Cut off from the World

I've just recovered from a sensory deprivation experience. For a couple of weeks I was without Internet access from my home. Until that time, I had taken connectivity for granted: the Internet was always just a few keystrokes away. Upon discovering that I could no longer establish a connection through my ISP, it suddenly became an obsession. I spent hours on the phone with the ISP's customer service department. I began to resent my brother-in-law, who seems unappreciative that his Internet connection works hitchlessly - and he hardly ever uses it.

Understand that my Internet connection at the office was working just fine, so I wasn't totally without my daily net.fix. I'm also not entirely a newbie, having had 'Net access since the early '80s, back when the VT-100 was an actual terminal and not just an emulation mode. Until two years ago, though, if I needed to connect to my ISP or CompuServe from home, I would unplug the line to my phone and plug it into my 2400-baud modem. Since the advent of the WWW and browsers, I've upgraded to a faster modem and gotten a semi-dedicated line for it (it multiplexes with my wife Jan's fax machine).

Netscape offshoot Navio claims that 50 million people are now connected to the Internet and that the size of the Internet doubles every 10 months. This growth isn't a trend that is likely to reverse itself, despite the skepticism about the "real" Internet numbers and the claims that many people who get connected soon drop out. In many places in this country, people are still suspicious of the Internet. They view it as a source of pornography and as a mechanism to prey on children. For the most part, these people have no direct knowledge of the Internet, relying solely on lurid newspaper articles for their information. Change generates anxiety, and the rapid expansion of the Internet certainly represents change.

The Internet is making inroads into the embedded systems industry as it is everywhere else, first as a source of information but increasingly for device connectivity. Non-PC devices represent only 1% of Internet access device shipments today, according to International Data Corp. in Framingham, MA - but by the millennium (assuming that all embedded systems don't break at the turn of the century), that number is predicted to jump to 20% of Internet access device shipments. Internet-connected devices could include security systems, utility meters, weather stations, vending machines, inventory control systems, TVs, and various permutations of telephones. I suspect that embedded systems connected to the Internet will be as invisible as any other embedded systems. People will have access to information they didn't have before, but they'll probably be oblivious to the technological underpinnings.

You can expect to see more coverage of embedded Internet issues in this magazine and at the Embedded Systems Conference. In fact, a glance at the program for the upcoming conference in San Jose at the end of this month reveals several classes that touch on the 'Net.

My connectivity problems have been solved. Last weekend I reseated all of the cards in my computer, reinstalled the TCP/IP stack, and reconnected the phone line. Something in that process fixed the problem. As is so often the case, it was apparently just a bad physical connection somewhere. I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to fix it. Now all's right with the world: I can e-mail this editorial to the office. And I no longer resent my brother-in-law.