
WLU.EDU              201
UMICH.EDU            167
AC.UK                164
UPENN.EDU            145
HARVARD.EDU          123
MSU.EDU              116
RUTGERS.EDU          112
OHIO-STATE.EDU       109
WISC.EDU             108
CNIDR.ORG            100
UCHICAGO.EDU          96
FSU.EDU               90
UMBC.EDU              86
EDU.AU                81
PRINCETON.EDU         76
PACBELL.COM           75
CORNELL.EDU           71
NYU.EDU               69
CHALMERS.SE           68
BU.EDU                65
WASHINGTON.EDU        64
BERKELEY.EDU          64
UIUC.EDU              63
PSU.EDU               63
CUNY.EDU              62
UNR.EDU               56
UVA.NL                55
UBC.CA                55
VIRGINIA.EDU          54
JHU.EDU               53
NETCOM.COM            53
NODAK.EDU             53
DIGEX.NET             52
UDEL.EDU              52
SFU.CA                51
SYR.EDU               51
YALE.EDU              51
COLORADO.EDU          50
EDU.PL                47
GMU.EDU               46
YU.EDU                46
CO.US                 46

Notice the first entry which includes six Israeli institutes of
higher education?  Even though we are able to outnumber any single
system in the Internet, we still comprise only 28% of all accesses
to our Gopher system.

Of the over 2,100 systems that accessed our Gopher in the space of
50 days (7.3 accesses per system), the top systems were:

VM.BIU.AC.IL                                 2005
VMS.HUJI.AC.IL                                602
HAFNHAF.MICRO.UMN.EDU                         201
LIBERTY.UC.WLU.EDU                            201
DELPHI.COM                                    199
FREENET.CARLETON.CA                           185
CCSG.TAU.AC.IL                                181
SHIKMA.CC.BIU.AC.IL                           180
INFO.UMD.EDU                                  172
JERUSALEM1.DATASRV.CO.IL                      130
ASHUR.CC.BIU.AC.IL                            124
RODENT.UIS.ITD.UMICH.EDU                      118
SALAAM.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU                        101
BURROW.CL.MSU.EDU                             100
CONCORD.CNIDR.ORG                             100
ALON.CC.BIU.AC.IL                              88
WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL                        76
IPAI.KN.PACBELL.COM                            75
MABUHAY.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU                        69
GDUNIX.GD.CHALMERS.SE                          65
ACTCOM.CO.IL                                   59
UMBC8.UMBC.EDU                                 58
TAMAR.CC.BIU.AC.IL                             57
MAIL.SAS.UPENN.EDU                             57
BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL                              56
ARISTO.TAU.AC.IL                               56
HAR1.HUJI.AC.IL                                55
CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU                                53
ACCESS.DIGEX.NET                               52
BOS3A.DELPHI.COM                               50

Useless trivia: The longest domain name found was a tie of 40
characters between:

SILLIMAN-COLLEGE-KSTAR-NODE.NET.YALE.EDU
N2-11-222-OCS-PUBLIC-1.PUBLIC.DREXEL.EDU

Now lets analyze the phonebook data a bit more:

Total phonebook access:      1122
Distinct system access:       151
Total "fields" requests       334
Total "quit" requests         350
Total "query" requests        411
Total "siteinfo" requests       9
Other                          18

Of the 411 query/ph requests (which is the actual data lookup;
"fields" merely returns which search fields are available), only 12
were actual Hebrew lookup searches, and all the rest were in
English.  Ignoring searches from outside Israel, this still
represents only 5.8% of the total Israeli searches conducted.
Conclusion: the de-facto language on the Internet is English.

Of the 1122 searches, 207 were from Israel (18%) which is an even
smaller percentage than Gopher access (28%).  Interestingly, within
Bar-Ilan the percentages stayed more or less the same.  Gopher
access for Bar-Ilan was 16.7% of the total and for Phonebook it was
16.1% of the total.  What can we learn from this?

My conclusion is that people within a small country (population
5 million) all know each other pretty well and therefore know the email
address of their colleagues.  People abroad are the ones therefore
that benefit the most from a local Phonebook (whois, X.500 or whatever
one is using) database.  Bottom line: setting up an online phonebook
provides marginal benefit to your local users but helps very remote
users find your users.

Another interesting observation is that 97.6% of all phonebook
transactions are either "query", "fields", or "quit".  Those sites
that intend to set up some sort of phonebook lookup service (with
only central updates; no user update) should look into creating a
small subset of the CCSO qi server as was done on Bar-Ilan
University's VM/CMS system.

Last observation: only 151 distinct Internet systems accessed the qi
server at Bar-Ilan University during the same period that 2101
distinct systems accessed the Gopher server.  My conclusion: even
though there is a pointer from the root menu of Bar-Ilan's Gopher
(accessed 5806 times) directly to qi/ph, users are more interested
in finding "information" than finding "people".

*Bar-Ilan University

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel - Present & Future
by Hank Nussbacher <[e-mail]>

During 1993, Israel's segment of the Internet, ILAN, was open to any
organization that fell into the category of "R&D, educational
or cultural".  By the beginning of December 1993, Israel had
the following registered and operational upper level domains:

ac.il - 11
co.il - 50
org.il - 2
k12.il - 1
gov.il - 5

Even though in "domain" terms the ac.il (higher education) domain
is only 16%, it still comprises 86% of our monthly data traffic.
This percentage is expected to decrease as more organizations
connect to the network.  In order to better assist smaller organizations
to connect to the network via dial-up and SLIP/PPP, the government
has authorized and licensed four commercial service providers to
provide Internet connectivity via the ILAN backbone.  There are
already 140 organizations that have connected up with one of these
Internet service providers.

We currently are moving 120 gigabytes per month within Israel and
are sending/receiving close to 55 gigabytes to abroad. ILAN is
currently in the process of accepting a 256kb satellite line as an
upgrade to our existing 128kb line to the USA.  This will give
Israel a total of 320kb bandwidth to abroad, when including our
64kb fiber optic line to Europe.

On a national scale, ILAN has outgrown its 128kb leased line backbone
and has signed an agreement with the national PTT to be the first
customer to use its MAN service.  The seven university bankbone will
run on 10Mb/sec Ethernet speeds via the MAN service (the only service
offered by our PTT) which will initially cover the cities of Tel-Aviv,
Jerusalem and Haifa.

This change in our backbone will allow us to begin exploring new
technologies that were previously unattainable at slower speeds.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Policy-realted happenings in 1993: International Cooperation at its Best
Steven N. Goldstein*  <[e-mail]>

By far, the most noteworthy development in the Internet was the integration
of the Russian Federation and Ukraine into the Global Internet at the IP level,
with the promise that China, too, would join in 1994.  By mid-year, Relcom
was connected northward through the Nordic countries, Demos connected to UUNET,
and the International Science Foundation had sponsored a link between RELARN
(the academic and research networking association of Russia) and Washington,
open to everybody.  The German Electron Synchrotron Laboratory (DESY) had
connected to the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow,
and together with the German Research Networking Association (DFN) was making
plans for a high-bandwidth (256 kbps) link via Moscow State University.  NASA
made extensive arrangements with the Russian Space Research Network to link
the Goddard Space Flight Center (and the NASA Science Internet) with
the Institute for Space Research (IKI) in Moscow, also at 256 kbps.  The
U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network planned, at least initially
to share the NASA link, and to work collaboratively with NASA to help to
connect institutes in St. Petersburg as well. At year's end, the expanded
German link is almost installed, and NASA awaits an early-1994 start-of-
service.  Plans were also underway for several groups to help fund a 64 kbps
satellite link from Novosibirsk to Helsinki, and the International Science
Foundation also committed to fund another satellite link from Moscow to
Stockholm (64 kbps, with growth potential to 128 kbps).  In December, NSFNET
was able to overcome earlier policy restrictions and exchange traffic with
the countries of the former Soviet Union.  This is a start; Russia is a huge
country, and the Internet reaches only a small, albeit scientifically
significant, portion of the country.  The challenge will be to get various
domestic and international parties to cooperate in expanding the national
infrastructure atop a telecommunications base that itself needs modernizing.

