Phone technicians with answers on everything from dial tones to digital subscriber lines: "I think I know where it is. I'll ask." Pause. "You want to go there?" Yes. "We're allowed to show what's behind the curtain?"
No yellow brick road, no Emerald City. A wizard pulls wires at the Internet's center. For all but a handful of 70 million users the Net is space beyond the screen, somewhere down the wire. Because it's oblique, dispersed and complex it's known only as data railroads and information superhighways, big pipes and plumbing. Engineers and technicians running the network use metaphor. Where does data go? Drawn on a white board, it disappears into a cloud. The Internet is no ethereal construct. Its tangible body exists anywhere electronic devices talk to each other over public networks in TCP/IP. It's as close as your home computer, modem and cell phone, and as distant as a satellite 22,000 miles above Earth. Hidden middle space isn't really hidden. The Internet's core is at the corner of University Ave and Bryant St in downtown Palo Alto CA between drugstore and bakery. "Digital" in 8-inch brass letters identifies 529 Bryant St's 3-story granite and sandstone building as the Internet's Middle.
Compaq Computer's Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), is one of 75 network access points worldwide where the Net's great data rivers converge. 3 of the 12 major network access points, public Internet exchanges, in the U S are here. Besides Compaq's Palo Alto facility (Compaq acquired Digital Equipment June 1999) Silicon Valley's other hubs are the Pacific Bell Network Access Point (with equipment spread over 6 cities) and Mae West, MCI WorldCom's Metropolitan Area Ethernet installation in downtown San Jose. Similarities between PAIX and ordinary office buildings end at the lobby where visitors sign in, receive ID badges and wait for escorts. Everyone without exception is accompanied by a Compaq employee at all times. PAIX general manager Laura Hendriksen doesn't usually do escort duty. Today she ushers a writer through 4 layers of security doors into the heart of the Net, one level below the street. Like many network people Hendriksen's not given to poems. Hers is a world of pipes and peers, feeds and speeds. Standing before the last locked door to the equipment cages at the center of the exchange, she talks of the 70-year-old building's history. Most people working here know this was a phone company central office, the center of things back then. That's how it is again as if we brought the building back to its historical roots. Employees and customers think it's cool.
Cool is what exchange designers saw building it in 1996. Other Internet exchanges were dank, depressing vaults, rows of equipment racks jammed into cages of cyclone fencing and 2-by-4s. PAIX's equipment cages too are aesthetically correct. Museum-quality pin spots snake along the open ceiling. No longer would the Internet's heart resemble a steamship's boiler room. This would be the first-class deck right down to the highly buffed blond wood doors and the cages' sleek fit and finish. No fine wood or filigree could make visitors forget they're inside a vast machine. For those unaccustomed to PAIX's the highly regulated (temperature-controlled, dust-filtered, video-monitored) world the most striking aspect is the low hum of 1000 tiny equipment fans. PAIX, like all other network access points, functions as a hub airport for data. ISPs from across the U S and the Pacific Rim pay $2,500 - $80,000 a month tarmac space and baggage-handling. Compaq facilitates cargo transfer between carriers. PAIX requires clients to have a speedy ramp (at least a 10MB-per-second Ethernet port) to the shared central switch connecting all carriers. Companies can also make side deals to route data directly between their cages, bypassing the central switch.
The largest of the 64 data airport tenants are Tier 1 carriers such as UUNet and AGIS - national and international ISPs leasing high-speed lines from long-distance phone companies to form the backbones of the Internet. Next are smaller regional and local carriers. Smaller players have airport space and exchange privileges but often pay larger ones to carry their data. Unlike most other major network access points PAIX also rents space to content providers. A manufacturer or shipper needing ready access to many airlines may locate a warehouse by an airport. 9 large Internet content firms park servers at PAIX, directly accessible to networks. Household names pumping data through PAIX include PointCast and Alta Vista. Tenants share a basketball court-sized room partitioned into cages each holding 3 - 25 coffin-sized equipment racks. Although some racks are almost empty, all 218 are rented. There's a waiting list for space. Compaq added 185 more racks expanding PAIX onto the building's first floor. An intricate latticework of precisely tied cables connects routers and servers in the racks to data pipes running along the open ceiling. Really big pipes - 13 ultra-high-capacity fiber-optic lines phone companies lease to the largest ISPs - carry a combined total of 26.52 gigabits per second, equivalent to 1/2 million home modems going at once.
