They call it the World Wide Web, and its multimedia magic is woven on strands of silicon stretched all across the American landscape and beyond. It’s the biggest W-word to hit the United States since Watergate.
Billions of dollars already have been bet by the planet’s media and high-technology elites on the dream that the Web will utterly transform the way people inform, educate and entertain themselves. And nowhere is the Web that spawns such speculation woven any wider than it is in and around Chicago.
A local new media visionary named Gordon Lake coined (and trademarked) the term Chicago Web to describe the hypertext heartland that he then began to document at length at his own Web site at http://www.chiweb.com.
Chicago Web is a mirror held up in cyberspace to reflect the city that exists in real space. Chicago Web reflects Chicago proper in a mosaic of millions of so-called Web pages, digital links to institutions and people as diverse as the official City of Chicago Web page and the unofficial Dennis Rodman Web page.
People with computers can drop by these places using a modem and a type of software called a Web browser and experience whatever is posted by their owners. So what you find on the street, you find on the Web. On the Chicago Web, however, time and distance are immediately swept away. The megalopolis and its inhabitants become your back-yard playground and playmates with the click of a computer mouse on an icon-a small image or similar representation of a Web destination on a computer screen.
Next time you watch a Bulls game, note that next to the advertising banners for Ameritech, Budweiser and Fritos you’ll see one that simply says, “nba.com.” It’s the address of the Web page of the National Basketball Association (the full address is http://www.nba.com, but most Web browsers will find Web pages without your having to type “http://” and in some cases, you can also omit “www”).
Want to know when Scottie Pippen had his best game ever (43 points against Charlotte on Feb. 2, 1991) or his best night ever rebounding (18 against the Nets on March 31, 1992)? Just follow the icons you’ll find on nba.com and click on the red bull. In further exploring the NBA site, you’ll be swept through a corner of cyberspace where virtually any bit of data about the game of basketball awaits on banks of computers called Web servers.
When you tire of the game, you might want to go shopping for pantyhose. If so, consider pointing your computer at the L’eggs site (www.pantyhose.com) posted on other banks of servers by the Chicago-based Sara Lee Inc. that asks you a series of questions, then picks out the pantyhose size and tones to best complement your look.
Quite often on the front page of this newspaper you’ll find nestled among the teasers for stories scattered throughout the paper some that refer you to to www.chicago.tribune.com, the Web version of the newspaper you are holding.
If you ask your grade school child when report cards are coming out, she may tell you to check out her school’s Web site. One division of this newspaper’s staff produces what are called Digital Cities, Web postings devoted to Chicago and to an ever-growing list of its suburbs, where local information such as individual school calendars are posted, just as are news reports from foreign correspondents, automobile ads, lottery numbers and the rest of the newspaper’s content.
Need the phone number for the desk sergeant at the Chicago Police Department’s Town Hall district? Have your browser find the City of Chicago Web page, then call up the interactive map where you click on each police district to home in on crime data, contact names and numbers and other information.
The City of Chicago Web site is www.ci.chi.il.us. The jargon breaks down this way. “WWW,” of course, means World Wide Web. “Ci” means the site is sponsored by a city. “Chi” is the city, “Il” the state and “US” the nation in which the site is situated.
To get all of this and much more, all you need is a modern personal computer and a modem. Such machines already are in roughly 30 per cent of all of American households and in well above 65 per cent of all households with incomes exceeding $100,000.
Not since the United States used the crash federal program called the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb has a new technology gone from unknown to household word as fast as the World Wide Web. Two years ago the Web was little more than a playground for the world’s high-end computer hobbyists, a corner of the Internet where a largely young and male crowd of the technologically adroit swapped pinup photos, sound clips, text files and tall tales of programming prowess.
Today’s Web is nerd nirvana no more.
Now the Web is the target of a feeding frenzy by the world’s media giants. Corporate combatants see in the Web the potential for a technology-fostered home entertainment revolution virtually without parallel. Quite literally, they say, the Web will have the same sort of impact on the world’s information makers as nuclear weapons have had on its warmakers.