By mid-year, Ukraine connected at 9.6 kbps from Lvov, in the western part of
the country, to Warsaw.  (Warsaw also offered connectivity to Belarus.)
Commercial IP connections were also made to Moscow.  The International
Science Foundation also readied an Internet demonstration project to be
centered in Kiev with the possibility of connecting to nodes elsewhere in
the country, perhaps with additional partners-in-grants.

More than 20 Internauts from the countries of the former Soviet Union
attended the INET '93 Workshop at Stanford University, and several more
joined them at the main INET meeting in San Francisco the next week.
Many stayed on for INTEROP, for a three-week grand tour of Internet bounties.

In China, the DECNET link between the Institute for High Energy Physics and
the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) was converted from DECnet to dual
protocol (IP and DECnet).
Also a metropolitan area network connecting the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
the National Computer and Networking Center of China, and Tsinghua University
prepared for a 64 kbps Internet connection to a U.S. node in California.
Chinese Internauts were also present for the three-week San Francisco Internet
gala, and Chinese network leaders visited many U.S. networking sites, including
the Washington, D.C. Global Internet eXchange (GIX).

In quite separate, but nevertheless spectacular chain of events, Latin
American networks continued to meet in workshops (Lima, Peru; San Jose,
Costa Rica, Caracas, Venezuela), and by the end of 1993, and in early
1994, we look for Internet connections from Uruguay (to Washington GIX),
Peru, Panama, and Honduras (to the International Connections Management for
NSFNET [ICM] node in Homestead, Florida), Colombia (Homestead or
Washington) and, soon, Bolivia.  These add to the relatively recent links
from Ecuador and Costa Rica, as well as the established links from Mexico,
Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. The Caribbean Academic Network,
CUNet, continued to grow, and Jamaica anticipates an early-1994 terrestrial
connection to Homestead, via Miami.  While the main credit must be given to
the local network organizers, many of whom donated time and money to get their
networks established and connected, the efforts of international organizations
like the Organization of American States (Hemispheric Inter-University
Science and Technology Network project, RedHUCyT) and the United Nations
Development Program provided both crucial financial support.
Several years ago, few observers would have predicted the degree of mutual
cooperation that has emerged among the Latin American and Caribbean networking
groups and their international sponsors.

*Program Director, Interagency & International Networking Coordination
Div. of Networking and Communications Research & Infrastructure
National Science Foundation
Arlington, VA  22230                                                  ||

////////////////////////////
Richard: corrections:

I jotted it off from memory, and a draft I just reviewed of a forthcoming
presentation from Frank Kuo snd Farooq reminded me of my errors as regards
China:

"...In Beijing, we saw a very impressive metropolitan networking project
called NCFC (National Computing and Networking Facility of China). NCFC is a
demonstration network linking the two major universities, Tsinghua
and Peking Universities to a number of research institutes of the Chinese
Academy of Science (CAS).  The NCFC network is a
new shining star in Chinese academic networking.  Funded by the PRC State
Planning Commission and the World Bank (over $10 million), NCFC has built
the best metropolitan area network (MAN) in China, and it is likely to
become China's major connecting point to the global Internet.  NCFC
consists of three campus LANs: Tsinghua University Network (TUNET), Peking
University Network (PUNET) and Chinese Academy of Science Network ( CASNET). "

My paragraph should therefore be corrected:

"..In China, the DECNET link between the Institute for High Energy Physics and
the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) was converted from DECnet to dual
                                          \_to be
protocol (IP and DECnet).

A new metropolitan networking project
called NCFC (National Computing and Networking Facility of China) has
been taking shape.  NCFC is a demonstration network linking the two major
universities, Tsinghua and Peking Universities to a number of research
institutes of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS).  NCFC made preparations

for a 64 kbps Internet connection to a U.S. node in California.
Chinese Internauts were also present for the three-week San Francisco Internet
gala, and Chinese network leade visited many U.S. networking sites, including
the Washington, D.C. Global Internet eXchange (GIX)."
//////////////////////
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/box/

Q: What do you get if you cross a Connection
Machine with a neural network?

A: A Massively Paranoid Processor

--courtest of Vint Cerf

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1993 in Internet Library Science
by Billy Barron <[e-mail]>

1993 was an interesting year for library science on the Internet where
a lot of long time trends were starting to reach maturity.  Several new
projects appeared also.

Implementations of the Z39.50 protocol have started to be used
in production on the Internet.  Vendors, such as DRA and NOTIS,
have started selling Z39.50 implementations to their customers.
A couple of public domain clients have also hit the street, but
neither are of production quality.

My Internet library guide finally reached the point I hoped for
several years now.  Instead of generating it from a word processing,
the guide is now generated by Marie-Christine Mahe of Yale University.
She has a program which turns links in Gopherspace into the document.
Similar projects can and should be done to make more Internet resource
lists with minimal manual labor.

The electronic journal market went through the roof this year.  By
this time, I would not be surprised to find a thousand different
electronic periodicals being published.  The premier collection of
them on the Internet is the CICNet Electronic Journal Project.  Other
smaller and specialized collections also exist.  Electronic journals
are becoming increasingly important to libraries as the price of paper
journals continue to increase.

Though this may have started in 1992, it was even more common in 1993.
Libraries, such as the Library of Congress, have started making images
and text of special collections available over the Internet.  It provides
a unique opportunity for Internet users to see collections they otherwise
would never have had the chance to see.

The University of Michigan started offering a course in Internet resource
discovery in their library science program.  As a part of the course,
the students are required to generate an Internet resource guide.  The
guides are then collected and placed in Gopher in an area known as the
Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Gophers.

Another trend is that quite a few public libraries became attached to
the Internet during the year.  Some of them even made their catalogs
available over the Internet.

Some libraries have started doing electronic reserves over the
Internet during 1993.  More sites will find this useful and
it will be increasingly common.

It is always hard to predict the future on the Internet.  In 1994, I know
that all of the above will continue happening.  I predict that
two different Internet Encyclopedia projects will occur.  One will
be thinking technology will solve all the problems.  The other will
be be more traditional and realistic in its goals and will use the
technology where appropiate.

An Internet Museum will be created in 1994 by someone.  It has already
been discussed on the PACS-L mailing list.  Currently, I'm personally
doing a bit of Internet archaelogy work by looking for the oldest
Internet library guides I can find.  I plan on including these guides
in the museum.  On a related note, if you have any Internet library lists
from 1990 or before (electronic or paper), please let me know.

