ON LINE

By Manly W. Mumford

Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club November 2, 1998

When you start a project you hope it will proceed to completion in the form you contemplated at the beginning -- no less, and not a lot more. Mostly when things don't turn out as you hoped, they fall short. But once in a great while a project will be completed satisfactorily and then keep on growing and growing beyond anyone's prior contemplation or even

comprehension.

This is what happened after one Robert Taylor, the Director of Information Processing Techniques Office of the Advance Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, became frustrated by three computer terminals in the room next to his office in February of 1966. One terminal was connected to a computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a second to a computer at California Institute of Technology, and a third to a Strategic Air Command computer in Santa Monica. Each of these computers had a different programming language, a different operating system, and a different log-in procedure. (1)

Taylor's office was staffed by himself and a secretary and had a budget of $19,000,000 to support work at various universities toward making advances in computing. He was aware that the various researchers using different computers could not communicate with each other on those

computers because of the different languages and operating systems. And much effort was being duplicated because of that lack of communication. So he proposed to the head of the Advance Research Projects Agency that they promote a system of electronic links among the various computers so that the researchers on any of them could share in the results obtained on each of the others.(2) Such a network could be arranged with redundancy so that if the primary link between a pair of researchers broke down, messages would simply take another path. Taylor's

boss added a million dollars to his budget for the purpose and told him to go ahead. Contrary to popular belief, it was this desire to bring researchers together, not a desire to create a bomb-proof communications system, that initiated what we now call the Internet, although some people who had been working on an idea for the latter did some work on developing the new network.

The concept of a network for transmitting message was not new. Every national postal system, telegraph system or telephone system employed a network. The novel feature of the ARPAnet was the practice of breaking up a message into packets of information that might take different routes along the network and then be reassembled in proper order at the destination. Each packet generally contains the equivalent of between 24 and 600 words, including the source address and the destination address and other housekeeping information. An analogy is that in order to move a house from Boston to Los Angeles one would dismantle the house and ship each piece on a separate truck, permitting the driver of each truck to take the route he thought best. Each piece would be labeled so that the receiving builder in Los Angeles would know which part should go where even though the first piece might not arrive until after the last.(3) This means that if a given line should become unavailable during the sending of a message, the remaining packets can travel on other lines, and when a message is not using a given line, other messages can use it. The previous method of sending information between computers, and used by services such as CompuServe and America on Line, required the use of a single telephone or other line throughout the time that the parties are communicating, just as on the telephone you are using the line even when neither party is speaking. The relative inefficiency of this older practice can be appreciated when you consider how much faster a computer can send information (at the equivalent of several hundred words per second) than you can type it in as sender or read it as recipient.

In a sense, the present universality of the Internet

can be attributed to President Eisenhower and his distrust of the military environment from which he rose. On determining that a healthy defense system would require substantial basic scientific research, he caused the creation of the Advance Research Project Agency outside the purview of any of the three branches of the armed forces so as to keep it out of their individual fiefdoms. Thus the Army could not keep the Agency's work secret to prevent the Navy from finding out about it. And as the original purpose of the ARPAnet was to facilitate communications among scientists at different universities, the open communication of academia triumphed over the secrecy to which the military is addicted. This is not to say that there are no secret military networks; I would be shocked if there were none. Yet the really big one is a free-for-all. For institutions, businesses, and some individuals a special connection to the Internet is available, for the rest of us, a simple telephone call to an Internet service provider provides the connection.

I will not pursue the details of the technical, cultural, financial, and serendipitous growth and metamorphosis of ARPAnet into the modern Internet that seems now to embrace our lives. You may remember how the students at various universities made its wonders known to the public, and how the various computer networks to which people subscribed faced a "merge or die" future as their customers found that what they had been paying for by the minute became available for $20 per month, or free for those attached to an institution with an Internet connection.

Although there is much more to the Internet, the World Wide Web

is the aspect of the Internet that so engages people that they consider the two almost identical.

