information highway

Entertainment

Drink and drive on the information highway

By Patrick Decloitre

It might be a surprising sight for those unfamiliar with the idea to see someone having a drink at a bar, but at the same time typing away on a computer. For the first time in the Pacific region, a concept already known in Europe has arrived; an Internet bar called Cyberbahn - a first in the Pacific.

To many ‘normal’ people in the South Pacific Island nations, Internet remains a remote concept. What is the concept of Internet? What does it mean to ‘surf’ on the “World Wide Web”?

It’s all about connecting a computer to a phone line through a modem. The con cept was introduced in the late 60s by the US Defence Department as a computer network. Then it was used for E-mail (electronic mail) exchange by American universities and the US Government departments. In 1991-1992, a new con cept, the World Wide Web (WWW), was introduced to a much larger public; the idea was to create a virtual publishing world. The outcome is that now, over 30 million people around the world are using what is generally referred to as “Internet”, explains Stuart Cameron, one of the direc tors of Cyberbahn, the company that set up the service in this Sydney Hotel bar (in the Circular Quay district).

The growth of the WWW was spectac ular; it started with just over a thousand ‘home pages’ (in fact, the computerised version of a magazine, whether it is in The Chicago Tribune or a Jazz monthly), and this year there are more than 60,000 avail able, according to Cameron.

“WWW is very versatile. You have full multimedia capability with sound, still images and video. You can call the latest weather satellite image, then go on to the music network and enquire on the local gigs in Sydney, ask for information about any country in the world, or read today’s issue of The Chicago Tribune. Really, it’s anything you can think of. Now, for the cost of a local call, it is possible to connect

your computer to Iceland,” says Cameron.

Do computers and alcohol mix well?

Apparently, yes: “Everybody here wants to come to continue work, or else they come for social reasons. We have all sorts of cus tomers; the young ones (in their 20s), who like to use the Internet and play pool, but also the 30-to-40-year-old customers who like to have a look at the stock market.

There are also quite a few tourists, so alto gether this is a large spectrum,” says Ben Carberry, assistant manager of the Sydney Paragon Hotel, where the Internet bar,

Cyberbahn, has been operating since July.

The advantages are, with this sort of facility, that you don’t need to have your

own computer - for SUS 11 per half an hour, you can connect to over 40,000 places around the world.

“The system has been designed for the first-timer (or ‘newbie’, but with all the speed and clarity demanded by an experi enced ‘net-head’. It’s the perfect introduc tion to the (Inter)net, as part of a group participating on the one machine or as an individual wanting to tinker with the new technology,” says Cameron.

The newcomer will quickly leam how to ‘serve’; it’s a matter of exploring through a list of topics called “book marks”.

Through these bookmarks you can have

Some youths enjoy their beer and go “surfing” in the World Wide

access to topics as Rolling Stones maga zine, NASA, the Pentagon, Terminator movies, Batman Forever, Greenpeace, Jazz on Line, the French president, Hugh Grant, and so on.

Other ways of finding a topic are sim ply by entering a key word on a specific subject. ■

Web using Internet.