Finally, I hope 1994 is the year where more people start worrying about
documents vanishing into the vapor without a trace.  I have definitely
learned my lesson about this in my hunt for old library guides.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AARNet Engineering Working Group (AEWG)
by David Woodgate <[e-mail]>

On 30 Nov 30 1993, at the Australian Networkshop Conference at the World
Conference Centre in Melbourne, Victoria, the AARNet Engineering
Working Group was announced. The Technical Manager of AARNet, Geoff
Huston, stated that the AEWG would provide technical advice to AARNet on
the provision of networking technologies and user services to the
networking community of Australia.

The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) was created in 1989
as a joint venture between the Australian Universities and the
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in
order to provide a national infrastructure of networking services to
Australia's research community. It is intended that the AEWG will help
AARNet maintain and enhance the high quality of this infrastructure.

The AARNet Engineering Working Group will investigate particular issues
that are relevant to maintaining successful networking within the
Australian environment, and will offer recommendations to AARNet on
directions in networking technologies and services within Australia. The
AEWG is made of working groups that each focus on a particular issue or
area. Working groups are open to all interested individuals.

Where the objectives of AEWG working groups coincide with those of working
groups from international bodies ( such as the IETF ), it is intended that
the members of the AEWG working groups will contribute to the
international effort towards solving those issues and generally improving
the quality of the Internet.

Any enquiries about the AARNet Engineering Working Group can be sent to
David Woodgate ( [e-mail] ).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What's news at Galapagos--JPL to install GPS station
by Steve Goldstein  <[e-mail]>

We have some exciting news at the Station that involves the
Internet connection which the Banco del Pacifico and Ecuanet
provided to us.

Yesterday and today we met with Steve DiNardo, of the Jet Propulsion
Labratory (JPL is a major sub-contractor to NASA), and with Capt.
Rodolfo Salazar, of the Instituto Geografico Militar technical
staff.

JPL does research and development on the GPS (Global Positioning
System).  As you know, GPS is a sytem of satellites which provides
navigational and other geographic location information which can be
picked up by small hand- held receivers.  These receivers can
indicate your position on earth with an accuracy of about 100 meters.

JPL is setting up a series of base stations scattered around the
world which gather information from the satellites.  JPL processes
the information, and 24 hours later produces data correction tables
that can be used to adjust previous readings so that they are
accurate to less than a centimeter.  There are many potential
research and conservation uses for these data.

There is currently no base station in the Galapagos area, and this
reduces the accuracy of the system.  JPL is very interested in
eliminating this "blind spot" by setting up a base station here at
Charles Darwin Research Station.

The Instituto Geografico Militar is very interested in this project
since the information gathered can be used to produce *very* accurate
maps.   Also the information can be used to detect movements in the
earth's crust.  We could discover for example, precisely which
direction and rate Galapagos is moving with respect to the continent.

JPL is providing funds for the station to build a small, very stable
platform on top of the Thomas Fischer Science Building, to mount the
down-link antenna for the base station.  The JPL will also provide
air conditioning for the room in the Fischer building which will
house the computer, and a UPS system that can allow the equipment to
operate all night.  Also, they will provide a 486 computer to act as
a mail router, and will run a thin Ethernet from the Fisher building,
through the library and adminstration buildings, to the computer lab.
This gives the station the Ethernet backbone it has needed for so
long!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard:  Note from Vint:

how about putting masthead page on one side, isoc application
form on the other?

can we put in an ad for INET94? check with Bernie or Geoff Manning
to see if they have some nice graphics yet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Building on the Internet Spirit - a Sustainable Human Development Perspective
Lawrence Yeung <[e-mail]>

The United Nations Development Programme first became an Internet node in late 1991. At that
time, the primary use was for electronic mail and file transfers between UNDP LAN users and
the external Internet communities. As we matured in the use of Internet, we began setting up
the 'gopher' server in mid 1992 for public access. Since then, the amount of daily connections
from the different Internet sites all over the world has grown from around 50 to over 900 a day.
The rate of growth is around 20% a month for connections to our main menu, whereas the file
retrievals have grown substantially more given the increasing amount of files on our server.
Today, people are downloading 4300 files from our server daily.

. What is on our Gopher ?

The UN Department for Public Information has provided a feed of the UN Press Releases and
Resolutions to our server. This material has been received with much excitement by the Internet
community, as it is of value for information, educational and research activities. We have
ventured into posting UNDP documents on activities in Eastern Europe, on the Sustainable
Development Network initiative, on important speeches and developments in general. As a step
to making UNDP personnel more easily accessible, our electronic mail addresses and telephones
are also listed.

. What are the user responses ?

Despite the short exposure since such information is made available on our host, the UNDP
Division of Public Affairs has received compliments from the Congressional Research Service
of the U.S. Library of Congress, who are downloading the Administrator's speeches, the UNDP
Updates, and other materials. These items are being filed on their system as 'major policy
statements' for use by US Congressional and Senatorial offices as 'an important research tool
for their work'. A leading business magazine in the Arab World, Alam Attijarat, has also picked
up information from our server on Palestinian issues.

The UNDP host has also become a vehicle of inter-agency cooperation. The Coordinating Unit
of the global Population Information Network (POPIN), within the Population Division with
funding from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has a section within the UNDP 'gopher'
server, designed to improve the flow of population information, both among population experts
and to the larger world audience.

With these successes, other UN and US organizations have contacted us requesting information,
demonstrations and seeking assistance in performing the same electronic publication. Many
Missions to the UN and NGOs have registered on our host as users, and through it, they
regularly correspond and interchange development information with their partners. While we are
delighted with the inroad we have made with this service, we welcome your comments on the
usefulness of our gopher host, and any suggestions on improvements.

. What is next ?

The UNDP vision is sustainable human development. That is, development should not only
generate growth but also distribute it equitably; not only raise productivity but also expand
employment; not only build infrastructure but also sustainable management systems; not only
transfer external knowledge but also value and build on traditional wisdom; not only teach skills
but also equip people to realize their full potential; not only provide a safety net but also
empower people to participate in the decisions that affect their lives; not only exploit natural
resources but also regenerate them; not only provide for today's needs but also those of future
generations. In this vision, the focus is moving towards increasing investment in specialists in
this development area, and the sharing of information through networks.

With timely access to information, the goal is to position UNDP Field Offices as consultants to
governments and national institutions in environmental management, economic development
trends, macro economic policies and national investment plans. Internet, a network of networks
with such a diversity of audiences, will undeniably be the communications channel for UNDP.
About 20 UNDP Field Offices presently have direct access to Internet but it is envisioned in the
next two to three years that all the 132 Field Offices will be Internet nodes or have direct access
to it. A challenging task lies ahead !

Chief, Communications and Computer Services
UNDP, New York   N.Y.  10017  U.S.A.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1993 viewed from CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
by Brian Carpenter [e-mail]

It seems that every year is an exciting year for networking,
and 1993 was no exception. With the Large Electron Positron
collider (LEP) working better than ever, the amount of CERN
experimental data to be processed continued to increase.
We hit new traffic records in our internal backbone
network (over 1500 GBytes in November) as well as
in our off-site traffic (over 350 GBytes in November,
of which some 50 GBytes was CLNP supporting DECnet/OSI).
In addition, IP transit traffic exceeded 500 GBytes in November.

