GenNet Ltd is a multi partner consortium set up to replace the internet usage in some companies with faster more, efficient ways.
History:
1991 - A bunch of technicians at Xerox Pal Alto begin experimenting with new business networks using high speed and large bandwidth fibre optic links in order to get around the limitations of modems and copper wire.
Late 91. The idea is mooted that this new technology could be used to do the same things that the Internet can do but much faster.
All through 92, it's developed by Xerox
Early 93. The Internet, via the WWW, picks up worldwide.
Late 93. Senior management in Pal Alto are given a demonstration. It is felt that this has potential but they would need to move rapidly on this as AOL and Compuserve are already going strong. It is decided to concentrate on the American market for now. Xerox senior management and legal teams are called in while AT&T are brought in to help lay cable.
Early 94. Capital is required to continue development and a small loan is obtained. This is used to lay a cable laid between Xerox offices in Boston and New York. In some places, a laser is used to avoid digging up streets at each end.
March '94. The first demo occurrs between cities which went off without a hitch. This includes real time full motion video and sound. The concept proves successful.
June '94. A confidential tender is put out to various companies for servers to handle the amount of data required. The only two responses are from Sun and IBM. The technical people from all four companies sit down together and begin discussions. It is finally decided that an independent company is set up to administer the 'monster' they come up with and all four companies have equal shares. This marks the conception of GenNet. Rumours hit the street of 'something' i.e. fast, new computers, IBM buying Microsoft, Sun buying IBM etc etc etc.
At this point they're still running a modified Unix, called GenNix. To make sure the system is 'bomb-proof' a large multi-user network is set up at Pal Alto. The software collapses. More technical meetings commence in order to fix it. An ex-IBM worker suggests that they use the Apple/IBM operating system called Pink, which had run into the Micro$oft brick wall. Pink was derived from OS/2 and System/7 and was more robust but had been squashed by the Windows inertia as being non-profitable.
Late '94
The system is rewritten in Pink and Pink is rebuilt to better handle the current and new technologies. Apple technicians also gets involved at this stage. IBM suggests that they do the entire deal, servers, network cables, enduser stations etc etc etc to ensure system stability. At this stage they are still only planning to market office to office. Sun manages the servers, Xerox/AT&T does cabling while Xerox does software. IBM/Apple do front end. Genix was installed on servers while Pink was put on the clients. The main servers consisted of 8 processors per box, in 4 boxes, in two mirrored pairs. This was tested and remained stable for six months.
Mid '95
General Networks Limited is setup as a private company with a staff of 985 engineers and 15 managers. Their objective is to market the new network to businesses so they start putting in business interconnectivity and name the network, BizNet. Little businesses also wanted in. It was then they realise that they have the next generation of the Internet and start laying the necessary broad bandwidth cables. Fortunately most metropolis areas are already wired with fibre optic and coaxial cable which can handle the requirements. In total, nearly 150 million was invested into laying cables, making links and updating connectivity software i.e. browser, mailer etc. Their main aim is to make networking easier to use and to provide an alternative to the Internet as it soon became apparent that the Internet couldn't handle the potential load. There was just too much difference between BizNet and Internet.
1996
After a huge amount of hard work etc etc, the BizNet comes into being. Most of the Internet market is hijacked and they lost money initially because of the unprecedented demand even with the $1000 initial setup fee and first six months free. Finally, near the end of the year, they start making money. Some hackers try to get through to the main servers but fail, mainly due to the sophisticated security developed. Many of them are identified and prosecuted.
When General Networks become public, their icon on the stockmarket is GNET. The name is transferred to the net as GenNet and it sticks. GenNet basically explodes from here on in. Several Internet ISP's and Microsoft try to take them to court but fail. Microsoft wants a piece of the end-user market but their offered front-end fails to live up to the required expectations and standards.
The company is set up by: AT&T, Xerox, Compuserve, IBM, Apple, and Sun Microsystems, with financial backing from several banks and finance houses as it is not expected to see a significant return for at least five years.
The first stage of the setup is to lay highspeed fibre optic cable between every major city in the USA in such an arrangement that there are multiple paths between cities. As with the Internet, high speed servers are used to pass messages along. These initially ran a modified version of Unix until the new Pink operating system is ready. As time went on, more cities and towns were connected.
More fibre optic cable is laid under city streets to provide a high speed access for users. In many cases existing TV cable can be used. This allows very fast bandwidths enabling digital and audio transmissions to be brought in.
By this stage, Microsoft has lost it's monopoly on the operating system market and is split up into operating divisions by the DOJ. They start to market more aggressively overseas.
The Pink OS is further updated to handle the new GenNet system and consists of the base operating system and specialised browser & e-mail software. This was not bundled with the OS but could be purchased as an add on. However, it is required for connecting to GenNet. Many major companies start doing versions of their software for Pink i.e. Corel, Adobe. Pink takes about 40% of market share with Windows (60%) of home PC market.
Present day
By the end of the millennium, GenNet is all over the USA allowing rapid video/audio streaming, teleconferencing and other data transfers that were not practical using the Internet. GenNet's e-mail system even allows large video and audio attachments as users had the speed to download such things. City users have fibre optic cabling run into their homes which provides the fastest access. More outlying users could connect using satellite dishes to either a geosync satellite or a repeater station on the nearest mountaintop. Portable users could use satellite link modems. Access using this method isn't quite as fast.
Gateways are developed between the GenNet and the world wide Internet. In most cases traffic in both directions are transparent to the user but any data from GenNet that the Internet couldn't handle is filtered out by the gateway. Thus all of the Internet is accessible from GenNet but not the other way round.