Now when you hear someone speak of the "Web" this is the web he is talking about. The two

main uses for individuals are for e-mail and for getting information. E-mail stands for "electronic

mail" and involves a sender's writing a message or transferring other information in electronic

form to one or more recipients. Before the Internet came to the prominence it has now, both

e-mail and the opportunity to locate and download information were available to those members

the public who were willing to pay by the minute, but the e-mail recipients were originally

restricted to only those on the same service as the sender, so a CompuServe subscriber could not

send messages to someone on America On Line. The services had and still

have their forums -- opportunities to log onto specialized bulletin boards dealing with particular

subjects. For example, one of the happiest investments I have made was a result of my logging

onto the CompuServe Wine Forum. In law school I read a case involving the taxation of

dividends paid by a winery to its shareholders, not in money, but in wine. The notion of such a

company stayed with me long after I forgot the holding of the case, and when I felt the time had

come, I left a message on that forum asking if anyone knew of a winery that paid dividends in

wine. Two or three messages came back saying that the senders knew of no wineries that paid

dividends period. However, the Chalone Wine Company, whose stock is publicly traded, offers

great deals to its shareholders in the purchase of its wines, and also takes them on fabulous trips.

I sent an e-mail message to the treasurer of that company asking for the information that a

prospective shareholder should have, intending to learn both about the financial aspects of the

company and whether the treasurer knew what information should be provided. When the

package of materials arrived via the sort of mail that the U.S. Postal Service deals with, I was

pleased with the results on both counts. Since then I have enjoyed much excellent wine, delightful

trips to Chile, Argentina, France, Portugal, Italy, and Australia, and half a dozen very cheerful

shareholders' celebrations at the Chalone winery in the hills southeast of Monterey, California.

The sense of fellowship among the shareholders who go on such trips and to such celebrations is

heartwarming; I have often said that I have known of many corporations organized for profit that

call themselves clubs, but Chalone is the only club I know of that calls itself a for-profit

corporation. But returning to the main topic of this paper, the various services

now offer access to the Internet and the opportunity to send e-mail via the Internet to subscribers

of different services. And it is possible for those who do not belong to an institution or subscribe

to a service to use the Internet through any of a great many Internet service providers. One

Randy Smith, who publishes a list of such providers in the Chicago area, lists 99 of them that offer

e-mail, news, and web services, and sixteen more that offer limited Internet service.

One of the near miracles of the Internet is that it was so unforeseen. In hindsight, it seems

a perfectly natural progression from where we human beings were to where we now are. Yet I

don't know of a single science fiction writer who, in his dreams of the future, predicted a world

wide web of the nature that we now have. Whether the Internet is good or bad (and I think it's

mostly good with enough bad to prove that it is a human rather than divine project) it is here and I

doubt that it can be uninvented any more than can the use of fire. Like fire, it should be used with

restraint and with respect to the rights of others. I don't know about sloth, but the other six

deadly sins are very well represented. Pride is demonstrated by those hackers who,

to establish their own superiority in their own minds, send signals that break into the web sites and

computers of others. Sometimes these break-ins are harmless, sometimes the hackers damage or

steal the material that has been stored in those sites. They envy the status that those victims have

earned. Covetousness is illustrated by the desire to get rich promptly through

obtaining other people's money by gambling. If you look for sites whose descriptions include the

word "gambling" or "gaming" you get quite a number devoted to the reformation of problem

gamblers, and others devoted to helping them continue gambling, such as the "Online Gambling

Network - guide to 100 gambling sites." For examples of the anger that is

expressed on the Internet, you may perform a search for those sites whose descriptions include

the words, "white supremacy." As for gluttony, a glance at the search engine Yahoo! showed,

"Search Result Found 37 categories and 891 sites for cooking." Further research gave me

"Search Result Found 0 categories and 148 sites for lust" and "Search Result Found 28

categories and 2559 sites for sex ." One of the most widely known of these is

www.whitehouse.com. Remember that the website of the executive branch of our

government is www.whitehouse.gov. Whitehouse.com introduces itself thus: "We

are in no way endorsed by or associated with the U.S. Government. You must be eighteen years

or older to enter this site!" In addition to the other pornographic items displayed as teasers for

features that cost money, it includes a free link to the Starr Report on President Clinton's

behavior. One question a person might ask is, "Who governs the Internet?" The

answer is about as simple as the answer to "Who governs the wind?" One reason for the

Internet's ungoverned success is that it is ungoverned. The current administration of the U.S.