One technical high spot of the year was CERN's participation,
with three other user sites, in the first international 34 Mbps
ATM application pilot, BETEL (Broadband Exchange over Trans-European
Links). The carriers for this project, funded by the European
Union, were France Telecom and Swiss Telecom PTT. CERN
and the IN2P3 computer centre in Lyons, France,
demonstrated remote physics data analysis over BETEL's IP service.
Data transfer rates up to 100 GBytes/day have been observed.

In another successful technology pilot, CERN and SEFT (the particle physics
institute in Helsinki, Finland) demonstrated overnight bulk data transfer
using an 8 Mbps IP link via the European Space Agency's OLYMPUS satellite.
Unfortunately this pilot was brutally terminated by a satellite
malfunction.

CERN's World Wide Web, coupled with the popular Mosaic interface from
NCSA, continued to grow dramatically in both the academic and commercial
parts of the Internet. A reasonable estimate is that Web traffic grew by more
than 300,000% in 1993. The web is its own best advertisement, so if
neither Xmosaic nor Www is installed on your favourite computer, ask for
them!

Like most Internet sites in Europe, CERN has suffered in the second
half of the year from uncertainties about the European Internet
infrastructure to be expected in 1994. As late as December, CERN
concluded an agreement with DANTE, the new non-profit operator of the
Europanet IP service. CERN also expects to remain connected to the
EBONE IP infrastructure at the beginning of 1994, and we will of
course continue to operate leased line connections to a number of
particle physics research institutes around the world.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Sincoskie Honored

mentioning that one of the IAB members,
W. David Sincoskie, Bellcore, has been
honored by elevation to IEEE Fellow for
his contributions and innovations in
fast packet switching, leading to the
development of an international broadband
information infrastructure.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<[e-mail]>
Subject: Errata of my article on ISOC newsletter Vol.2 No.3

I mentioned RFC1482 for ISO-2022-JP; the correct RFC is RFC1468.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Internet Index
 Compiled by Win Treese ([e-mail])

        Annual rate of growth for Gopher traffic: 997%

      Annual rate of growth for World-Wide Web traffic: 341,634%

Average time between new networks connecting to the Internet: 10 minutes

Number of newspaper and magazine articles about the Internet during the
         first nine months of 1993: over 2300

     Number of on-line coffeehouses in San Francisco: 18

 Cost for four minutes of Internet time at those coffeehouses: $0.25

Date of first known Internet mail message sent by a head of state: 2 March 1993
    (Sent by Bill Clinton, President of the United States)

Date on which first Stephen King short story published via the Internet before
           print publication: 19 Sept 1993

      Number of mail messages carried by IBM's Internet gateways
           in January, 1993: about 340,000

    Number of mail messages carried by Digital's Internet gateways
             in June, 1993: over 700,000

       Advertised network numbers in July, 1993: 13,293
       Advertised network numbers in July, 1992:  5,739

     Date after which more than half the registered networks were
               commercial: August, 1991

      Number of Internet hosts in Norway, per 1000 population: 5
  Number of Internet hosts in United States, per 1000 population: 4
      Number of Internet hosts in July, 1993: 1,776,000

Round-trip time from Digital CRL to mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov in McMurdo, Antartica:
               640 milliseconds
              Number of hops: 18

Number of USENET articles posted on a typical day in February, 1993: 350,000
            Number of megabytes posted: 44
           Number of users posting: 80,000
         Number of sites represented: 25,000

    Number of Silicon Valley real estate agencies advertising with
              Internet mail addresses: 1

    Terabytes carried by the NSFnet backbone in February, 1993: 5

   Number of countries reachable by electronic mail: 137 (approx.)
 Number of countries not reachable by electronic mail: 99 (approx.)
           Number of countries on the Internet: 60

    Amount of time it takes for Supreme Court decisions to become
        available on the Internet: less than one day.

 Date of first National Public Radio program broadcast simultaneously
             on the Internet: 21 May 1993

Percent of Boardwatch Top 100 BBS systems with Internet Connectivity: 21

      Number of people on the Internet who know you're a dog: 0

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GNET: an Archive and Electronic Journal
Toward a Truly Global Network
Larry Press <[e-mail]>

Computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet
they are not truly global -- they are concentrated in affluent
parts of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.

GNET is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort
to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts
of developed nations.  (Net access is better in many "third
world" schools than in South-Central Los Angeles).  GNET consists
of two parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion.

Archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the
directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1).  To
conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each
document, as well as the full document.  (Those without ftp
access can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval).

In addition to the archive, there is a moderated GNET discussion
list.  The list is limited to discussion of the documents in the
archive.  It is hoped that document authors will follow this
discussion, and update their documents accordingly.  If this
happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal.  Monthly
mailings will list new papers added to the archive.

We wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to
visionary.  Suitable topics include, but are not restricted to:

   descriptions of networks and projects
   host and user hardware and software
   connection options and protocols
   current and proposed applications
   education using the global net
   user and system administrator training
   social, political or spriritual impact
   economic and environmental impact
   politics and funding
   free speech, security and privacy
   directories of people and resources

To submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated
discussion list, use the address [e-mail].

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evolution of a Homegrown Desire to Network: The Ugandan Experience
by Charles Musisi  <[e-mail]>

     The introduction of electronic mail to Uganda began in May
1992 as a spinoff from the International Development Research
Centre's (IDRC) ESANET project for universities in East and
Southern Africa.  The original idea was to experiment with
computer-based communication in the East and Southern African
region by setting up nodes at leading universities in each of the
participating countries:  Nairobi University, Kenya; the
University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Makerere University -
Kampala (MUKLA), Uganda; the University of Zambia; and the
University of Zimbabwe.

     In Uganda, the ESANET project's mandate was promptly extended
to include nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and health-related
organizations through NGOnet-Africa and HealthNet, two other
IDRC-funded projects.  Since the introduction of this service to
the wider community, many NGOs, small businesses, government
agencies, UN bodies, and other international relief, health, and
development agencies have demonstrated serious interest in
communicating via electronic mail.


Achievements and Constraints

     Though the ESANET project focus was modest - to experiment
with various computer-based communication modalities and to work
out technical bugs associated with poor telephone lines, erratic
management of the telephone long distance dialing system, and
hardware and software problems - it has made a lasting
contribution by introducing electronic mail communication to
researchers and other users at the Makerere University campus.

     From its humble early days with just a handful of users, the
node at MUKLA has evolved to a base of over 100 installed sites
comprising over 400 users. Of these, about forty sites call into
the node daily, so with an average of three users per site, we
estimate that about 160 of our users communicate by e-mail every
day.  Most of the sites are around Kampala, but there are also a
few in outlying areas such as Entebbe (15 sites), Jinja (two
sites), Mbale (three sites), Mbarara (two sites), and Kabale (two
sites).

     As of December 1993, solutions to most of the technical
challenges have been worked out.  MUKLA's FidoNet technology-based
electronic mail system has reached a level of reliability
surpassing that of fax machines.  A cost analysis completed at the
conclusion of the ESANET project clearly showed the
appropriateness of Fidonet as an entry level technology and its
suitability to Africa's difficult telephone infrastructure.
During the ESANET experiments our FidoNet electronic mail system
demonstrated a high degree of sustainability.  It required only a
modest initial investment and proved capable of recovering
operational costs from the local user community.

