MBONE: Multicasting Tomorrow's Internet
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Once upon a time, not so long ago, the words Internet and multimedia were rarely mentioned in the same sentence. Although you could download GIF images or sound files from an FTP site and then view or listen to them on your PC, the Internet experience itself was far from a multimedia extravaganza. Indeed, until the advent of Mosaic and the phenomenal popularity of the World Wide Web, accessing the Internet was like reading the front page of the Wall Street Journal: lots of good information, but gray, without pictures, and dull on the eyes.In 1993, a computer program called Mosaic changed all that. Mosaic is a browser -- a program that allows users to use the Internet's World Wide Web. For the first time, true multimedia -- the mixing of various media such as text, images, sounds, and movies -- came to the Internet. Today, not only can you download those sorts of files, but you can also experience them while you are online. And, if you have anything to say, you can even present your information, complete with mixed media, on your own Web page.
The World Wide Web continues to grow in popularity, but most of us have limited bandwidth resources. We use poky 9600 bps and 14.4 Kbps modems to send and receive data, but in the world of full multimedia we're going to need much faster access. After all, 14.4 Kbps means 14,400 bits of information every second, and even with good data compression technology, we're lucky to hit 38,800 bits per second regularly. At these speeds, video or audio files that are more than a few minutes long can take an hour or more to transfer to a PC, so if you're waiting to see Gone with the Wind or hear Wagner's entire Ring cycle, forget it. Even users who are lucky enough to access the Internet with a 28.8 Kbps modem get tired of waiting for things to download.
As a result of this bottleneck, most people get only text and graphics files from the Web. Text and still image files are generally small, so you don't need to wait too long to view them, but anyone who has waited for a graphically heavy Web site, such as Time Warner's Pathfinder, soon realizes how frustrating even this experience can be. Although audio and animation are both possible on the Web, you need a much faster connection (or the patience of a saint) to send and receive the huge audio and video files that would enable you to take full advantage of Internet multimedia.
Figure 1-1: Time Warner's Pathfinder Web site -- a great resource, but the images can make it slow going
On the Internet, and typically in real life, new technologies are first available to a core group of inventors and experimenters. If the new technology is good enough, or interesting enough, or worthwhile enough, word gets out. Other folks begin to hear about the wonders of the new technology, and they want to try it. They find out what they need, and then they spend whatever time and money is necessary. Slowly, the technology gains wider and broader acceptance, with more and more people taking part, until at last it becomes so common that it's practically a household word. Consider, for example, electronic mail. Or the World Wide Web. Or the waffle iron.
What's interesting about the Internet these days is that new technologies don't get much of a experimental period. The Net had more than a decade to shake itself out, from the time of its inception in 1969 to the beginnings of its widespread use in the early 1980s. After that, especially beginning in the late 1980s, new technologies started moving from someone's brain to common use in a matter of a couple of years or even less. Mosaic, the famous World Wide Web browser, is an excellent example. First introduced in February 1993, and solely for UNIX's X Window platform, Mosaic became an important program for thousands of UNIX, Windows and Macintosh users by the end of 1993, and it became probably the most written-about computer program in the world by the middle of 1994. If you want to invent an Internet technology today, you'd better plan to introduce it less than a year after you start working on it, or the technology will likely be out of date by the time it hits the Net.
Nevertheless, important technologies take time to develop. Sometimes, a technology is so complex that years of research are needed to get it to work at all. Other times, the technology demands so much of related technologies that only a few people in the world have the equipment necessary to even get an inkling of what the technology is about. Over the past few years, something called the MBONE has been making its way onto the Internet slowly and experimentally. But its use is about to increase exponentially, because even those of us who today rely on mere modems will soon have access to the technologies that are necessary to bring the MBONE into our homes and offices.
Today, "regular Internet users" are at the cusp of a new multimedia revolution. Users who are pushing the limits of a 14.4 Kbps connection can already use some cool new multimedia tools (some of which are discussed in Chapter 3). In the coming months, true multimedia will become more commonplace for "regular users" as bandwidth limitations decrease and as hackers continue to improve compression methods for stuffing more information down that thin 14.4 Kbps link. Then, too, 28.8 Kbps modems will soon be cheap enough to replace the 14.4's completely, helping to ease the data bottleneck even further.