Government plans to keep it pretty much that way on the theory that it can continue to be

self-governing. Our fellow member David Maher (who has reviewed and greatly improved this

paragraph) is very active, both on the national and the international scene, in the attempt to create

a non-governmental structure that will administer the Internet. A few administrative tasks do

have to be performed, including the assignment and registration of names. Until September 30,

1998 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has authorized and the National Science

Foundation has provided funds for an organization in Virginia called Network Solutions to be the

exclusive registry for the popular top level domains of ".com," ".net" and ".org". Network

Solutions is now operating under an extension of the agreement with the U.S. Government.

Meanwhile, IANA has formed a non-profit corporation called Internet Corporation for Assigned

Names and Numbers, which will take over all the administrative functions of the Internet,

including delegation of domain name registration to various registries. In addition to the

well-known .com, .net and .org, every country in the world has its own top level domain registry,

including for example ".us". None of the foreign registries is operated by Network Solutions.

Presumably the new corporation will introduce competition into the Internet domain registration

system, and there will probably be some new domains. A web site has at least two

words in its name, the first, chosen by the owner, appears just after the ubiquitous www. The top

level name, in this country usually one of the three mentioned above or .edu or .gov or .mil,

appears afterward to denote whether the user is a governmental unit, an educational institution,

the military, a non-profit organization, a network, or something else. Congress

often

considers governing certain conduct on the Internet, and has prohibited the taxation of

transactions made over it for a few years.(4) "Let it grow out of its infancy before we let the tax

man put his teeth into various parts of its anatomy," said one Senator.(5) An exception to this

moratorium is for material deemed harmful to minors.(6) Among the

unfortunate aspects of the new ability of people to communicate with each other so well are the

ease with which it enables human predators to locate and begin stalking their prey. From time to

time you read in the newspapers of a pedophile who logged onto a chat session for children, who

located a potential victim, and who learned enough about that child to stalk and trap him or her.

On June 11 the House of Representatives, by a vote of 416-0, adopted a bill to crack down on

pedophiles who so use the Internet, making prosecutions easier and toughening prison

sentences.(7) The Senate did not act on the bill before adjourning. Whether or not it is revived in

the next Congress, children, especially, should not give out their real names, addresses, telephone

numbers, or other information that would enable a predator to find them. Not

only for the young, but for everyone, is there a need to observe some basic security rules. The

most widespread abuse is by those who are compiling mailing lists (either electronic or postal).

A Massachusetts company that is already tracking the moves of more than 30 million Internet

users, recording where they go and what they read, often without the users' knowledge, has

entered an agreement with some of the largest commercial Web sites to track their users so that

advertisements can be precisely aimed at the most likely prospects for goods and services.

Many individual Internet services already collect data on who uses their sites and how

they use them. This new arrangement would assemble such items of personal information into a

central database containing digital records on possibly every person who uses the Web. The

purpose is to enable more precise targeting of recipients of advertising, whether by spam of the

sort mentioned later or by inserting advertising material on the sites that a potential patsy uses.

For example, if you log onto a site providing tourist information about Brazil, you might be

targeted for advertisements for hotels in Rio de Janeiro when you later check the weather

forecast.(8) To protect individual privacy, the authorities in Europe take a

different approach than our Government. The European Union has adopted a directive requiring

the various members to adopt legislation prohibiting this practice.(9) Of course, this

problem is not new nor limited to users of the Internet. You may have noticed that, after you buy

anything from a mail order catalog you have not used before, you get lots of new, similar

catalogs. One large web site, Geocities, was caught by the Federal Trade

Commission falsely promising confidentiality to users that were asked asked to reveal personal

information about education, income, occupation and personal interests. The Commission found

that Geocities had lied to more than two million subscribers by giving this information to

advertisers and others.(10) Any time you send a store your address, it may go

on a mailing list. This is not much different from traditional shopping by mail. But if you send the

store your credit card number, there is a possibility that someone else will be secretly intercepting

your communication and can combine your name with that number and use the information to

enrich himself. Most of the good stores on the Internet, such as Amazon.com and Land's End,

use data encryption methods by which you can send such information with little fear of

eavesdroppers. Except when you know that your communication is reliably encrypted, don't send

anything over the Internet that you would not be willing to say loudly on a crowded

bus. There is an ongoing battle between our national law enforcement

authorities and the people who write the software for encrypting messages. The former want to

prohibit all encryption that they can't decode. The latter believe that people should be able to

communicate in a way that the government cannot read. The government has made it a crime for

a U.S. citizen to transfer such technology to a foreigner, as if it were atomic bomb secrets.