     The system operator at MUKLA provides the user community with
ongoing technical support services and user training.  Users of
the MUKLA system can send and receive internet messages and access
internationally distributed electronic conferences on a wide range
of topics and from a variety of sources.  These include
research-oriented conferences on green house gases whose
distribution to researchers in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Senegal,
the Gambia, Morocco, and Kenya is being supported through the
United Nations Environment Programme's Global Environment Facility
Project.  The MUKLA sysop has also setup and trained operators of
e-mail systems at four Nairobi-based groups: FEMNET, Climate
Network Africa, EcoNews Africa, and the Institute of Primate
Research.

     Interest in using electronic mail is strong throughout the
region, but technical capacity to meet this demand is severely
constrained by the scarcity of funding to retain experienced
personnel.  To permit continued expansion of networking in the
region, there is urgent need for a corps of regionally based
experts who can advise on hardware and software problems as well
as do the installations and train new users.


Promotion and Expansion

     Although the MUKLA system was setup primarily to serve the
Ugandan research community, we have collaborated with related
initiatives to promote broader usage of network services.  Among
these are the UNESCO-supported Regional Informatics Network for
Africa Project (RINAF); the INET '93 Developing Countries
Workshop; the ComNet Commonwealth project, a network intended to
link key government decision makers; and the forthcoming IDRC-
supported Capacity and Infrastructure Building for Electronic
Communication in Africa (CIBECA) project.

     A strategy for expanding electronic networking through 1994
and beyond is in place.  This incorporates the CIBECA regional
initiative as well as MUKLA's own homegrown expansion plan aimed
at achieving full Internet connectivity for Uganda by the end of
1995 through a gradual step-by-step approach.

     Currently each of our upcountry installations must make long
distance calls to the MUKLA node at Kampala.  To improve
efficiency and reduce costs, we need to establish satellite nodes
in some of these places.  An Entebbe node is planned under the
expansion programme to service the enthusiastic user community
there.  Entebbe is the seat of a number of Ugandan government
ministries, UN agencies, international organizations, and NGOs.

     Another node is planned for Kabale in the Southwestern part
of Uganda. Kabale is well-placed to serve as an point of entry for
spreading electronic networking throughout the Kagera River Basin,
an area comprising the landlocked countries of Rwanda and Burundi,
and some parts of Western Tanzania and Eastern Zaire.  The
rationale for this is a recently installed modern microwave-based
telephone infrastructure that now connects the subregion.

     Our expansion strategy also seeks to improve on the
institutional capacity of MUKLA and its future satellite nodes to
effectively enhance communication both nationally and
internationally by: (1) developing appropriate educational
materials and training formats for end users; (2) providing
technical assistance and training for system operators; and (3)
facilitating communication via e-mail amongst users within the
country and the region at large.

     We will continue to give a high priority to increasing the
use of electronic mail for communications within Uganda,
especially targeting further expansion among research
institutions, NGOs, small businesses, cooperatives, government
departments, and parastatal bodies.  Organizations and individuals
involved in health, relief, environment, and other
development-related work will remain an important group for us.
From a strong self-sustaining local base, we look forward to
improving communication opportunities both nationally and
regionally, and to integrating our growing Ugandan user community
ever more closely with the global Internet.

*Institute of Computer Science, Makerere University

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The IETF Secretariat
by Steve Coya* <[e-mail]>

The second part is the list of protocol actions and RFCs since my last
report.

This has been quite a year for the IETF. We began the year with IPNG
candidate demonstrations in the terminal room at Columbus, status updates
in Amsterdam, and the consolidation of SIP and PIP into a single effort by
the November meeting.

New members of the IESG and IAB, chosen for the first time by a selection
committee, took office during the March meeting.

The IESG established a special ad-hoc Area for all the IPNG related
working groups, and by November the IPNG Directorate had been announced,
along with a six month plan of action.

We held the first IETF meeting outside of North America, and future non-
North American meetings are being planned as I write this message.

Multi-casting is no longer a "special" component but an integral part of
the meetings themselves. At the first IETF meeting of the year, there were
just under 350 avt recipients. This grew to just over 400 receiving host
at the Amsterdam meeting. For the final meeting in Houston, the number of
receiving sites grew to more than 600 in over 15 countries.

The InterNIC launched services during the week of the first IETF meeting
in 1993, and a presentation was given to the IETF by representatives from
the three organizations comprising the InterNIC. Part of the presentation
included remote participants who spoke to the IETF via the audio-video
link.

And the world has discovered the Internet. A significant number of books
have appeared in bookstores, many articles are printed in the press, a
cartoon appeared in the New Yorker Magazine (see the Amsterdam
proceedings), and even Doonesbury has gotten into the act. More and more
"mainstream" publications are carrying information on the Internet. More
and more services are being offered and discussed.

There are a number of new products (user interfaces) that are available to
all Interneters; new tools and features are anticipated all the time, and
are being worked on today. Capabilities we are only now beginning to
conceptualize will probably be designed, implemented, distributed, and re-
implemented (good ol' Version 2, eh?) by this time next year. Traditional
concepts are being challenged and rethought as the general public moves
into cyberspace.

Consider electronic publication... this is/will be much more than merely
having the articles and pictures, along with the cover and title pages,
available on-line for electronic distribution or browsing. The entire
concept of books will be re-examined as one considers the capabilities
available today (and conceptualize what COULD be available tomorrow)...
additional references, use of new technologies such as hypertext,
knowbots, links to reference material and even more... two way
communications! Just imagine an application where a ``reader'' can ask the
author to elaborate on a concept, or clarify with additional examples, or
even to submit additional queries.

"May you live through interesting times" is an ancient Chinese curse.
However, I am looking forward to more interesting times as new
capabilities are provided and we improve our ability to perceive what
cyberspace has to offer.

*Executive Director

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved or
recommended the following 27 actions between 1 October 1993 and
31 December 1993:

   o  Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol as a Proposed Standard
   o  Guidelines for Running OSPF Over Frame Relay Networks be
      published as an Informational RFC.
   o  Multiprotocol Interconnect on X.25 and ISDN in the Packet
      Mode is now a Draft Standard.
   o  Classical IP and ARP over ATM is a Proposed Standard.
   o  Extensions to the Generic-Interface MIB is reclassified as
      Historic.
   o  MOSPF: Analysis and Experience be published as an
      Informational RFC.
   o  OSPF Version 2 is now a Draft Standard.
   o  Multicast Extensions to OSPF is a Proposed Standard.
   o  Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments is an Experimental
      Protocol.
   o  The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is now a Draft Standard.
   o  PPP in HDLC Framing is now a Draft Standard.
   o  Common DNS Data File Configuration Error be published as an
      Informational RFC.
   o  Common DNS Implementation Errors and Suggested Fixes. be
      published as an Informational RFC.
   o  FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (FOOBAR) is an
      Experimental Protocol.
   o  Requirements for an Internet Standard Point-to-Point Protocol
      be published as an Informational RFC.
   o  FYI on Questions and Answers: Answers to Commonly Asked
      "Primary and Secondary School Internet User" Questions be
      published as an Informational RFC.
   o  Representing IP Information in the X.500 Directory is an
      Experimental Protocol.
   o  DSA Metrics be published as an Informational RFC.
   o  Telnet Environment Option is a Proposed Standard.
   o  DECnet Phase IV MIB Extensions is now a Draft Standard.
   o  Telnet Environment Option Interoperability Issues be
      published as an Informational RFC.
   o  Charting Networks in the X.500 Directory is an Experimental
      Protocol.
   o  Network Services Monitoring MIB is a Proposed Standard.
   o  Mail Monitoring MIB is a Proposed Standard.
   o  X.500 Directory Monitoring MIB is a Proposed Standard.
   o  PPP LCP Extensions is a Proposed Standard.
   o  Evolution of the Interfaces Group of MIB-II is a Proposed
      Standard.
   o  Essential Tools for the OSI Internet be published as an
      Informational RFC.


