Who pays?
Richard Wray's article (Is this lights out for the internet, Online, July 11) covers its physical robustness well but says less about its remarkable commercial structure: here is a medium run in a cooperative fashion. If I fetch a packet from America, Turkey or Chad it costs me nothing, whereas the phone costs to those countries varies widely. It took a long time for this structure to evolve: IBM, Compuserve/AOL, Microsoft etc, all attempted to monopolise the networks and failed.
Now a person only pays their internet service provider and there is no accounting for most of the packets that fly round the network, unlike in the above mentioned networks, where there were often elaborate means of counting the distance that packets travelled and the number of gateways through which they passed. Although a significant part of this is attributable to the nature of TCP/IP, I can't but imagine there will be a continued struggle for control by the companies who run the net, as the rewards of monopoly must be huge. Of course, there is no equality now: I'm sure there is no "free" internet access in Chad or Turkey, nor will there probably be in the UK in five years' time. Someone has to pay. So will the internet "as we know it" survive?
Chris Moss
chris.moss9@ntlworld.com
Shorted
Jack Schofield mentioned some interesting "shorties" in Web watch (Online, July 4) but looks like he skipped out one of my favorites: http://snipurl.com. This has a load of functionality that none of those mentioned has, including meaningful nick names, protected short URLs, quick sharing, statistics etc. And try " http://x.com " at tinyurl.com or shorl.com: they do not seem to have much common sense, but are a great resource nevertheless! Erick Papadakis
erick_papadakis@yahoo.com
Breakthrough
Re PCs content to be in control ( Second sight, July 11). Jack Schofield might have made rather more mention of Apple Computer. He goes so far as to quote Gartner as saying: "The big break for personal computers came with the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981", but this isn't quite accurate; that wasn't the "big breakthrough", that was the introduction. The big breakthrough came in 1984, when Apple released the Macintosh, the first computer to allow editing of images onscreen, the first to introduce different typefaces, and the computer that ignited the DTP revolution, along with most of modern computing. Somewhat later, Windows was released as a poor imitation of the Mac Graphical User Interface. The rest is history, but the Macintosh has done more for computing than Windows could ever hope to. Schofield could have made more of this. Paul Bradforth
pb@paulbradforth.com
Cold comfort
Re You are now entering the comfort zone (Business Solutions, May 30). Working as an ergonomist I read the above article with interest, but was disappointed by it. Are you advocating all computer users sit on typist chairs? Having computers at eye level is not correct for all: good if you can touch type, but the majority can't. As for telling readers that when working at computers they should take a break from the screen once an hour - where did that come from? And you refer to black keyboards as well - but Dell's keyboards are a problem as the amount of glare they give off under a light can lead to visual discomfort. Duncan Abbott MSc, BSc
da@enricosmog.com
BT encounter
I see others are having problems with BT. I have had to start using my other ISP as BT is getting so unreliable. I get disconnected at random from my BT Internet account (not broadband), after anything between 10 seconds and 25 minutes, but it happens far too often. When I feel emotionally strong enough, I will take it up with BT, but I do not look forward to the encounter! Peter Jones
pierrejones@clara.co.uk
