Preface

In 1996, there emerged a significant new development in the world of communications - the Internet protocol engine.

Leading the field was Allegiant's Marionet: a stand alone application, with no visible interface. This powerful little device just sits in RAM, occupying less than 100K of memory, acting like a system extension and accepting instructions from documents to facilitate the movement of messages and files across the Internet.

Humancode and Ventana also designed protocol engine software, as attachments for multimedia players.

All major producers of multimedia authoring packages announced (or hinted) they would be having Internet protocol engines built into their 1997 version releases.

These small special applications, or bolt on extras, enable individual computer documents to communicate and exchange data across the Internet. They provide all the necessary standard messaging protocols to allow documents to use the Internet and the Web without having to go through special servers.

The significance of this seemingly innocuous development is that it allows documents to be "brought to life".

Documents, instead of being merely passive end-products of data processing operations, can now be designed to become contributing members of complex dynamic systems.

This paves the way for documents, not applications, to rule the Internet - ushering in a new phase which has no precedence in mass communication history.

Documents can be receivers or broadcasters; their client and server roles can be interactively interchangeable. They can be designed to behave intelligently: with servers, clients and each other - independently of human supervision or control.

More speculatively, these new Internet protocol engines, by bestowing upon documents the power to communicate, could be ushering in a new kind of life - an Artificial-Life - with the ability to adapt and evolve on the information landscape of the Internet.

This new form of A-life should be capable of transforming the Internet into a vast intelligence - turning it into a gargantuan brain to create a super power which could evolve to rival and perhaps even dominate the human race.

I know you've heard all this many times before, this is what the soothsayers have been saying for the last two or three decades. It hasn't happened yet, but, by the end of this book you will be understanding how this is not only currently possible but also practical and achievable

Already we are using the techniques of evolutionary biology to design information systems. Object oriented programming techniques are enabling systems to be designed which go far beyond any designer's ability to comprehend their full complexity.

Systems are no longer being designed to be isolated and are being regarded lesss and less as stand alone products. They are designed to cooperate and interact with other systems. Systems are evolving into systems of systems with no overall control or authority.

Who will be in control, when all of our computer systems are inter-locked into vast world wide interactive networks which are too complex for anyone to mess with?

Imagine now, an organizing army of smart documents, acting like vast hordes of ants in an ant colony, building, changing, adapting and learning. There is no knowing where this all this can go.

One thing is certain, the human race is now beginning to build a symbiotic relationship with an abstract entity which could turn out to be a dominant partner.

Paradoxically, this book is going to show you the practical steps which will encourage you to become a willing partner in the creation of this phenomenon.

What this book is going to do for you

To the vast majority of users and developers involved in the Internet, the significance of this revolutionary new development of protocol engines went unnoticed at the beginning of 1997. All previous mass communication systems have been based upon the paradigm of broadcasters broadcasting out to passive audiences; publishers printing for passive readerships.

People can visualize the idea of a changing environment where members of an audience or a readership would be able to take part, or have a say, in the communication process, but, the idea of the vectors of communication themselves being involved is something else.

It just isn't intuitive to understand how protocol engines can trigger a metamorphosis of the Internet and the World Wide Web into something spectacularly new - something that requires a radically new paradigm to appreciate and take advantage of.

It is to this major issue that this book will be addressed. It is designed to put you into a new mind set where the Internet and the Web can be looked at in a new light.

We are going to go beyond the superficial initial concept of the Internet and the Word Wide Web to explore another world to find the real opportunities which this truly revolutionary new media will be opening up.

These opportunities will NOT be found by taking a conventional view of the World Wide Web or by using the conventional paradigms of traditional media. Those paradigms are blind to the many other ways in which the Internet and the Web can be used.

The really big opportunities are going to be found by looking at the Internet in a different way, using the tools, methods and techniques of the newly emerging sciences of information processing and molecular biology, perhaps even some of the conceptual techniques of the ancients which they used to explain the unexplainable..

We shall be dealing with an object oriented world of Intranets and hybrids. We shall be dealing with the interplay between humans, intelligent documents, CD-ROMs, computers and the Internet. We shall be discovering a strange new world of information landscapes, of cybernetic structures and biotic mechanisms; exploring new and exciting ideas - which haven't been possible before the advent of the protocol engines which bring "life" to documents.

Details of book, CD-ROM and online continuation - peter@genps.demon.co.uk