PUBLICATION DATE Sunday. November 1, 1992 EDITION CITY SERIES INTERNET FACES GRIDLOCK. First of two parts BYLINE By Joshua Quittner. NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER LENGTH 196 Lines Most mornings, Barbara Enzer flips on the MacIntosh computer in her Manhattan apartment and checks in with her kids. Enzer's daughter goes to Yale University; her son lives in San Francisco. Though thousands of miles separate them, Enzer is able to tell her children at the same time that a) she is paying attention to her diet, b) her broken arm is healing nicely, and c) "Cleanliness is good and so is good food." The Enzers, as much an electronic family as a nuclear one, communicate by using an information superhighway, a global throughway that some 6 million people take to work, school and play every day. That highway, a confluence of more than 6,000 interconnected computer networks, is called the Internet. Now, after 20 years of relentless growth, the Internet is nearing critical mass and is about to take a giant leap in size and importance, experts say. Driven by a combination of White House-level political interest, new technology that will bring video and sound, and rules that let companies do business on the network, this grand experiment is heading from the realm of science into the domain of ordinary life. Equipped with only a personal computer and a modem, record numbers of new users are using local phone calls to enter the system. Within its web they can find information in hundreds of free databases, exchange messages with people the world over and communicate on electronic bulletin boards read by an audience of tens of thousands. For the first time, guidebooks are being published for the often-confusing Internet, local ex-hackers - and companies like Sprint - are selling ways to get on it, and the system is getting so crowded it's running out of user addresses. "People conduct their love life over the Internet, their hobbies and their interests. They argue politics and engage in all the kinds of things that people do," said Mitch Kapor, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Mass., which promotes public awareness of the on-line world. Schools - including 20 in New York City - are signing on to the Internet in growing numbers. Within the next year or two, Internet experts also predict a surge in commercial services, such as multimedia catalogues. Fueling Internet fever is "the Gore thing," as Eric Arnum, editor of a computer newsletter, calls it. That's the widespread belief that many of the obstacles limiting Internet growth will disappear if the Democratic ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore - long the Senate's leading information-highway proponent - win this Tuesday. But whether Clinton or President George Bush is elected, the Internet's path is uncertain. An anarchic, chaotic system, the Internet was cobbled together over the past 20 years from military, research, university and other networks linked by telephone lines, satellite and cable. Most of the American networks in it are federally subsidized. In addition, the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, spent about $30 million in the past five years building a high-speed network backbone, called the NSFnet, and helping regional networks to attach to it. No one knows precisely how much it costs to run the Internet; each of its networks is responsible for its own upkeep and equipment. No one knows how many people use it. And no one has central authority for running it or enforcing its largely informal rules. Experts agree that key questions must be answered if the Internet is to realize its potential: Who should control, build and fund it? Government, which could make it part of the national infrastructure like the interstate highways? Or private interests, like IBM? Should it be made simple and cheap enough for everyone to use, or should it be honed as a tool for research? Besides the big questions, immediate problems curb the Internet's usefulness. It's confusing to use; it crashes a lot; it's too slow to allow full-motion video; and its lack of structure stalls the spread of new services. Internet use has grown 15 percent a month for the past decade, according to Vinton Cerf, president of the Internet Society, the volunteer secretariat that helps administer the network. In the last year, the managers of the the high-speed backbone network allowed businesses to conduct commerce on it for the first time. Commercial users already had been signing on at a fast pace to share information. By July, 1991, they exceeded all other users for the first time. Increasingly, that interest is coming from "non-techies" like Barbara Enzer. A 51-year-old counselor who works with disabled children, Enzer first used a computer less than two years ago. She was helped by her son, Matisse, who works at the WELL, a California-based computer conferencing system. For $2 an hour, its users hold on-screen discussions on topics ranging from child rearing to the Grateful Dead. Though she could connect her computer to the WELL directly over long-distance lines, she chose the more difficult - but far cheaper - Internet route. She subscribes to Panix in Manhattan, one of several local companies that act as a gateway to the Internet. By making a local call to the company, she can get onto the data highway and almost instantly reach the WELL, which has its own computer on the Internet. Now her life is filled with friends she's never met face-to-face: "I converse with people from the Midwest, from Washington, from Florida. It's cross-generational - a woman in her 20s; a woman in her 80s who is also a Ph.D. in nutrition. There's a man - we write poetry - he lives in Michigan." When Enzer broke her arm in an auto accident last month she got notes from a couple of friends or neighbors; countless network friends, however, sent their support via electronic mail. "Nothing in my life holds a candle to those interactions, I must say." Internet e-mail came to wide attention when it was used to organize the opposition to the Russian coup in 1991. But e-mail and bulletin boards are just a small part of what the Internet can provide. Users also can search thousands of databases scattered through 110 nations. Card catalogues of every major library in the world; digitized satellite photographs of Mars; technical data about mapping human genes - the collective knowledge of the planet is gradually settling on the Internet. What most sets it apart from independent commercial networks like Prodigy and CompuServe is its laser-like speed and what that speed can engender. Using the Internet, an astronomer in Germany can instruct a telescope on a 14,000-foot mountain in Chile