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Copyright (c) 2011 by David "42" Mitchell

Last updated 2011-04-14

Here is the bottom line first: The Internet is ready for the Next Step!

Due to the readiness of Internet users to embrace new concepts and the availability of technology to actually make these new concepts real, things are about to happen.

In 1993, I wrote about this in the closing chapter of the textbook "The Internet Unleashed" (Sam's Publications). Many authors contributed, each writing one or more chapters. The first edition was published in 1994:

Keep this in mind: Since most of the work about the Next Step was done before 1995, very little can be found on the Internet today. Google didn't exist, there was no Internet archiving, the Usenet and social networks of the time are long gone. So, I will be reloading from scanned print media (there is a lot). This is like an archeological dig into the past to explain the future...

Here are the first few links (more to come as I find them):

The Next Step is a large one, and the Lunar Teleoperations Model 1 hints at it. While LTM1 is an example of a subset of the Next Step, it is just one variation on a theme that actually will, in very real terms, change the world in the near future. LTM1 had excellent coverage in the book "The Net After Dark".

Here are some photos that were used in the book "The Net After Dark":

Part of the diorama with the lunar rover, complete with camera and tether

(Remember this is 1994-1996 and no one had done this before - IP cameras did not exist

and a lot of equipment was off-camera doing video to IP conversion and serving)

A close-up of one of the diorama paintings (all original space art) and the rover

The rover was an old remote controlled toy tank. We removed the gun turret, rewired the motor control,

installed the camera, added a tether with cables and built a back-end system

This is the live video feed as seen on a VGA monitor of a 386 (!) PC computer. Since video browsers did not exists yet, I wrote a custom software browser that allowed video reception, remote control and chatting. The software was written in QuickBasic, compiled to an .exe, which runs on all version of windows, except vista, even today!

Since we were dealing with pre-Pentium processors, the video codecs were developed from scratch and written in assembler and called as routines within the Basic software. For the user, it meant being able to receive live video over a dialup line with a 19.2K modem and actually drive the rover.

This actually led to my doing work on planetary rovers and a NASA award