Recently the New York Times carried a story of an encryption expert who moved to the Island of

Anguilla in the Caribbean and renounced his U.S. citizenship because he wanted "to be free from

the silly U.S. laws on crypto."(11) My own view is that there are people in Russia, Germany,

England, Israel and other countries who are capable of devising secure encryption, and by driving

the international market for this product abroad, we shall forfeit such expertise among our own

citizens. I am appalled at the sex and gambling sites that encourage patrons to let

them have their credit card numbers so that the financial cost of the sins of their choice can be

charged to their accounts. Many of these operations are outside of the United States, where our

laws pertaining to credit card fraud, as well as those pertaining to pornography and gambling

cannot be enforced. Why one would trust a stranger who he knows is evading American law in

one respect to treat his credit card information with honor is a question that I doubt many

pornography and gambling addicts ask. There are precautions that can be taken, including the

obtaining of a credit card account separate from one's usual card, and directing the credit card

company to keep a low limit on it, and telling the company to cancel the card when the owner

believes that it may be abused, but these are loss limitation -- not prevention --

measures. In some respects shopping on the Internet is a blessing; in other

respects it is not. I often use Amazon.com to buy books because it is much more likely than

anyone else I know of to have or get the book I want and to send it to me promptly and at

minimum cost. A few months ago, for example, I got a copy of the Orkneyinga Saga

from them. This is an English translation of an Icelandic saga of the earls of the Orkney Islands

from the ninth to the twelfth centuries that I learned about while perusing the Orkney Island web

site. With Stuart Brent's gone, I wouldn't even try to find such a volume in a conventional store.

I understand, by the way, that traditional college bookstores are facing very serious competition

from Amazon.com because the latter is able to provide students with the texts required for their

courses faster and cheaper. However, on the Internet you can't see the book, or feel the paper, or

lift it, or look at the pictures, or check how well it is designed, printed and bound before you buy,

as you can at a conventional bookstore. I feel that if I check these things at a conventional

bookstore I should buy the book, if at all, from this store -- that it would be wrong then to order it

via the Internet just to save money. If you want to buy something from an

Internet store that does not offer encryption, you will probably find a way to do so by telephone

or by post. This way Internet eavesdroppers will not get your credit card information.

One problem for the Internet as a whole is spam. Not a canned meat product, in this

context the term refers, derogatorily, to unwanted e-mail -- usually advertising. This is not only a

nuisance for users of the Internet, but a significant problem for their service providers who bear

the cost of receiving, holding, and transmitting thousands of messages that those users, their

customers, don't want to receive. Consider the what the plight of the U.S. Postal Service would

be if it charged $20 per month to everyone who wanted to receive mail, and then found itself

required to deliver tons of junk mail without compensation. The service provider whose customer

sends spam may or may not know about it, as the offending message goes once to this provider's

computer and then to the electronic mail boxes of scores or hundreds of thousands of users that

are maintained by thousands of other service providers. Many of the mailing lists for this spam

are derived from web sites that capture the e-mail addresses of those who log onto them. After

logging onto the aforementioned www.whitehouse.com while doing research for this

paper I got several items of spam touting means of improving my sex life. Last

March Senators Murkowski and Torricelli got an anti-spam measure into Senate Bill S1618, the