And so entertainment and information media moguls swarm onto the Web with a particular zeal. Newspapers throughout the country are very much in that fray, right along with movie producers and major software houses including Microsoft and IBM. You can read your Tribune in its traditional ink-on-paper form or read the same thing and more on its Web site.
And if you want to check out the competition, it, too, comes in a Web version at www.suntimes.com.
And if the establishment newspapers aren’t enough, there’s the anti-establishment Chicago Reader at www.chireader.com, where lonely hearts now can exchange lies and promises in on-line, interactive multimedia splendor as well as by snail mail and tape recorded come-ons.
Or if you’re swimming even further from the mainstream, there’s the Reader’s own competition, New City Newspaper at www.newcitynet.com.
Want to see what movies are playing in Schaumburg? Point your machine at www.excite.com and click on the icon for movies. You’ll not only find listings for every film playing in the city and suburbs, but in many cases, via a “tickets and showtimes” page, you’ll be able to use a credit card to buy a ticket on the spot.
Want to see the latest stuff at the Museum of Science and Industry but can’t bear to face the crowds? Just go to www.msichicago.org where you can view illustrated on-line information about such Chicago icons as the U-505 submarine and “America’s Main Street” and, of course, you can take a room-by-room tour of Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, which, Web or no Web, continues to reign as the world’s most elegant doll house.
Are you more into motorcycles than doll houses? A computer savvy biker named Skip Robinson has published a Web site called “Chicago Motorcycle Rider’s Guide” at http://www.wwa. com/cgobiker complete with photos of the area’s more prominent motorcycle riders and maps of the better places to take one’s hog out for a spin.
If you’re into kinder, gentler issues, two Highland Park rabbit lovers, Lisa and Troy Denkinger, maintain a Web site devoted to helping “bunny rabbits” who are bought as Easter season pets, then treated poorly the rest of the year.
Their Chicago House Rabbit Society page, which covers everything from bunny-feeding tips to a list of veterinarians who take rabbit cases in the Chicago metropolitan area, is at www.webcom.com/hrs/index.html.
Asked why they took up the crusade to help rabbits on-line, the Dinkingers replied via e-mail that they wanted to take global the crusade they started in Highland Park.
“We were able to reach outside the Chicago area to disperse information from some very considerable local experts to other parts of the country and the world,” they wrote.
“We have had ongoing conversations with rabbit people all over the world who have gained valuable information from the Chicago HRS site that is not available anywhere else. The site has been fairly popular, garnering between 500 and 1,000 hits (visits by individual Web users) daily.”
Another local effort to go global is that of the Chicago Transit Authority, which has posted maps and schedules of its “L,” subway and bus routes on the Web at www.transitchicago.com.
If you’re among the terminally nerdy, you can even use the site to compute how many minutes it would take to ride a train from any given point on the system to any other given point. While this stuff is well-known to local residents, it amounts to valuable intelligence for those planning a trip here, note the CTA’s Webmasters, as site designers are called.
Meanwhile, for decidedly local consumption, the Illinois Department of Transportation now posts minute-by-minute traffic congestion updates on its site at dot.state.il.us. Soon, say IDOT executives, people will be using cellular-phone modems to access the traffic maps from laptops in their cars.
The Illinois Web scene definitely transcends the secular.
With the death of the widely venerated Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the Archdiocese of Chicago took steps both to seek beatification for the cardinal under the ancient proceedings of the Vatican and to post an ultramodern Bernardin memorial Web site filled with tributes and tales of the blessings he brought to the faithful. It is posted at www.archdiocese-chgo.org.
Many area Catholic parishes have their own Web sites, and most of them now carry hot links to Bernardin’s electronic epitaph right along with posted times for masses, confession and the weekly total in the contributions baskets.
Along with churches, museums find a particularly apt niche on-line.
Even as Bernardin was losing his battle with cancer, the Chicago Historical Society used the Web to mark the 125th anniversary of the Great Fire of 1871 by posting virtually all of its fire-related archives at http://www.chicagohs. org.
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago shut down its enormous collections of Egyptian art last year for museum renovations but made up for it by creating a magnificent Web site replete with photographs of thousands of art treasures along with huge stores of monographs, essays and other scholarship. This virtual museum awaits anyone with a browser at www oi.uchicago.edu.
