Chapter 5: Better Access To Better Data

Surfing The Internet

ISDN speed makes "surfing the Internet" a fast-moving and exciting adventure. Which means that this graphically intensive worldwide information highway becomes just that - graphic. User interfaces such as Mosaic, Netscape and others come alive - with full-color visuals, previews and other images replacing unrelenting pages of underlined type.

The Internet, of course, offers an almost unbelievable array of information, from recipes for chocolate cookies and around-the-clock discussions of current soap operas, to worldwide e-mail, international research data, and earnest disputations on the swirled tracks of a top quark.

Yet the Internet is also the most visually intensive system in the world - with photographs of almost every conceivable kind, art from museums and collections around the world, scientific and engineering images from virtually every discipline, global video discussions, and more. They are all on-line, available to the persistent researcher.

It is speed, too, that makes this incredible size and complexity less daunting, more accessible, more useful.