Telephone Anti-Slamming Act. However, the measure would not prohibit spam, but only require

that the user who receives spam can, by sending an appropriate E-mail message back to the

sender, require that his name and address be removed from the sender's mailing list. Although not

yet enacted into law, this bill has had some effect; I've gotten more than one item of spam bearing

a terminal paragraph that reads, "Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618, further

transmissions to you by the sender of this e-mail may be stopped at NO COST to you by placing

the word "REMOVE" in the subject line of the reply." This bill passed the Senate but the House

of Representatives did nothing with it before adjourning. The Direct Marketing

Association evidently agreed on this approach when its director of public relations was quoted as

saying, "The DMA's goal is to create an online marketplace where E-mail is an acceptable mode

of communication, welcomed and trusted by the consumer."(12) This one-bite

approach enrages more than it pacifies the Internet Service Providers' Consortium (ISP/C). One

of its members averred that this measure "completely ignores the cost ISPs bear in handling

thousands or millions of advertising e-mail messages unwanted by E-mail

users,"(13) The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail supported

Representative Christopher Smith's Netizens Protection Act of 1997, HR1748 of the recently

adjourned Congress, that would have provided that consumers will get only that advertising which

they agree to receive. It went nowhere. My own practice, when I receive spam,

generally involves deleting it, but often after forwarding the offending message back to the

webmaster of the service provider through which it was sent with the comment, "One of your

customers is using your facilities to send spam over the Internet." As each e-mail message

contains, at its head, the address of the sender and the address of its service provider, this is not

difficult, but I have found that the senders of many such messages display an unusable return

address. I have no way of knowing how effective my practice alone is, but I expect that it would

make an originating service provider pretty unhappy with the offending customer if ten thousand

recipients of a piece of spam did likewise. Once when I received some spam urging me to invest

money in some scheme or other, I printed it out and mailed it in an envelope to the Chicago

enforcement office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Perhaps my legal career has

given me more faith in present self-help than in future legislation. The best part

of the Internet is the huge quantity of information that is freely available. When preparing for a

trip to Scotland and England early this past summer, I found all the necessary train, bus, air, and

ferry schedules, as well as tourist literature with some pictures and personal accounts by other

travelers. You might not have thought that while sitting at my computer in Chicago I can, within

five minutes, get the timetable for the ferry that operates between Kirkwall on the main Orkney

Island to Shapinsay, the next island to the north. But I can and I did.(14) I like

to think that one source of the greatness of the United States is the practice, perhaps a remnant of

the frontier, of a number of people freely joining in a common purpose, each giving what he will

and taking what he chooses. In the case of knowledge, one can give a hundred units and take

only one, yet still profit. And the group profits even when one person takes a hundred units of

knowledge and gives but one. This is the Internet. Although I had been using the

Internet for some time, I had not contributed to it before Ed Hansen, one of my old shipmates,

asked if I would be willing to let the web site that comes with the service provided by my Internet

service provider be used as a home page for the crew of the U.S.S. Weeden DE797, a

World War II Destroyer Escort. Since his retirement as an executive of Procter and Gamble, Ed

had been taking classes and otherwise learning how to do such things. I agreed, and told him my

log-in name and password so that he could set up the page. In the process, I learned some

rudiments of how to do it. This included obtaining some software called "WS_FTP" that is

available free on the Internet and that enables one to send material via the proper protocol to the

Internet so that it will be accepted, and some other software that my old shipmate sent me to

translate material in hypertext markup language. Hypertext markup language looks like ordinary

English except that it is full of mysterious expressions surrounded by those marks that we were

told in school mean "less than" and "greater than." These expressions are understood by Internet

computers to specify any of a variety of directions pertaining to line breaks, new paragraphs, type

face and size, color of background, the inclusion of pictures and sounds, and other details about

but not part of the written material itself. Hypertext markup language also provides for those

links, very common on the Internet, that permit you to move the cursor to a word or phrase of

underlined text, to click your mouse button, and thereby to switch to some other part of the same

web site or to an entirely different site. Should you wish to see the result of Ed's

work on my site, the address is http://www.enteract.com/~mmumford. If you log onto

that site, you'll find a picture of the ship, her history as written by the former executive officer,

pictures of some members of the crew as they appeared more than 50 years ago, information

about past and future reunions, and links to various other sites. These other sites tell about other

ships in the U.S. Navy during that war, including the U.S.S. Underhill DE682 that was

sunk on an assignment originally intended for our ship. Also sites telling about the type of

Japanese midget submarine that sank the Underhill and about the U505, the

captured German submarine on display at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago.

