Looking Forward, Looking Back

I take the reins of IEEE Internet Computing after 10 years of the magazine's existence, and a crazy 10 years it has been — if not for the magazine itself, then for the Internet. With my first column as editor in chief, I'd like to look back at the past decade and how the magazine has evolved along with the Internet. I picked the column heading, All Systems Go, to highlight one of these evolutionary steps. My three predecessors in this position, to which the magazine is eternally grateful, share a technical background in one important aspect of Internet technology: namely, artificial intelligence and, specifically, agents. It's this sort of technology that has given the Web many of its significant innovations in func-tionality and user interfaces. For instance, some sites scour the Web for news articles, identify key themes among them, and summarize the important topics with sets of links to follow for different perspectives on the same topic. However, the Internet has many other aspects, which we can think of as being at the " lower " layers — infrastructure rather than applications. Although I have had a foot in both camps, I come more from the infrastructure perspective than the applications area, and my columns will reflect that. At the same time, the editorial calendar and editorial board will continue to reflect the diversity necessary to describe Internet computing in all its forms. This year, for example, will see theme issues in such areas as roaming, distance learning, the dissemination of rapidly changing information, knowledge management, and media search, as well as new tracks on engineering the Web and Internet economics. So back to the past decade of the Internet. IC's founding editor in chief, Charles Petrie, began his inaugural column with the following remarks: Many ask if the Internet is the CB radio or the 8-track cassette player of the '90s. The better question is whether the Internet is the Los Angeles of the '40s: an urban frontier of the Far West, where every person has a chance to create something new and fine, where success takes only intelligence, creativity, and courage. If this analogy holds true, we have less than a decade in Internet years before it becomes a sprawling wasteland of commercial interests and cyber-carhops hoping for a big break because they have a Web page best viewed with Netscape 3XX.0 or better. Then there …