PUBLICATION DATE Tuesday. November 3, 1992 EDITION ALL EDITIONS SECTION DISCOVERY SERIES This is the second in a two-part series on the Internet, the information highway that links 6,000 computer networks around the world. HEADLINE GETTING UP TO SPEED ON THE COMPUTER HIGHWAY. Overcoming real problems in a virtual world. See end of text for sidebars BYLINE By Joshua Quittner. NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER LENGTH 274 Lines BARRY KORT, READY to leave the real world for the virtual world, logs in to Chezmoto, a powerful mainframe computer at the artificial intelligence lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kort sits at a personal computer in his Boston home but has connected, over normal telephone lines - and over the Internet - to a place he's building that pulses within Chezmoto's circuits. Words rather than pictures fill Kort's screen, welcoming him to Cyberion City, a simulated 24th Century space colony: "You are among the adventurous and moderately wealthy few who have decided to visit (and perhaps dwell) in Cyberion City, the largest space city in the solar system." Dozens of users can log in for free and interact - "chat" with each other by typing out messages, build things together out of computer code - and explore the invisible landscape of this computer-generated world. It's an example of a MUSE, a multi-user simulation environment, one of the hottest things today on the 6,000 interconnected networks that comprise the Internet, the world's biggest information highway. If the Internet were the physical world, it would echo with the sounds of hammers and saws and pneumatic wrenches. But it's the virtual world - the one that can be seen only on a computer screen - that's booming with activity. From Michael Hart, who is assembling a library of 10,000 classic books, to researchers at Xerox who are building a "virtual office," to Vinton Cerf, who's designing information-gathering robots, Internet experts are trying to make the Internet more useful. Several problems have limited the Internet's appeal: much of the information on it is technical and scientific; many of the interactive uses seem trivial. Most troublesome of all, it contains so much information that it's hard to find what you need, or even figure out how to look for it. Within the past three years, however, new ways of navigating the networks have been developed, helping users to scan thousands of databases by making selections from central menus. "What we had was a library where all the books were dumped on the floor and there was no card catalogue," Ed Krol, author of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet," said. "Now there's a card catalogue and people are starting to put the books on the shelves." In fact, librarians are one of the biggest new communities to thrive on the Internet. They have begun fulfilling requests for documents by electronic mail, and are working on better ways to organize on-line card catalogues. But they're not the only newcomers. Graduate students in the humanities use the Internet to research dissertations and to find databases of grants to fund research. Businesses are bringing their employees on line. At IBM, which started allowing employees Internet access in 1990, more than 8,000 people are now on-line; they are joining at the rate of 1,000 people a month. The IBM workers use it to keep up with their peers outside the company - "to improve their technical vitality," said Howard Funk, who initiated the Internet program at IBM in May, 1990. "The business we're in is very fast moving. If you're not reading the literature or talking to your peers, you're not keeping up." Cerf, one of the Internet's pioneers and architects, said, "We're seeing not only exponential growth in the number of users, we're seeing an explosion in the kinds of interests. I'm on a discussion list for Shakespeare, something that wouldn't have entered my mind 10 years ago." TO MICHAEL HART, the Internet seems a natural medium for literature. Hart, whose title is professor of electronic text at Illinois Benedictine College, is leading a band of volunteers who aim to put 10,000 volumes on line by 2001. That effort is called Project Gutenberg, named for the inventor of the printing press. "When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the price of the book fell to 1/400th of its previous price. That's exactly what we're doing," said Hart, who figures that "Alice in Wonderland" costs less than a nickel to store on a floppy disk. Project Gutenberg books include the complete works of Shakespeare, "The Hunting of the Snark," Aesop's Fables and "Moby Dick." Hart's volunteers, from New Zealand to Nebraska, use "scanners," devices that convert page after page of printed text into digital computer code. Hart said 40 books were now archived on computers accessible over the Internet; the library doubles in size every year. Whether people actually read books on their computers, read printouts, or merely use the electronic versions for research is all the same to Hart. "Put it on a disk and stick it in your kid's [Christmas] stocking," he said. Hart himself is simply an information junkie. "My goal is to have every piece of information in my house," he said half seriously: Now, he has 100 gigabytes of data - 100 billion bytes, about 33,333 pages of text - stored