And a hilarious account of the misadventures of a destroyer that mistakenly fired a live torpedo at

the Battleship Iowa while the latter was carrying President Roosevelt to Teheran.

Subsequently, whenever that destroyer entered a harbor where other ships were commanded by

officers who knew the story, she was greeted with the signal, "Don't shoot! We're

Republicans." Having thus learned of the possibility and technique of posting and

maintaining a site on the Internet, I considered that this would be a good thing for The Chicago

Literary Club. With President John Notz's endorsement, I obtained authorization to do so from

the Club's board of directors, and went about the process. The value to the Club

of having such a site lies in posting information about the Club at one easily available source that

can be searched without difficulty (assuming you have the skill and equipment). This information

includes the by-laws, the dates, titles and authors of papers delivered, the scheme of exercises, the

officers and committee members, The Internal Revenue Service ruling that gifts to the Club (but

not dues) are deductible from taxable income, and the full text of every paper of which the author

has given me a copy on disk or via e-mail. These authors include Roger Ball, Barry Barrington,

Bill Beauman, John Carlson, Sheldon Chertow, Arthur Gould, Amy Kass (the 1997

Baer fellow) Philip Liebson, Tom Pado, Howard Prossnitz, Timothy Robieson, and myself. The

list also includes Thomas McConnell, whom few of us remember -- more about his paper later.

As more and more papers are written on word processors or computers, I expect that more will

be made available to me to be so posted. My reason for wanting to post Club

papers is that a great deal of time and effort goes into them, and it is sad to have the product of

that work (unless published by the Club) available only to those who attend the meeting at which

each paper is delivered, or who get a copy from the author, or who look it up at the Newberry

Library. I have not chosen to post the names and addresses of the members. To do

so could get them on mailing lists, or tip off sheriffs of faraway counties, or otherwise invite

unwelcome attention. I am finishing a project in celebration of the Club's 125th year of compiling

a list of all the papers delivered to the Club in its history. I expect to post this, too, on the

Internet as well as a list of prominent members and former members with brief

biographies. When I posted a list of summaries of papers delivered during the

1996-97 season, it included one delivered to the Chicago Literary Club March 1, 1943, and

re-read by Francis Lackner as a Classics Night paper on January 29, 1996. Shortly thereafter I got

e-mail message from one Donald Factor of London, reading in part: "While

researching a book about the Max Factor family I came across the following entry

in the web pages of The Chicago Literary Club along with your e-mail address as a source

of further information. January 29, 1996 - Francis A. Lackner, Jr. - President; presented

the second of the Seasons Classic Nights at The Cliff Dwellers: "Luck and Witless Virtue

vs. Guile" presented by Thomas McConnell on 3/1/43, it is the story of John ("Jake the

Barber") Factor and his nemesis, an English clergyman. Factor, who ended up in a federal

penitentiary, developed an enormous reputation in England as a financial swindler of

members of the aristocracy and leaders in the professions. Although illiterate, Factor

possessed intimate knowledge of human psychology and the affairs of the stock market,

and, had his ability been put to better use, it would have brought him legitimate success.'

I would like very much to obtain a copy of this paper. It sounds as if it would be of

tremendous help to me in filling in some hidden aspects of my family's history. I am

engaged in writing a personal memoir of The Max Factor family. Jack "Jake the Barber"

Factor was the younger brother of Max Factor and was my great uncle. I only knew him in

his old age and all the members of his generation are now dead. So far I have only been

able to discover information about Jack's later life as a wealthy philanthropist in California

along with some vague bits and pieces about his previous criminal activities in Chicago

and next to nothing about his time in England. Therefore, a chance to read this paper

would be a great help to me. If it is possible for you to arrange for me to get hold of a

copy I would be most greatful." Frank Lackner spent several hours having this

paper scanned and partially put in

presentable form to send via e-mail to Donald Factor. I spent several more hours completing the

job of getting it into a shape that would not shame The Chicago Literary Club. It is now posted

on the Club's web site. However, the amount of work convinced me that, in the future, papers to

be so posted would have to be given to me in electronic form. An Organization that

calls itself "Clay Tablets" and has as its purpose the collection of links to various sites that may be

of use to writers contacted me by e-mail and asked permission to include a link to The Chicago

