Chapter 5: Better Access To Better Data

Getting On The Information Highway

While thousands of business, government, research and educational organizations today reach the Internet through dedicated high-speed lines, many more use standard telephone lines. In fact, as many as twenty to thirty million users currently link their PCs and workstations to the Internet through the limited speeds of analog modems, with dialed connections to the "hubs" of service providers or the "e-mail gateways" of Compuserve, GEnie, America On-Line, Prodigy and other information services.

Yet the slow speeds of modems actually undo much of the Internet's graphic power. Mosaic, for example, "the most elegant, powerful, intuitive and beautiful knowledge tool ever created" - as well as Netscape, Hot Java and other key browsers - can often appear not as a fast-paced flow of images from around the world, but as a seemingly endless wait for endlessly evolving screens.

ISDN changes this, and lets this most graphic of databases come to life for millions of potential users.