Of course, on the Web you don’t need a public endowment or ties to a great university to start your own museum.
Bill Swislow, a Chicago Tribune editor on the Internet side of the editorial department, has built such a museum at www.mcs.com/-billsw/home.html on the Web.
Swislow has devoted his personal Web page largely to a stunning tribute to a wonderful Chicago eccentric named Joseph “40,000” Murphy, a lifelong bachelor and lieutenant to usher-industry magnate Andy Frain. Murphy’s nickname evoked an amazing collection of thousands of photographs he had taken with the great, the near great and the obscure whom he met over four decades of ushering at the city’s great public arenas.”
Another highly imaginative if quirky Web project is underway at Gordon Lake’s Chicago Web. Lake, a freelance television producer who dreams of becoming a soap opera impresario, has created a Web-based drama called “Lake Shore Drive” in which an assortment of attractive young women and men with apartments along the lakefront yuppie corridor have posed for photographs to illustrate a digital daytime drama every bit as sordid and complex as “The Young and the Restless.”
The story unfolds in the form of e-mail messages the melange of characters sends among their group with titles like “Bruce Gets Upset with Jake,” “Skip and Angela Face Off” and “Kevin Tries to Get Laura Back.”
Right now the photos of these real people illustrate stories that Lake and other writers make up, but Lake said he plans to replace the still photos with video clips, and then those pictured in “Lake Shore Drive” will have to act as well as pose.
“Soon,” said Lake, “the Web will take the place of cable television, and I will be ready with my library of soap opera episodes and with the ability to sell clients the sort of low-cost video production that a Web environment will make a reality.”
Matt Hucke, a Chicago computer programmer, says that when he moved here from St. Louis to start his career, he came to believe that the most fascinating thing about the city was its cemeteries. Now he has built an eerie Web site, www.graveyards.com, devoted to touring the great resting places of Graceland Cemetery, Rosehill Cemetery, Oakridge, Woodland and tiny Bachelor’s Grove, the last of which Hucke’s “Chicago Graveyards” site calls the “most haunted cemetery in Chicago.” It’s “small, barren and badly vandalized, but world-famous for its numerous sightings.”
All over the landscape are Swislows, Lakes and Huckes in training at schools where homework includes learning how to write hypertext markup language (HTML) the essentially simple code used to create these pages.
In the tiny central Illinois hamlet of Morrisonville, the second grade class at Morrisonville School has posted its survey of local water wells along with a class photo on its Web site at http://web.isbe.state.il.us/bbergdol/sec grdhpg.html.
Meanwhile, in Chicago’s South Side inner-city Grand Boulevard neighborhood, nearly a dozen students at Du Sable High School have posted personal pages on the school’s Web site at http://www.dusable.cps.k12.il.us.
One of the more striking Du Sable student pages is that of Ken Higgins, which features a happy picture of planet earth as a big blue marble that then explodes into huge balls of orange flames using the latest Internet animation technology.
Corporations, too, sense tremendous potential in the Web. Marketing gurus everywhere cite the happy reality that the Web not only displays the same hype and propaganda as do other media, it also makes the pitches interactive in a way no magazine ad, television commercial or radio spot can match.
One of Chicago’s leading designers of corporate Internet sites, Michael Hakimi, chief executive of American Information Systems Inc. on North Michigan Avenue, recalled pioneering this aspect of the Web for Sara Lee nearly two years ago.
Hakimi, a twentysomething computer genius who started his company with two school chums in 1993, worked this wonder by turning the sizing charts printed on each pack of L’eggs into an interactive sales tool. A customer simply types in her height, weight and color preferences and up pops a form that lets her buy hose that fits with just a few clicks of the mouse.
“We’ve come a long way from just pantyhose, but that early job really shows the potential,” said Hakimi, who now lists among his clients more than 50 companies and institutions from Ameritech to Zurich/Kemper Insurance Inc., from Allstate to United Airlines.
The Web, of course, is a global affair, and its offerings worldwide far exceed the Midwestern sites built by such local talent.
