No Comments Written by Robert on July 24, 2008 – 11:17 pm

When laptops, and desktop computers before them, were developed, they were thought of as independent islands. A personal computer was meant to be one person’s tool. But just as human beings are by nature social creatures, so too have PCs evolved into interconnected members of a worldwide web of machines. In fact, what once began as a sidelight - the interchange of electronic mail and the ability to visit a collection of information at a “site” - has for many users become the computer’s main purpose.

Laptop users have especially benefited from this evolution. As you go out on the road, you can now take your home or business office with you; you can exist in cyberspace and no one has to know where you are when you send or receive files, information, or mail. Think of what cell phones have done in an even shorter period of time: If I’m not at my desk when someone calls my office, the call routes to my cell phone and I can answer almost anywhere in the world.

Laptop users can gain access to the Internet in several ways: by using a dialup modem in connection to the plain old telephone system (POTS); by WiFi interchange with a wireless point of access to a high-speed modem; or by connecting (via wire or wirelessly) to an office or home network that includes a high-speed cable or DSL modem.

Where exactly is this place called cyberspace? The best definition I know of is based around a technology more than 125 years old: If you and I were to speak on the telephone, our conversation doesn’t take place where I am or where you are. Our words, and the business we conduct, take place in a virtual world that has no physical foundation. (The word itself was coined by novelist William Gibson in his 1984 book, Neuromancer, and it referred to a vast network of interconnected human and computer minds.) Today we call that place the Internet, and here’s what it encompasses.

The World Wide Web

The best-known part of the Internet isn’t a thing, and it isn’t owned or directly managed by any individual, company, or government agency. That’s mostly a good thing, although sometimes a world without limits can be taken over by bandits, vandals, and other evildoers. The Internet is a web of interconnections between huge commercial, educational, and government systems and individual outposts like your personal laptop.

Becoming a citizen of cyberspace is as simple as obtaining access to the Internet. Bits and pieces of the web are managed by communication companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and an international organization that oversees the issuance of Internet protocol (IP) addresses and domains. I don’t have time or space to name all of the things you can do on the Internet, but I list a few in a moment. I can confidently say, as a journalist who’s been involved with personal computers since their birth a quarter-century ago, that almost none of these were even imagined back then: Buying a car, selling a house, watching a movie, reading a book in a library 10,000 miles away, finding a recipe, consulting a doctor . . . get the idea?

Electronic mail

For many people, electronic mail has all but replaced the neighborhood postal carrier for most of the essential letters. We receive bills, mash notes, credit card statements, and even that most cherished of all postal items: junk mail. E-mail is essentially a store-and-forward system. Here’s what that means: You can send a message anytime and the recipient can pick it up whenever he is online. Messages travel from your computer to a server at an ISP or a web site, and is then routed from there to the server associated with the person you’re addressing and on to its destination.

The message moves at electronic speed, minus the generally insignificant time it takes to navigate through traffic jams at various routing sites. For that reason, physical distance makes little difference; when I send a message or a file by e-mail to a co-worker at her desk 10 feet away from me, my message (broken up into small packets that travel on their own and are reassembled at the recipient) takes a couple of dozen hops up and a couple of dozen hops down before it arrives.

(The last time I “traced” an Internet connection using a simple utility, I found that 21 different handoffs that began at my office in Massachusetts, passed through New York and then Washington, and then ended in Atlanta.) The total time: about 448 ms, or less than half a second.

Instant messaging

If that’s not quite fast enough for you, you can employ another technology that wasn’t in the plans when personal computers were introduced. Instant messages (IMs) are intended for use in situations when both the sender and the recipient are at their computers and connected to the Internet; both parties make a connection to a central server, which routes messages between the computers at near-instant speed. The leaders include AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, and other services, including Google Talk and Jabber.

Voice over Internet Protocol

And then you’ve come full circle, to the use of the computer and the Internet as a substitute for the telephone. You plug a phone or an entire house full of phones into a special telephone adapter, which is connected to a broadband modem and through it to the Internet. The telephone adapter converts the analog rising and falling waves of a voice signal into digital packets that can travel over the Internet. Calls from computer to computer can be as cheap as free (although you do have to pay for Internet service); calls from regular phone to phone, using the Internet’s facilities, are often included in the flat rate for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.