In 1993 George Gilder wrote an article called "The Issaquah Miracle," about the wiring of a high school, in which he compares the isolated computer to a "car in the jungle." It is good for all kinds of things, but they pale in comparison to what that automobile could do on a highway. Connecting the individual computer to the Internet put the car on a dirt road. Till now the Internet has depended on large central servers, such Yahoo, and Altavista to provide direction to the millions of PC's. Now we are beginning to think about getting on the freeway. Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and Centrata are heading in the direction of distributed computing, where small PC's are joined to create a powerful supercomputer. We are at the dawn of this event and only dimly aware of the possibilities and difficulties we are facing.

To-date the biggest experiment in distributed computing is SETI@home. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home, at UC Berkeley. Last time I looked there were 2,133,586 computers in 226 countries participating. Collectively they have contributed 323718.28 years of CPU time since the project started a year ago.

Each participant connects to the SETI computers through the Internet and downloads a chunk of data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope, in Puerto Rico. The SETI@Home screen saver works in the background processing the chunk of data. On a 350 MHz Pentium it takes about 100 hours to digest one chunk. When it is done, the processed file is uploaded and a new chunk down loaded. So far no extraterrestrials have been found, but when they are found their civilization will be named after the owner of the PC that crunched the chunk of data it was found in.

Napster is a program that is functioning now. Napster has set up a network of Internet connected PC's to let individuals search for and exchange MP3 encoded music files. Although Napster discourages copyright infringement and has barred individuals found violating copyright, the company has been taken to court by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Metallica for copyright infringement. Opening arguments in the case were heard on July 3, 2000. Napster is being defended by David Boies, the lawyer who defeated Microsoft in the antitrust case. Boies argues the RIAA has lost the right to enforce its copyright because it has used that copyright to hinder the development of new methods of music distribution in an anti-competitive manner. See Boies' argument in pdf format.

Gnutella, another file exchange program was created at Nullsoft, a company owned by AOL. When AOL (in the process of a financial marriage with Time-Warner) realized what its subsidiary was doing it did its best to squelch Gnutella. Since then Gnutella has taken on a life of its own. Legal challenge against Gnutella seems unlikely as the software creates a "peer to peer" network without requiring a central server as Napster does. Without a central server there is no target for legal action. Gnutella can be used to search for any type of file, it is not limited to MP3 files. Hence it is causing concern not only for recording companies but also software and movie companies.

The Free Network Project is "Re-wiring the Internet" to facilitate the distribution of information through the creation of a volunteer network.The Freenet design was created by Ian Clarke, 23, as his final year project for a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer science at Edinburgh University, Scotland. Clarke has become a crusader against censorship.

Characteristics of the of the software include:

• lack of centralized control or administration
• virtually impossible to remove information
• authors and readers may choose to remain anonymous
• location of information remains hidden
• possible to post information without having a permanent Internet presence
• information will be stored where it is needed
• popular information more plentiful

With SETI@Home, Centrata, Napster, Gnutella and Freenet we are gathering speed on the on-ramp of the distributed computing freeway. Where exactly it will take us is hard to predict. We would not be remiss to assume that we may be running into some pot-holes and we may find the concept of copyright involved in a serious wreck.