Thirty-four Requests for Comments (RFC) were published between
1 October 1993 and 31 December 1993:

  RFC       St  Title
  -------   --  -------------------------------------
  RFC1528   E   Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain:
        Remote Printing -- Technical Procedures
  RFC1529   I   Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain:
        Remote Printing -- Administrative Policies
  RFC1530   I   Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain:
        General Principles and Policy
  RFC1531   PS  Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
  RFC1532   PS  Clarifications and Extensions for the Bootstrap
        Protocol
  RFC1533   PS  DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions
  RFC1534   PS  Interoperation Between DHCP and BOOTP
  RFC1535   I   A Security Problem and Proposed Correction With
        Widely Deployed DNS Software
  RFC1536   I   Common DNS Implementation Errors and Suggested
        Fixes.
  RFC1537   I   Common DNS Data File Configuration Error
  RFC1538   I   Advanced SNA/IP : A Simple SNA Transport Protocol
  RFC1539   I   The Tao of IETF - A Guide for New Attendees of the
        Internet Engineering Task Force
  RFC1540   S   INTERNET OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS
  RFC1541   PS  Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
  RFC1542   PS  Clarifications and Extensions for the Bootstrap
        Protocol
  RFC1543   I   Instructions to RFC Authors
  RFC1544   PS  The Content-MD5 Header Field
  RFC1545   E   FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (FOOBAR)
  RFC1546   I   Host Anycasting Service
  RFC1547   I   Requirements for an Internet Standard
        Point-to-Point Protocol
  RFC1548   DS  The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)
  RFC1549   DS  PPP in HDLC Framing
  RFC1550   I   IP: Next Generation (IPng) White Paper Solicitation
  RFC1551   I   Novell IPX Over Various WAN Media (IPXWAN)
  RFC1552   PS  The PPP Internetwork Packet Exchange Control
        Protocol (IPXCP)
  RFC1553   PS  Compressing IPX Headers Over WAN Media (CIPX)
  RFC1554   I   ISO-2022-JP-2: Multilingual Extension of
        ISO-2022-JP
  RFC1555   I   Hebrew Character Encoding for Internet Messages
  RFC1556   I   Handling of Bi-directional Texts in MIME
  RFC1557   I   Korean Character Encoding for Internet Messages
  RFC1558   I   A String Representation of LDAP Search Filters
  RFC1559   DS  DECnet Phase IV MIB Extensions
  RFC1560   I   The MultiProtocol Internet
  RFC1561   E   Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments

Key to RFC Status:

  S         Internet Standard
  PS        Proposed Standard
  DS        Draft Standard
  E         Experimental
  I         Informational

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Battle for Real Estate in the Global Village
by Carl Malamud* <[e-mail]>

After decades of visionaries talking about the future,
people are realizing that the future is today.  For 25
years, the Internet has been developing to the point
where even industry pundits have realized that the
global village is a reality.

Why did Bell Atlantic pay billions of dollars for TCI?
Why are QVC and Viacom battling for Paramount?  Why is
the Internet suddenly so hip?  The answer to all these questions
can be found in the buzzword of 1993, "convergence."

Convergence is not about what is going to happen tomorrow,
it is about what has happened under our eyes.  The
World Wide Web, Gopher, Wired Magazine, on-line presidential
reports, and many other phenomena are just a few indications
that we have reached the critical stage.  Over the next
few years, we will see every computer in the world
gradually join this web of connectivity.

THe question that is being asked by many, however, is
whether the Internet is some temporary experiment that
will go away.  Now that the big boys are in the game,
can we all go home and leave the question of networks
to the professionals?

The Internet is not going to go away when cable companies
and telephone companies and movie studios join the digital
world.  Instead, the Internet will continue to spread, just
as any fundamental infrastructure becomes more and more
embedded in our daily lives.  The Internet is an infrastructure,
not a network.

What has happened in 1993 is a realization that we have
something real.  The challenge for 1994 is to make sure
that we protect what we have.  The Internet is an
internetwork, a joining together of the networks of
the world into a global mesh, a matrix of connectivity.
It is crucial that we don't loose sight of the importance
of an internetwork.

When we look at the spread of information that will
happen over the next few years, it will be tempting to
build little islands, isolated worlds of cable TV systems or
video-on-demand over telephone systems or private networks for
distribution of music.  These isolated worlds have an
important place: they are the networks that we will
build and use over the next 20 years.

What we don't want to loose sight of, however, is joining
all those networks together.  Even if I have the ultimate
cable TV box in my home, I still want to be able to
send messages to people in other islands.  Even if
the phone company provides the ultimate information
service, there is always information available in other
places.

The Internet has a crucial role to play, and it is vital
that we don't loose sight of the difference between the
convergence of media in the home and the need for universal
connectivity in an internetwork.  Convergence is about
newer and better local area networks: better ways of giving
the consumer a nice, pleasant working environment.  The
Internet is about joining these islands together to build
our global village.  You can't do one without the other and
our challenge in 1994 will be to do both.

*Internet Multicasting Service

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRINGING COMMERCIAL INTERNET TO THE UK IN '93 (and '94)
by D J Mooring* <[e-mail]>

In the UK, 1993 was the year in which the Internet finally grew up.

One year before, PIPEX (The Public IP Exchange) had been launched by
its parent, the Unipalm group, into a market that didn't yet exist.
As the UK's first real provider of commercial-quality Internet
connections, its task was to put together a service that people could
literally 'plug' into.

Less than two years later, PIPEX has succeeded in building a
commercial UK Internet more or less single-handed, with 75% of the UK
market by volume and well over 80% by value.

Before PIPEX, the number of UK commercial organisations with a serious
direct connection to the Internet (ie, a digital leased line) could be
counted on one hand.  As 1993 closes, PIPEX has over 150 corporate
customers connecting to the Internet via leased line, with virtually
all of those taking KiloStream bandwidth (64kbps) or higher.  Scores
more are dialling into the PIPEX network, either directly (even from
Switzerland and Ghana) or through resellers, who between them carry
traffic for many more hundreds of customers.

Unfortunately, an almost continuous flow of mainstream UK press
coverage about the Internet has largely failed to convey a true
impression of how it is being utilised, choosing instead to dwell on
the figure of the lone, often anti-social, cybernerd as the archetypal
Internet user.

In fact (as even a glance at PIPEX's customer list will confirm)
scores of blue-chip companies are now connected - banks, insurance
companies, power generators, publishers, as well as big names from the
worlds of electronics and manufacturing.  Many of those are moving
core applications across their links.  Others are now seriously
looking at the Internet as a more cost-effective medium for their VPNs
(Virtual Private Networks) than any closed alternative.