In a small room 10 ft removed from the main cages are 3 bright orange plastic tubes coming out of the basement wall. 2 of the conduits, the size of vacuum cleaner tubes, continue on to a rack of equipment breaking data lines down into smaller lines. The last orange tube, containing outdated copper wires, stops one foot inside the basement wall, crudely severed with a hacksaw. Like a weed-choked wagon trail beside the interstate it's of historic interest only and leads nowhere. As a systems failure or delay at one hub airport can disrupt traffic across an airline's entire operation, what happens at PAIX is critically important to all clients. Unless companies buy rack space at many exchanges, one problem with a single piece of equipment here can effectively take an entire ISP and all its clients down. For network technicians who install and maintain the equipment the cage city is a 24/7 culture. When your entire company's fate hangs by a couple of OC-3 fiber-optic conduits you don't break for dinner or sleep or anything until the problem is solved. By the elevator, just outside the main cage room, is a spartan alcove with 3 plump upholstered chairs and a pair of oversize monitors displaying system stats and security information. Here out-of-town network plumbers camp out, sometimes for days. People jump on planes with no thought where they'll stay once they're here. Hendriksen points to a cage one aisle removed from the main drag. "Those 4 technicians from NetRail in Atlanta are expanding their equipment. They've been at it since 9:30 last night." In the lounge the only evidence of human habitation is 3 empty Pepsi cans and a John Le Carre novel.
Without cooperation and free data exchange between networks the Internet would not be. Cooperation today is different than when the Net was an alliance of university networks. At exchange points many carriers sign treaties enabling them to trade data freely with all other signers. Likewise the exchange is a competitive marketplace where carriers cut side deals to exchange traffic one-on-one. Internet service is a dog-eat-dog business. Nowhere is that more evident than here, where companies routinely place mission-critical equipment in plain view of their most bitter rivals. "I don't think of this place as particularly tense. We take lots of steps to make sure people behave." So far there's no instance of an overzealous tech "accidentally" fouling a neighbor's wires. "Escorts take care of malicious tendencies. Anyone going into a cage is escorted. We've had people say 'We tested your security. He went into the common-area cage and he put his thumb on my router unchallenged.' That's the level of silliness we talk about."
Think of an airport so competitive airlines go to elaborate lengths to disguise their planes' markings and keep flight schedules secret. At PAIX many equipment racks are anonymous. Internet Protocol numbers (numeric tags identifying equipment to the rest of the Internet) are blacked out. "We've had people go over the line, taking too much interest in stuff a couple racks away from theirs. Escorts handle that. It's a game. Most ISPs can tell who others are by looking at how they rack their equipment and what's in the racks." Few human touches soften the mood. On one ISP rack technicians post smiling life-size cardboard cutouts of staffers. Another firm installed a Christmas tree. In the beginning stuffed animals were allowed in cages to give it a zoo-like feel. It didn't work. Safety required the animals be a certain type of cloth and only brightly colored.
In the basement one machine sits apart from the city of cages, in its own room, with its own security layer. This is the GIGAswitch, the great sink to which all the data rivers great and small must flow. With its cables and ports the shared central switch looks not entirely unlike a phone switchboard out of a bygone era, an artifact from when this building was young. This is it, the wired digital world's very crossroads. It's no metaphor. It's real. Its molecules are millions of pulses of white light moving through the switch every second. Hendriksen smiles indulgently when visitors kneel, placing a hand on its face.
THE VERY MIDDLE - Until Apr 1995 the Internet's backbone was supported by the National Science Foundation. With 4 government-sanctioned Internet exchange points and 2 private ones network topology was a simple string map. Competing commercial carriers took over the backbones. Maps and routes became much more complex. Today much traffic once flowing through public exchange points is routed through private interconnections. Private peering arrangements between ISPs exist anywhere transactions are mutually convenient. Because of secrecy involved in peering agreements it's impossible to know how much is truly shunted away from exchanges. Consensus estimates 2/3 of Internet traffic today doesn't flow through common central switches of public exchanges such as PAIX, MAE West, PacBell. The string map becomes a loosely woven fabric. 6 grand junctions are now hundreds of smaller ones never appearing on maps. If private 1 - 1 exchanges continues at current pace there'll soon be no middle. When the center disappears piece by piece, line by line into 1000 unmarked equipment closets the Net will truly be hidden, unmappable, unknowable.
