IBM jumped on the Internet bandwagon with a flurry of announcements and press events at the Internet World '95 conference and exhibition in San Jose, CA, this month. The company sent its vice president of Internet applications, John Patrick, to give a keynote address and promote the company's products and services.
Making the biggest splash was the announcement of the 1996 Olympic Games' World-Wide Web server, established by the Atlanta committee for the games in conjunction with IBM. Information on the Olympics, including the schedule of events and ticket information, is to be made available beginning this month and extending through the games, when users will be able to get results of the competitions as they happen. Web browsers can access the home page at http://www.atlanta.olympic.org.
In his address, Patrick expounded several ideas for Internet use that he called "getting connected." He said the Internet and the World-Wide Web are part of "forces of change now under way in the industry, that are causing an information explosion. This will enable a whole new set of applications that will change our lives like nothing since the printing press."
He called for companies to use e-mail to increase their productivity in working outside the organization, not just within it. He also called for the introduction of an information directory that would find Internet addresses on-line. Companies should design their WWW pages more like magazines, he said, and put everything they print for the public on their WWW servers.
"The really good ideas are in the trenches, in the grass roots. Find out who they are and talk to them," Patrick said. "Whatever you spend on market research, spend it on the Internet instead and get the information firsthand."
IBM introduced two new information management technologies to be used with Web-based tools. InfoMarket Search, a network service, can search, retrieve, and prioritize information across the Internet, or private networks, and deliver customized database information to most desktops. The technology, originally employed by the U.S. government, employs a single query to interface with diverse databases from major vendors, merge the results, and present them on Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX-based workstations.
The IBM electronic publishing package for the WWW is currently in beta test. It consists of a compiler that accepts files from common word processors and a server that posts documents, books, or entire libraries on the Internet.
In making its announcements, IBM took pains to point out its historical connection to the Internet, as one of the contributors to the development and deployment of the original NSFnet set up under the National Science Foundation. NSFnet originally connected five super-computers at various academic research centers throughout the United States and used IBM's software management tools. The speed of NSFnet allowed it to divert traffic from the overloaded, defense-sponsored ARPAnet, until it finally replaced ARPAnet as the Internet backbone in 1989. The Internet was opened to commercial users in 1991. Today, it's been estimated, the Internet has 30 million users, with a new network signing on every 30 minutes.