While the archdiocese of Chicago venerates the late Cardinal Bernardin at its site, the far more sophisticated Vatican Web site in Rome offers a stunning glimpse of the papal archives, antiquities and treasure at www.vatican.va.
In addition to the Tribune and Sun-Times sites, the Web includes one holding the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist of London, Paris Match and The New York Times along with hundreds of other newspapers, magazines and newsletters.
Entertainment giant Time Warner’s Pathfinder site (http://pathfinder.com) holds not only the content of Time, People and Sports Illustrated magazines. It also offers movie clips of Warner Bros. films, sample chapters from Time Warner books and sound clips of tracks on CDs by the conglomerate’s record companies, among them Elektra and Warner Records.
Virtually every major university offers Web sites that embody whatever the sponsoring institution favors most.
Likewise for the world’s museums, its art galleries, hotels, governments and virtually all other forms of organized human endeavor.
And in addition to institutions, nobody knows how many individual Web pages like those posted by Swislow, Lake and Hucke are out there, but they surely number in the tens of thousands, perhaps even in the millions.
Already the Web has been described as television with “50 million channels.” By this time next year, there likely will be 100 million channels. They’ll be as close to you as the nearest personal computer or TV set.
Each of these channels, in the Internet sense, is called a Web “page” and each Web page is a collection of data on some computer somewhere that holds words, pictures, sounds and/or animations posted on the Internet by someone or some institution.
The computer giant Digital Equipment Corp. made a recent attempt to count all the the pages on the Web. The company used a program called a “spider” in combination with ultrahigh-speed computers to call each Web page automatically. This Netwide census turned up 54 million Web pages.
Digital then used a bank of its computers to index the content of each page and posted the resulting binary Baedeker at its own Web site at www.altavista.com. Altavista thus becomes the card catalog of the huge global library known as cyberspace.
And everything in cyberspace soon will be playing on a computer-or a television set-near you.
That’s right, a TV set.
A creature of computers and the Internet in its origins, the Web is fast becoming a fixture on the shelves of consumer electronics stores where shoppers encounter gadgets like “WebTV,” a box very much like the Sega game machine that hooks into the back of sets along with the antenna.
But with WebTV and its competing devices, instead of playing “Sonic the Hedgehog” with game paddles, you click a remote control box and move from Web channel to Web channel on your screen.
With the WebTV boxes already selling briskly, executives in Glenview at giant Zenith Electronics Inc. boast of plans simply to build such Web reception into a new generation of TVs that will start reaching the market this year.
In downtown Chicago, experts at the cable set-top boxmaker General Instrument Inc. say that they, too, are building Internet receivers for TV sets that will draw down Web offerings via cable television connections.
And Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. enters the fray with its own line of Web page set-top receiving boxes.
Soon, say marketing gurus at all these companies, the Web will expand the horizon of channel surfing from today’s 82 choices to, quite literally, millions of new channels.
Already, the arcane addresses for the channels that fill Altavista have swept into the American vernacular.
In conversation one refers to the Altavista site as “double u, double u, double u dot altavista dot com.” The “w’s” (for World Wide Web) are followed by the site name, then a three letter designation for the type of site. “Com” at the end means commercial. There also are sites called “gov” for government, “edu” for colleges and universities and “org” for nonprofit entities.
Seven million families with accounts on America Online now can say they get their e-mail at aol.com (pronounced “ay oh el dot com”). Another 4 million get theirs at “CompuServe dot com.” Students enroll at Northwestern and tell their parents to e-mail them at “en double u u dot edu,” or nwu.edu.
Such addresses serve also as the equivalent of broadcast call letters for the channels of the Web. One types these codes into a Web browser and the computer calls up the corresponding page with all of its offerings, usually in a matter of seconds.
Sometimes, however, the pages are slow to appear and people start to complain about gridlock-so many browsers cluttering the telephone lines of the planet that the InfoBahn backs up like the Dan Ryan Expressway on a wet winter afternoon.
Of course in this very gridlock lies still more evidence that the World Wide Web that was virtually unknown two years ago is now world wide with browers on every continent “surfing the net.”