In addition to constructing an enviable, 'resiliant and redundant' UK
backbone for its customers, with no single points of failure, PIPEX
has this year branched out into Europe, where there has been a dearth
of truly commercial providers.  POPS have now been commissioned for
France and Benelux.  In 1994, availability for PIPEX-standard services
across Europe will undoubtedly expand further.

Throughout 1993 PIPEX has experienced sustained compound growth of 10%
per month - that growth rate is expected to continue if not increase
during 1994, making PIPEX probably the fastest-growing commercial
provider in the industry.  PIPEX was also the first provider to
introduce an ISDN service (June 1993), and takeup of ISDN, both as a
means of connection and as a backup option, will increase next year.

Above all, the provision of products and services 'online' will become
de rigeur in 1994.  Publishers are already rushing to put their
catalogues and many of their publications on the wire, as are the
major credit-check and business information vendors.  Players in the
computer industry will have to look to put support and even software
distribution online, in order to keep up with the Joneses.  Despite
media emphasis on the supposed consumer benefits of cheap and
ubiquitous connectivity, it is the real benefits of low-cost
connectivity for business that will cause the Internet to keep on
growing in '94.

[consider the following tacked, on the express condition that any
re-communicated version that is not entirely verbatim is submitted
first, in context, to PIPEX Limited att:  for approval]

*PIPEX Limited 216 The Science Park
Cambridge CB4 4WA England
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet Subject Matter Guides Available
by Lou Rosenfeld <[e-mail]>

I'm pleased to announce the availability of eleven new subject-specific
guides to the Internet.  These guides were created between September and
December of this year by students enrolled in the course "Internet: Resource
Discovery and Organization" at the University of Michigan School of
Information and Library Studies, taught by Prof. Joe Janes and myself.
Students were instructed in Internet tool usage and resource discovery
approaches with the goal of creating ASCII text guides identifying and
evaluating the quality of the resources in specific subject areas.  Some
of these guides will be available as HTML documents as well.

Titles and authors of these guides follow:

* Aerospace Engineering: A Guide to Internet Resources
    Chris Poterala  Dave Dalquist

* Archives on the Internet (available 12/28)
    Nika Kayne  Denise Anthony

* Internet Guide to Book Discussions and Book Reviews
    Shannon Allen  Gretchen Krug

* Government Sources of Business and Economic Information
    Kim Tsang  Terese Austin

* A Guide to Environmental Resources on the Internet
    Toni Murphy  Carol Briggs-Erickson

* Film and Video Resources on the Internet
    Lisa Wood  Kristen Garlock

* Neurosciences Internet Resource Guide
    Sheryl Cormicle  Steve Bonario

* Personal Finance Resources on the Internet
    Abbot Chambers  Catherine Kummer

* Internet Guide to Popular Music
    Rolaant MacKenzie  Vicki Coleman

* Guide to Theater Resources on the Internet
    Deborah Torres  Martha Vander Kolk

* US Technology Public Policy
    Steve Kirk  David Blair

Unless otherwise mentioned, these guides are now available from the
Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides.  Jointly
sponsored by the University Library and the School of Information and
Library Studies at the University of Michigan, the Clearinghouse provides
access to subject-oriented resource guides created by members of the
Internet community.  There are currently over 60 guides available via
anonymous FTP, Gopher, and WorldWideWeb/Mosaic.  Information on accessing
the Clearinghouse follows:

anonymous FTP:
            host:  una.hh.lib.umich.edu
            path:  /inetdirsstacks

Gopher:
            gopher.lib.umich.edu
            menu:  What's New and Featured Resources=>Clearinghouse...

Gopher .link file:
 Name=Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides (UMich)
 Type=1
 Port=70
 Path=1/inetdirs
 Host=una.hh.lib.umich.edu

Uniform Resource Locators (URL):
            http://http2.sils.umich.edu/~lou/chhome.html or
            gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/11/inetdirs

There is also descriptive information available about these projects
available from the Clearinghouse.  Other questions, suggestions, and
comments regarding this course and the Clearinghouse are welcome.

*School of Information and Library Studies
University of Michigan

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Latin America and Caribbean Whois Goes On-line
by Xavier Baquero <[e-mail]>

Last August at INET93, the Latin American network administrators met
and decided to setup a Latin American WHOIS.

- - - The project was asigned to ECUANET (Ecuador) and UNIRED (Chile).
- - - The host in which the WHOIS SERVER is installed is WHOIS.LAC.NET
  (LAC stands for Latin America and Caribbean)
- - - The server is at this time in Ecuador (aliasing ecua.net.ec host),
  but in february is going to be moved to Miami, Fl., in order to
  provide a better response time.

The whois.lac.net server will serve more than 25 countries in
latin america and the caribbean.

*Vicepresident, EcuaNet (Quito, ECUADOR)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scientific Networking for Developing Countries
by Wendy White <[e-mail]>

Significant in 1993 -- the increased recognition that scientific
communication must be international and that efforts must be expanded to
include researchers from around the world in the "information highway."  With
this increased awareness comes a recognition that, in order to benefit from
these changes, societies will need to improve the way they educate children
and train adults to cope with the technologies.  There is also a need to
recognize that these technologies need to be disseminated equally and that
they cannot remain in the hands of the elite.  The Task Force that was
designated by the U.S. White House to consider the National Information
Infrastructure (NII) said it this way:

"The benefits of the NII for the nation are immense.  An advanced information
infrastructure will enable U.S. firms to compete and win in the global
economy, generating good jobs for the American people and economic growth for
the nation.  As importantly, the NII can transform the lives of the American
people -- ameliorating the constraints of geography, disability and economic
status -- giving all American a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents
and ambitions will take them."

This quote applies equally to people living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
but, according to Mike Holderness (New Scientist, 8 May 1993, pp 36-40):

"As we enter the age of global electronic communication, more than half the
world's population has no access even to the phone network that is the basis
of the new information networks.  Global division -- between the "information-
rich" and the "information-poor" is now more sharply defined than ever."

Significant for 1994?  This gap cannot be allowed to increase.  Policy makers
in developing countries will join this debate and become a part of the global
information highway.  They cannot afford to have their countries left behind
so they will join their colleagues in Europe and North America in discussing
issues related to access to the technology.  They will also join the debate
about issues related to the application of the technology.

They will establish an indigenous research capacity that is built upon a
strong informational base and that will, in turn, create, modify, interpret,
and disseminate scientific and technical information.  In this new information
age, communication and information generation and management are so intrinsic
to the scientific endeavor that they cannot be ignored.

There is no reason to discount the potential existing now in all countries to
exploit information technologies and to use these to increase productivity, to
guide decision making, and to allow scientists to interact with the
international community.  Low-cost, interim technologies, such as Fidonet,
will continue to prove effective in international, scientific, business,
educational, and government institutions.  Scientists and information
professionals will learn valuable lessons about which information technologies
work best in which settings.  These leaders will build an experiential base
that will be useful as the information sector develops and as scientists make
more and more demands for high-quality and timely information resources.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1993, the Internet gains momentum
by Erik Huizer (SURFnet BV)" <[e-mail]>

In the history of the ever changing and developing Internet, it is
hard to point out significant years, but I'd like to think 1993 was
one of those. In 1993 the Internet gained momentum in various ways:

Internationalization;
Of course the Internet has been an international network from it's
conception, but the real internationalization of the Internet was a
gradual process of many years.  In 1993 the growth of the Internet was
keeping its usual rate of doubling roughly every year. However in
1993 the growth outside of the USA was more significant than that
inside of the USA. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) the
technical forum, that develops the standards for the Internet met for
the first time outside of North America in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
For the first time 50% of the participants was from outside of the
USA.