1993 the Internet had a lot of of not so easy to use protocols such as gopher, ftp, archie, and e-mail. Yes, e-mail is a special protocol to use over the Internet. Along came the protocol called a browser. The first big browser hit was Netscape, taking on the name "world wide web". Which came first, the www in URLs used by browser software or the world wide web name? Today world wide web and Internet are synonomous, creating combination bowser software so you can skip from one protocol to another easily, doing e-mail in your browser or ftp. For common usage they're the same. Once there was Internet but no www. Hope that isn't too confusing.
The user (browser) side implements e-commerce and mailing lists with HTML forms. Server side databases store this information. Cold Fusion goes between Web and database. Cold Fusion understands web-talk and database structure and characteristics. When users fill out and submit an HTML form, data entered is transmitted to the server in one Web message. Cold Fusion extracts this data, builds a database record from it and adds this record to the database. The database rejects bad data (like if the user entered his name in the date field) Cold Fusion sends the user an error message. Server owners install Cold Fusion to attract Web developers and business people. They may charge more for hosting a website because they offer a superior service. For Cold Fusion you need a server that offers it. Geocities might not have it. All major hosts will soon have Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion replaces CGI, an earlier database-handling method. CGI sits on servers doing the same thing (go between Web-talk and database) but requires expert programming. Cold Fusion doesn't. It's much simpler. Cold Fusion markup language CFML, similar to HTML, uses tags. It looks like a special extension of HTML. Study database packages like ACCESS or DBASE. You define and create the database and upload it to the server. Also needed are database reports and queries so clients can see what's going on. There are legal responsibilities dealing with E-commerce. In the event of catastrophic data loss clients could be forced out of business and sue. Much responsibility rests with server owners. They're responsible for backup, anti-virus, etc. The Web developer must test his software up the kazoo, throw all kinds of curves at it - bad data, duplicate data, no data, strange keys hit, etc. Heard about FLASH?
Texas-based Dell Computer surveyed 1,001 of the nation's 6.5 million people using the Internet at least once a week. Wish lists included renewing driver's licenses and license plates (90%) paying tickets (70%) voting (78%) editing photos (80%) doing laundry and watering lawns (50%) home security (67%) ordering groceries (47%) California has 8.3 million people online. The Bay Area accounts for over 25% statewide. The survey shows computers as central in daily life. Despite hype about computers as the focus of our future, users want computers to fade into the background as household appliances. Technology's purpose is to get out of the way, not to have a computer but to get something done. Computing does its best work when you can't tell it's there, like the computer controlling your car's fuel injectors.
Computers that crash get rave reviews. Metreon's Microsoft store visitors see computers as home-based taskmasters. Where do you want to go today? Passsersby say not very far. Of 20 people questioned at Metreon, 18 want computers to handle chores like balancing checkbooks, controlling lights and avoiding DMV lines. "Computers were supposed to be our slaves. Now they take over. We should put them to work," said one, gesturing to Metreon's flashing screens and lights. Sacramento based California Voter Foundation is cautious about online balloting. Privacy, security and fraud must be addressed before people are comfortable voting over the Internet. Security also blocks online DMV transactions. The DMV doesn't really want people standing in DMV field office lines but they do want to see in person those taking the license renewal test required every 15 years. Because of a 50% failure rate for that test there's huge potential for fraud.
With increasingly complex computers, users like Randy Tamez struggle to make them perform simple tasks. Nearly blinded by a 1989 brain tumor, Tamez depends on his computer and special software for routine tasks like reading things. As the Internet and computers accessing it become laden with features he scrambles to keep up. "Advertisers say hooray for this or that new computer feature but it leaves us in the dust. It's disheartening," said Tamez.