Distributed Instrumentation And Computation: A Look At What's Out On The End Of The Internet

The internet is truly becoming commonplace in education, industry and commerce. It provides a channel for entertainment, advertisement, education and even some good old-fashioned work. The fluid nature of the beast we refer to as “the net” or “the web” is becoming ever more apparent in the form of just precisely what is sitting out there at the end of the connection. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is taking on nearly universal proportions with potential targets being everything from the University Computer Center Server (we used to say “mainframe”) to the COKE machine on the first floor of the Residence Hall. For educators and researchers, the internet is providing a vast communication channel for distributed efforts through collaboration with colleagues at remote locations as well as sharing unique resources such as instrumentation, data archives and laboratories.