on disks at home. "Some of us, like in science fiction, live on the Internet," said Hart, who on one recent day had received 147 electronic mail messages by noon. "You couldn't have Project Gutenberg without the Internet." And you couldn't have MUSES and MUDS. That's "multi-user simulation environments" and "multi-user dungeons," a diversion that's been sweeping the Internet. Dozens of users at a time can log in to one computer and play, say, the "Dungeons and Dragons" games for which MUDS were named. Users portray characters and compete - usually in slash-and-maim adventures. The computer not only allows users to send messages to each other in real time, but also defines the place where the game is played. So far, in MUDS and MUSES, text descriptions, rather than images, let players know where they are and what's happening. Some critics say that MUSES and MUDS are a waste of precious bandwidth, tying up the Internet's increasingly trafficked datalines with marathon game sessions. A number of places, including Amherst College, even forbade students from logging in to them. But advocates say a powerful tool is being forged here, a tool that allows a group mind - a collective, networked mind - to confront a task and solve it, regardless of the physical distance and differences that separate the participants. Futurists say this may be how the Internet evolves: As the networks become faster, allowing a flow of video and sound, rather than simply text, users may be able to share virtual reality across the Internet. In virtual reality, users wearing goggles and other gear can interact in computer-constructed spaces that appear three-dimensional to the users. "This is just the beginning," said Howard Rheingold, editor of the Whole Earth Review and author of an upcoming book, "Virtual Communities." "Think of a virtual office: You create an environment for a project, with a board room, private workshops, that kind of thing. What if people aren't in one room? What if they're scattered around the world? And what if some are programers and some are communicators - people with different skills are working together on a shared mental model?" In California, at XEROX Palo Alto Research Center, a virtual office is being built. The Jupiter Project began this summer to explore MUDS and MUSES and see whether those models could be used by workers, said David Nichols, who works on the project. The offices and hallways used by the Jupiter people at PARC have been recreated on a MUSE. It shows a flat map, rather than a moving cartoon. Users can "move" among offices, converse, even work on the same spreadsheet or report together. The system allows graphics and audio; video is on the way. Nichols said one advantage of virtual meeting has become apparent: Maybe because it takes less energy, maybe because the experience is less intense, workers are more likely to interact in the virtual office than they are face to face. "The casual reaction," he called it. "It feels like it's easier to drop by someone's virtual office to say, how are you doing, than it is to give them a phone call." Initially, the project will be run on Xerox^ internal computer network. Nichols said, however, that within a few years, virtual offices could be Internet based. After 20 years planning telephone networks for Bell Laboratories, followed by a stint doing work on the NASA space station, Kort drew up a list of the Big Problems that beset the world - things like pollution, poverty, the threat of nuclear war. Then he picked the one he felt he could attack. "I decided to get involved in solving the educational problem," he said. "In looking around for current ideas, I stumbled upon the then-current MUDS that were on the Net. I thought I could take this powerful technology and change it to something that had a social and educational value." Two years ago, with Stan Lim, a California State University student he met over the Internet, he designed a system that allowed users to "build" things within the simulated space station by issuing simple commands like "@create room," and to give them attributes. For instance, the room could be furnished with chairs that wobble when someone sits in them. Cyberion City now has more than 1,500 registered citizens from all over. "We give people an unrestricted freedom to build 100 objects," Kort said. "If they want to build beyond that we ask them to build something of public value . . . All public attractions you see in Cyberion City - the science center, museum, university, shopping mall, entertainment section, rain forest, Yellowstone Park, planetarium - are built by the people." Virtual life may turn out to be one of the Internet's greatest draws. Rheingold, who has been searching out MUSES and MUDS and other shared places computer networks, has discovered an irony: With this new technology, people are trying to reconstruct a piece of what the modern world has taken from them. "In America particularly, but also throughout the industrial world, all the informal public spaces where people used to gather - the town square, the drug-store soda fountain, the friendly neighborhood tavern - have been replaced by fast-food outlets and suburbs and malls. There's been a real loss of community," Rheingold said. "This is a way of lateral communication. These are really places where people can find each other."