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The most important technological achievement of the twentieth century continues
to play a crucial role in business, entertainment, politics, and the dark world
of Running alike. This, of course, begs the question; what is the NET?
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TECHNOLOGY OF THE NET
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The NET is not an operating system (OS), a programming language, or a type of Computer;
it is essentially millions of Computers installed with software that support a shared
connection protocol allowing them to communicate with one another by receiving and
transmitting neurally-parseable data. To access the NET a person needs access to
a Terminal that is connected to the physical network of the NET, and one of a variety
of interfacing options.
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USE CASE OF THE NET
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The NET provides two different but related uses to the world. The first is global
connectivity for computing. Email, chat, massive data access, etc are all made possible
by the connectivity backbone of the NET. The second, and generally more interesting
usage of the NET is the presentation of "Neurally Enabled Content", i.e. Virtual
Realities known as Mindscapes.
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GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY
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The backbone of the NET is a collection of interconnected servers scattered across
the globe. Though the NET backbone originated with and was primarily controlled
by the scientific juggernaut that is CERN for a long time, the NET Protocol is an
open standard and thus privately owned servers soon proliferated to the point that
no one controls the backbone any longer, and it would take a massive failure of
hundreds of unrelated servers around the globe to disrupt overall connectivity for
any length of time.
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TECHNICAL PROTOCOL
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The basic NET protocol is Neural Translation / Transmission Protocol (NTTP) and
it was created specifically to enable Neural Enquiry Technology to transmit and
receive the data that it uses to create a "virtual reality" session accessible
by multiple users at once. The protocol saw a lot of revision and improvement in
the first decade of its use, but has not been massively altered in over three decades.
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Though the NET is not proprietary and NTTP is an open protocol, CERN has retained
the rights to its development and maintenance. The NTTP Protocol has been periodically
upgraded and rolled out by the WorldNET Committee, a nonprofit organization largely
sponsored and staffed by CERN, and is currently at version "23.21.1b".
The last upgrade was released four years ago in 2029, and was a relatively minor
patch to a low-risk security flaw introduced in the previous version a few months
prior. In other words, the technology is pretty static and sweeping innovations
are a thing of the distant past.
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MINDSCAPES
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The ability of the NET to provide content that is tangible to any or all Human senses
is referred to collectively as "Mindscaping", and discrete content is
called a "Mindscape". Mindscapes are a large collection of NEC units composed
together and designed to impart a specific sort of experience to a user, ranging
from interactive games, to virtual locales (aka NetHoods), commercial shopping venues,
virtual workplaces, teleconferencing facilities, and other more esoteric uses.
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