Literary Club among them. I granted permission, partly because I thought it a good idea and

partly because they could link to our site anyway. We are listed under "Organizations" between

"Canadian Authors" and "Common Word" a site in Manchester, England, that promotes writing

in the northwest of that country. The statistics that are available through

EnterAct, our Internet Service Provider, show that during a recent week we had 200 hits from 67

people who downloaded 34 files. Most of our hits are from the United States but others were

from Canada, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Israel, and Thailand. You may have

noticed an article on the front page of the October 2, 1998, Chicago Tribune captioned, "Fragile

note illuminates city's Great Fire." It reported on the gift to the Chicago Historical Society of the

written order given by Mayor Mason to the Chicago Police Department during the night of

October 8, 1871, reading "Release all prisoners from jail at once, keeping them in custody if

possible." In preparing to write this story, the reporter Mark LeBien asked Kenan Heise, owner of

the Chicago Historical Bookworks, for information about the man who was mayor at that time.

Mr. Heise, having recently published my January 27, 1997, Chicago Literary Club paper, The

Old Family Fire, referred him to me. The reporter did not have time to get a copy, but I

provided him one by referring to the Club's Internet site where it is posted. Some of the material

in the completed article is from my paper. Further, I got the name and telephone number of the

donor of the note, Elizabeth Trowbridge Wild of Fairport, New York, and had a pleasant chat

with her. She also is a great great grandchild of Roswell B. Mason, Mayor of Chicago at the time

of the Fire, and has custody of much family material assembled by her grandfather, Mason

Trowbridge, a grandson of the Mayor. The purpose of this paper is to tell you

about

the Internet as a whole and from the point of view of a user. One of those users is this Club. In

addition, my purpose is to invite you to submit to me your Club papers, hereafter and heretofore

delivered, in electronic form -- either on disk or by e-mail, so that I can post them where they may

reach an audience far larger than the membership of this Club, and where other members of this

Club can find them whether or not selected for publication. I have gotten three

e-mail inquiries about joining the Club. My response has been to reply, giving my telephone

number

in case they would like to know more about the Club and also mentioning the dues. So far I've

received no such telephone calls. The address of the Club's site is

www.chilit.org/~litclub. If that is more than you care to remember or to write down now,

you can also find our site by checking on any of several search engines, such as Yahoo! or Alta

Vista for "Chicago Literary

Club." =================================================================== 1.Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, the

Origins of the Internet, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996, P.12. 2. Hafner and

Lyon, Pp. 41, 42. 3. Hafner and Lyon, P. 60. 4. Omnibus Consolidated

and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999. Title XI Moratorium on Certain

Taxes, the Internet Tax Freedom Act'' applies to State and local governments; Title XII to the

Federal Government. Also see Title XIV, the Child On Line Protection Act that is currently under

attack in court. 5. The New York Times on the Web, October 9, 1998, "Senate

Spares Internet From Taxes" by Matthew L. Wald. 6. Section 1101(e) of Internet

Tax Freedom Act. 7. The New York Times on the Web, June 12, 1998, "House

Passes Bill to Curb Internet as Pedophiles' Lure" by Lizette Alvarez. 8. The New

York Times on the Web, August 16, 1998, "Big Web Sites to Track Steps of Their Users" by

Saul Hansell. 9. The New York Times on the Web, October 26, 1998, "European Law

Aims to Protect Privacy of Personal Data" by Edmund L. Andrews. 10. The New

York Times on the Web, August 16, 1998, "Internet Privacy Deal" by Joel

Brinkley. 11. The New York Times on the Web, September 6, 1998, "Encryption

Expert Says U.S. Laws Led to Renouncing of Citizenship" by Peter Wayner. 12.

The New York Times on the Web, May 19, 1998, "Backlash Against Telephone Anti-Slamming

Act". 13. "Backlash Against Telephone Anti-Slamming Act" above. 14.

http://www.orkneyislands.com/travel/tt_07.html.