Henrietta Hay's Column

I finally did it. I couldn't stand to hear my friends talking about cruising around on the world wide web, being amazed at the breadth of information available, laughing at the funny stuff they found on it, and tossing around "http://www's" all the time. Here was something really big in the computer world - not necessarily sensible, but big -- and my curiosity finally got the best of me.

Also, I always get interested when the conservative politicians start screaming censorship, and I wanted to see what had them so shook up.

With a new faster modem and lot of help, here I am, a cruiser on the World Wide Web in a slightly leaky boat.

There are still, in this universe of ours, a few people who don't know what I'm talking about, and to a great extent, that includes me. I have asked all the experts I know just how Internet works, and have gotten all kinds of answers which sound good but really don't explain it. I am not at all sure that anybody knows.

For the record - not that you really want to know -- this is what they told me. From my computer I pay a provider to open the door to the net. Then a software program called Netscape serves as a tour guide and lets me navigate the net in my leaky little boat. The net, or the web, is a huge bunch of computers sitting out there with infinite amounts of information on them. When my little boat finds what I want, presto, there it is on my screen. The whole thing is tied together by, I strongly suspect, some extra-terrestrials from outer space running the whole thing from Venus That clears it up, doesn't it?

What good is the Web anyway?

If it did nothing more than give us E-mail, I would consider it a boon to humankind. I can communicate daily with my sons in Bahrain and Phoenix, with friends in Grand Junction, with friends and strangers all over the world - with the click of a button.

This is the information age, so they tell us, and the web provides vital access to the information highway. (I'm getting pretty good at tossing around the new meanings of old words.) Library catalogs, community information, legislative records, business statistics, current news and a lot of other valuable information along with vast amounts of trivia are accessible through the web. It is valuable for research, although not completely reliable, and great fun for those who are just terminally curious

Each morning I check the headlines from CNN and at least one other news service. I could find today's weather in Moscow - if I wanted to - or the price of rice futures in Tokyo. Granted I don't really care, but curiosity turns up some odd things now and then.

When Erma Bombeck died I found six pages of her best quotes. When I wanted to find out just who started this whole thing, I found the history of the Internet - on the Internet. The idea was born in the Pentagon in the sixties as a means of maintaining communications in case of a nuclear attack.

My young friend Katie had to write a paper on sweatshops. She headed for her mother's computer and found far more material than she wanted on the web. The combination of history, detailed descriptions and statistics would be nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I hope she got an A on the paper.

Congress is trying to add a heavy-handed layer of censorship to the Internet. That is not unlike trying to herd cats. Since there is no central control, anybody can put anything on a home page. With library catalogs, government documents, medical databases, business statistics and whole encyclopedias on the web, making certain words illegal is outrageous. Once again, parents, if you are worried keep your kid off the computer when you're not around. And be sure to check your phone bills.

The web is not perfect, but it is an essential tool in retrieving information. As my friend the philosopher says, it is sometimes useful, quite unreliable and always fascinating. And now I know what http://www means.

[NOTE: One year later, in 1997, http://henriettahay.com was created, and her columns began to appear on the Web. Since 2010, they've been available on https://www.davehay.com/henrietta --DCH]