Commercialization;
While commercial networks have been around for along time, 1993 was
the year where the commercialization became really significant. The
Internet changed from a network that exists mostly of academic and
reserach networks into one where commercial organizations own the
largest part of the Internet address space. Several countries now have
multiple commercial Internet providers.

Application and service orientation;
While infrastructure (copper, glass, ip-connectivity and routing) was
(and still is) the aspect that gets most of the attention in the
development of the Internet, 1993 showed that there is a shift of
interest towards applications and services. In 1993 tools like Gopher
(University of Minestota) and World Wide Web (CERN) have conquered the
user that wants to roam the sheer endless source of Information called
Internet.  More and more developers and service providers have caught
on to the fact that we need to provide well supported services and
sophisticated applications with simpele interfaces to the increasing
amount of users that use the Internet as a day to day tool.

User support and training;
With the masses of new Internet users coming on to the network every
day, user support, user documentation and training have had to evolve
significantly. Thanks to the IETF User Services Area and especially
the RARE Working Group on Information Services and User Support (ISUS)
this gets the attention and coordination it deserves. Furthermore
various professional publications for newcomers to the Internet can
now be bought in the local bookshop.

All of these developments are for the good of the Internet, and we
will see these developments continue to keep up their momentum through
1994 and after. Undoubtedly, one year from now there will be other
areas to add to this list, while the Internet develops more and more
into an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to communicate or
access information.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NETWORKING  IN  BRAZIL  93 / 94
by Eduardo Tadao Takahashi* <[e-mail]>

Ninety-three  was  a  year  of  transition  to  adulthood for the
Brazilian  Research  Network  (RNP).   On the technical, concrete
side,  our  backbone  at 9-6-64Kbps  operated without surmounting
problems,  in  spite of the  heavy  demand,  and  the  number  of
connected  institutions  reached  almost  twice  as  many  as  we
expected in our most optimistic predictions.  The backbone  covers
today  22  states of the country, out of 26); and the remaining
four (which are in the Amazon)  are  expected  to be connected in
1994.

Two  Regional Centers  were put in operation,  one in  San
Paulo  and  a  second  one  in  Brasilia,  setting  in  motion  a
decentralization process which  RNP  means to further  accelerate
in 1994.

A Center for Informatics Resources in Molecular Biology
was set up  in Brasilia under the  umbrella of the  Ministry of
Agriculture,  in cooperation with the  European Molecular Biology
Laboratory (EMBL).

On the  political front, the year was marked by two major activities:

first,  Phase II of
the   RNP  Initiative  was  planned  in  detail,  and  means  and
resources  were  sought with  overall success

second,  critical
steps were taken in  order to provide for specific legislation to
support (non-commercial) networking activities in Brazil.

The New Distance Education Act

1994 begins under the impact of a newly issued Act by the
Presidency of Brazil.  For three years, starting on
8 Dec. 1993,  the Act provides a special tariff for communications
services used by any  national project in  Distance  Education
where networking is expected  to play a crucial role. This
covers our Brazilian Research Network - RNP.

The special tariff is 10%  of the normal  cost!
This is a  breakthrough  for academic networking in Brazil.  Much
ground  has  yet  to  be  covered  in  order  to evolve  from the
political decision already taken  to daily impact.  However,  one
cannot  overstate  the  importance  of the  Act,  which  squarely
tackles the major  obstacle  preventing further  dissemination of
networking in Brazil  (and in  Latin America  in general): costs,
costs, costs!

As the immediate consequence, RNP is striving to put in place the
so-called  Backbone  -  Phase II,  which will have trunk links at
2 Mbit/s   covering   six   cities   in   the   country  in July 94.
Complementary initiatives for 94 include:

- the installation of three more Regional Centers;

- the coverage of Amazon states by a VSAT-backbone;

- the  organization of a number of specialized Centers/Nuclei in
  areas  such as Multimedia, Sustainable Development, and Public
  Administration;

- the  launching of  a  large experiment in  Distance Education,
  involving secondary schools in 5 cities in the country; and

- the access to High-performance Computing Centers and Data Base
  Services in Brazil and abroad.

It is of course not certain that RNP will be able to achieve the
larger part of  these goals in 94.  However, the mere fact that,
amid the political  turmoil within which Brazil  has  lived  for
years, we can state such objectives is a motive for contentment.

* Director, Brazilian  Research  Network (RNP)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet Technology
by Craig Partridge <[e-mail]>

A columnist in a local newspaper opined recently that past year retrospectives
are an excuse for columnists to take an issue off.  Perhaps so, but writing
a gigabit networking retrospective on the year actually took some effort
because there was no defining event in 1993 that really changed high
speed networking. Rather, it was a year of many small accomplishments.

First, on the link level technologies front, considerable progress has been
made.  The Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) standards reached an important
level of maturity when the ATM Forum issued version 3.0 of their ATM specs
(as a book from Prentice Hall).  Furthermore, several US carriers announced
tariffs for ATM/OC-3 (155 Mb/s) service and, for research purposes, OC-12
(622 Mb/s) is apparently available.  And, fiber optic experts at Bellcore have
started to talk about the need to deploy OC-192 (about 10 Gb/s) in the near
future.

The High-Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) also firmly established
its role as the commodity high-end (800 Mbit/s) local-area network.  By this
fall, most major computer vendors offered a HIPPI interface for their systems.
The result is that, via HIPPI, you can attach your EISA-bus PC to your
Cray at 800 Mbit/s.  While attaching the PC may seem silly, the expected
widespread availability of PCI bus products in 1994 may make this scenario
perfectly reasonable.  (Informal reports are that the PCI bus offers sustained
gigabit transfer rates).

Second, from the perspective of connecting hosts, the exciting news was
the development of the HP Afterburner network interface.  A memory mapped
network interface, the Afterburner validated Van Jacobson's 1990 arguments
that simple memory mapped interfaces could support high performance by
demonstrating over 200 Mbit/s TCP/IP throughput on a HP workstation.  By
late 1993 the Afterburner, which started the year as a research effort,
was a product.  Now that inexpensive hosts are capable of high speeds,
routers will not be far behind.

Third, in optical networking, the major news was that some US long
lines carriers are starting to replace electrical-optical repeaters on
some lines with optical amplifiers.  Two advantages of optical amplifiers
are that they substantially ease the upgrading of a fiber's transmission
rate and they don't impose special framing requirements on the fiber's
transmission scheme.  Both degrees of flexibility will be important
as telephone infrastructure upgrades to higher bandwidths.

Finally, information about high speed networks became even more available.
The Journal of High Speed Networking finished a strong first year of
publication.  High speed networking conferences sprouted like weeds.
There are two IFIP conferences, a US Government sponsored conference,
and a USENIX conference on high-speed networking all scheduled for 1994.
And we're beginning to see books: Paul Green's, Fiber Optic Networking,
Martin DePrycker's Asynchronous Transfer Mode, and my Gigabit Networking,
all appeared in 1993.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------