And so futurists, waxing poetic about the huge variety that humankind in all its hues, flavors and varieties is bringing to the World Wide Web, sometimes quote the trailer of an old sci-fi television show to describe this enormously varied landscape suddenly before us all. The Web, they say, is the space that extends from your inner mind to its Outer Limits.
Cyberspace, still other computer lovers are wont to say, is the space between one’s ears.
And while all that is true, the Web is created by women and men who sit in front of computers. And those computers are in real places-places like Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Boston, Columbus, Ohio., and, above all, Chicago.
A major reason for the heavy footprints being made by the Midwesterners is that Chicago, and the state that engulfs it was home to most of the founding geniuses who, in fact, created today’s World Wide Web out of cybernetic whole cloth while laboring away in the computer labs at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Urbana-Champaign.
The computer geniuses behind the breakthrough split into two camps. One, led by a young man named Marc Andreessen moved to California and became Netscape Communications Inc., maker of the world’s most popular Web software, called Netscape Navigator. The other camp, led by another U. of I. Internet maven named Tim Krauskopf and a venture capitalist, Douglas Colbeth, settled in Naperville to become Spyglass Inc.
Spyglass programmers are the force behind mighty Microsoft Corp.’s competing Internet package, called Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The resulting “browser wars,” pitting the enormously successful Netscape against Bill Gates’ gigantic Microsoft, have become a business and pop culture legend of the mid-1990s as the two companies go head to head in the battle for Web hegemony.
At the center of the Web is “Mosaic,” a piece of software developed by computer scientists at the same National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
“Mosaic” amounts to a scheme for translating the vast content of the Internet into a graphical experience. The World Wide Web amounts to that part of the Internet designed to take advantage of Mosaic’s so-called graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounced GOO-ee), and let visitors get their information by pointing and clicking with a computer mouse rather than by using the complex text commands upon which the underlying Internet structure is based.
Of course, beyond just making text come to life as pictures rather than green words glowing on a black screen, Mosaic does much more by allowing computers to display photographs, play sounds, display animations and even run movies.
In essence, Andreessen took the parts of Mosaic that he invented at the U. of I. and used it to create Netscape, while Spyglass co-founders Krauskopf, the company’s chief technology officer, and Colbeth, its chief executive, retained the rest of the technology and began a business of licensing it to other companies such as Microsoft and a raft of similar blue chips.
Now, said Krauskopf, the computer experts at Spyglass must anticipate the next great move of the Internet.
He predicted that the future will belong to Spyglass if it can move the technology now on computers and TV sets and place it in even smaller and less specialized devices. This concept, he said, is to “embed our technology in a huge variety of devices.”
Some of these devices are fairly obvious, such as adding a Web browser to a telephone or taking advantage of the various ways in which Web connectivity can be built into television set-top boxes and even hand-held personal electronics gadgets like a Sony Walkman or a Sega Game Boy.
But there are far less obvious applications as well. And it is here that Spyglass sees its best hope for moving from being an enormously lucrative business to becoming downright filthy rich, according to Krauskopf and other company officials.
For example, said Krauskopf, Spyglass has plans to build software that will let companies like Coca-Cola or Pepsi put all their machines on the Web so that delivery truck drivers can send questions to each machine over phone lines to find out how much soda is in each.
“And we’ve got thoughts about gasoline pumps the same way,” added Krauskopf, who noted that already many service stations have hooked their gas pumps to the Internet by the simple process of installing credit card scanners in them.
“That means that every gas pump in the country can be on the Internet and start offering a variety of services and information in addition to gasoline,” said Krauskopf.
For example, he said, gas pumps could offer printouts of maps to nearby locations along with fuel. Or they could simply be used to advertise specials on sale inside the stations. They also could be used like bank Automatic Teller Machines to let people join gasoline co-ops and get their fuel by entering PIN numbers, he added.
“The point here,” said Krauskopf, “is that things are changing fast and new opportunities come with every change.
“If you would have suggested putting a Coke machine on the Internet two years ago, people wouldn’t even have been able to picture what you were talking about.
“Now,” he added, “it makes sense.
“I guess it makes you wonder what we’re going to wire up next.”