Users have a choice of two types of GenNet connections. Fixed: i.e. the user's machine has a permanent link which could be activated at a touch of a button and mobile: which requires dialing into the nearest GenNet node. Most mobile users use PacCards. These are credit card sized cards which contain the user's logincode and most other data required for connection. Cybercafes use a modified browser which needs your user name and password to be entered before access is allowed.
With several million potential users, there had to be a way of telling them apart but allow them to have the user name they wanted. Compuserve's method of using numbers was looked at but it was decided that names was much more user friendly. Hence the concept of group names was devised. These are basically similar to domain names but act as qualifiers to the user name. One person could register a group name then allow their friends and associates to tack their user names onto it. A user has to have a group name. Initially a default group name of gennet-user was offered but this rapidly became unwieldy.
For instance: user mercury registers the group name silver-millennium. This results in the user name mercury.silver-millennium. That user can then allow other people to join so that user names such as mars.silver-millennium, venus.silver-millennium, jupiter.silver-millennium are created. Thus a message to mercury would be addressed to mercury.silver-millennium. If the destination group name is left off then it is assumed to be the same as the source group name.
A further extension was later added to allow users with more than one machine sharing the same user.group to have a node number prefixed by a #. If the # portion is left off the address then, depending on the user's profile, any machine would pick up the messages, or the specified default machine will be used, whereas using the # will limit it to that specific machine. Thus a user with a desktop and a laptop could have machine addresses of mercury.silver-millennium#1 and mercury.silver-millennium#2. #0 is the default and means either any machine belonging to that user, or the primary machine selected by that user.
User and group names can be up to 255 characters each and can contain any character on a standard ASCII keyboard except for space . # / \ < > @ and ~. It is recommended that uppercase letters not be used as some systems treat them as lowercase. / and \ are treated the same and are used for URL's, @ and ~ are used for Internet addresses and < and > are reserved for future use.
Blackeagles's group name is BE. Most other companies use their company name as a group name, while individuals are usually associated with whatever they decided on, usually the name of a club or society. It is not uncommon for a user to be associated with more than one group name. In this case aliases are set up for that user in the GenNet system so that messages end up at one usercode, known as the primary.
This implies that users need three things to log in, their user name, group name, and password. However, this means they can log in from anywhere that has a gennet connection and retrieve their mail, unlike the Internet where you connect to a specific ISP. Think of GenNet as one huge ISP. A user's mail could be stored on any one of several physical hosts and is accessed through GenNet's internal mail directory. All that is transparent to the user. The physical host used is usually the one closest to the user. Once a user registers a change of address the physical host they use can also change if they request it.
Newsgroups on the GenNet work the same as the Internet with the same naming conventions, but multimedia attachments are allowed. All the UseNet hierarchy is mirrored on the GenNet although there are several which are GenNet specific. All of them are prefixed by gnet.
Similarly users can set up WebSites. These can be stored physically on any Web Server machine on the GenNet but, as far as the user is concerned, there is only one HUGE WebServer. Each group name has it's own welcome page which is only modifiable by the person who registered the group. As a new user is added a new link is automatically added to that page which is an e-mail link. If a user in the group hosts a Web page, then a link to the user's index page, which has the same directory name as their user code, is also automatically added. Thus a tree directory would look like:
silver-millenium�����jupiter
�������������index
�������������recipie-links
�����mercury
�������������index
����������������links
����������������gencon
������������������������diary
������������������������gallery
����������������project-akon-99
������������������������diary
������������������������gallery
����������������photo-gallery
������������������������index
������������������������cosplay
������������������������underwater
������������������������misc
�����pluto
����������������index
����������������links
This means a user's home page (if they have one) is in the format <group>/<user>/. The default index page is INDEX, the same as the internet. This mercury's index page is silver-millennium/mercury/index.html but can be accessed by just typing silver-millennium/mercury
Additionally the group welcome page can also have non-user specific pages under it as the need requires. This is usually done for corporate pages. In this case, care must be taken to ensure the page names don't match any user names in that corporation.
Only the webmaster need worry about the file extensions. The enduser doesn't need to. If the string silver-millennium/mercury/links is typed in, the system will first search for a page called links.html in the silver-millennium/mercury directory. If it can't find one then a subdirectory called links is looked for. If one is found, then the page index.html within that directory is retrieved, if it exists.
Extensions were added to HTML and Java to allow for embedded multimedia.
With only one authority issuing group names (unlike the Internet) naming conventions were a lot simpler. Also GenNet Corp learnt from the lessons of the Internet and ensured that no one was allowed to buy names and then resell them, and any name that could be associated with a company or trademark was protected.
Connecting to the Internet was easy. The GenNet browser recognised the internet conventions. Anything prefixed by http: ftp: etc was treated as an internet address and passed through the gateway.
In the other direction, any internet user mailing to a GenNet address had to know the full user and group and place @gen.net after that. Thus internet mail to an operative in BlackEagle would be sent to operative [email protected]. Many GenNet websites are unable to be accessed from outside but those that can would have a name like gnn://blackeagle/info.html.
It is common for Webmasters on the GenNet to maintain two sites, one for GenNet and the other for the InterNet. One extension to HTML in the header block allowed for the blocking of an entire GenNet page hierarchy from being accessed by the Internet. Extensions to the ALT tag allowed alternate material to be displayed by Internet browsers when accessing material only accessible by GenNet.
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