to locate a celestial object, take a digital "snapshot" of it and, minutes later, send it back to Germany. Researchers can pool supercomputers in different states, creating a super-supercomputer to run global climate simulations. An author in Illinois and his editor in Massachusetts can pass a book in progress back and forth as if across a table. "Anyone, anytime, anywhere, can literally have access to global information and expertise," said Frank Odasz, director of Big Sky Telegraph, a Montana project that gives nearly 2,000 rural teachers and students access to the Internet. Odasz says the Internet, like a railroad, could bring jobs and markets to Montana. "We could be engaging in international trade and swapping Montana alfalfa cubes with products from other countries, potato vodka from Estonia, whatever," he said. National defense, not commerce, was the concern 20 years ago when the first modern computer network made its debut at a communications conference in the basement of the Washington Hilton. Called the ARPANET, for the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency that sponsored it, it linked a handful of Defense Department and university computers. Other networks connected, agreeing to use the same rules for transmitting packets of data. The system took a giant leap with the creation of the NSFnet in the late 1980s. Last December, it got another boost when President George Bush embraced the idea of a national data superhighway that would someday enter every American's home, allowing Internet-like services. He approved $92 million in seed money to start a National Research and Education Network, which would be based on the NSFnet but go well beyond it. That idea had been pushed in Congress for more than a decade by Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. If the Democrats win, Gore will be in charge of building such a superhighway, presidential candidate Bill Clinton has said. "Everyone is waiting for Gore," said Arnum, editor of the newsletter Electronic Mail and Microsystems. Noting that vice presidents traditionally undertake pet projects, he added, "Bush got funerals, Quayle got Mars, Gore will get the Internet." Gore has said the government will seed network projects with portions of the $20-billion infrastructure fund proposed by Clinton. At the same time, it will act as a regulatory middle man, easing rules that restrict commercial uses and promoting technical standards that allow commercial expansion. The goal is to link every home to a network of fiber optic cables - hair-thin strands of glass - that can transmit huge amounts of data, including video, as fast as the high-speed backbone. But that means an expensive rewiring of America. Gore emphasizes that interim technology could bring the information highway to homes much sooner. "How soon it reaches homes will surprise many," Gore said in a recent interview. "I think that some bypass technologies that distribute very large quantities of information to the home will be available before the end of a first Clinton-Gore term." By April, 1992, the NSFnet was running at 45 million bits per second - roughly 1,500 pages of text per second - and handling 10 times as much volume as a year earlier. Higher speeds will soon be needed to accommodate even the primitive video and audio messages - multimedia - that are about to become available on the network, said Alan Baratz, who heads IBM's high-speed computing and communications division. The National Science Foundation is soliciting bids to speed up its network to at least 150 million bits per second. That's still relatively slow. IBM and Rogers Cable in Toronto have an experimental network that runs at a gigabit - a billion bits - a second, fast enough for full-motion video. NOTES SIDEBAR; SEE MAIN STORY: Highway to High-Tech SERIES INTERNET FACES GRIDLOCK. First of two parts HEADLINE Kids^ Journey Into the World Of Computers BYLINE By Joshua Quittner. NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER LENGTH 45 Lines The people of Anchovia are peaceful. The people of Anchovia are trying to decide whether to allow foreigners to visit. The people of Anchovia will either ban organized religion, or force everyone to go to church on Sunday. Two dozen eighth-graders at PS / IS 308 in Bedford-Stuyvesant - the people of Anchovia - are popping out of their seats with excitement as they thrash out the constitution of a new country. Anchovia isn't in any atlas. It exists alongside the "virtual countries" of Petrolia, Balancia, Bushland and Oceana on a computer at the University of Alabama. Using the Internet as a gateway to that computer, students from Japan, Canada, Russia and the United States are playing an eight-week game of global politics that's supposed to lead to a treaty to preserve the ocean. Today, however, the Anchovians are feeling a bit bellicose, said Edna Lieberman, their teacher. "They made a little negotiation with Bushland, a message just feeling them out," she said. The Anchovians want the Bushlanders (in reality, Canadian university students) to team up with them and charge other nations for passage through the Dire Straits, a finger of water between the two nations. "If Bushland doesn't go for it, my kids are walking right in and taking that land," Lieberman said. David Crookall, an Alabama professor who runs the project, says the game has been played for 20 years. The students at Brooklyn's PS 308, a gifted class, are the youngest ever to play. Participants learn that the computer is a great equalizer: There is no black or white, male or female, old or young here. "People are really the same everywhere, that's what we learn," said Angelica Sanchez, 13. Lieberman said her kids love that this world is nonracist. In Bed-Stuy "they just can't meet the people they meet, people from all over. And they're accepted as people, not as those people." "Anchovia is a dreamland," said Joycetta Ray, 13. "It is where a person dreams to live." Last year, Crookall contacted Fred Goldberg, who runs the Board of Education's computer network, NYCENET. Twenty city schools - including a class of fourth-graders - are connected, Goldberg said. The response to the Internet has been so terrific that Goldberg worries how a wave of young users is going to wash with the more traditional networkers. "Put yourself in their shoes," he said. "You're a professor at MIT, used to corresponding with your colleagues and maybe a bit with students - and they're not too fond of that - and one day you turn on your computer and there's 30 electronic messages, all from fourth-graders." Tuesday in Discovery: New Uses for the Internet **END OF STORY REACHED** -- josh quittner vox: 516-454-2806 fax: 516-454-2873 quit@newsday.com