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AMAZON multi-meters discounts AMAZON oscilloscope discounts INTRODUCTION "The Internet is the biggest time-waster people have ever invented," says the manufacturing manager of a large Michigan plant. "The Internet is a bigger time saver then our CAD system, fax machine, and the cell phone combined," says the chief engineer at the same plant! How can this be? Like the fable about seven blind men describing an elephant, the Internet is both a great waster of time and a great saver of time. The smart engineer will become familiar with the Internet and use it like any powerful tool. What's in It for Engineering and Maintenance Professionals? There are several ways the Internet is being used by the engineering and maintenance professions. The capabilities are available around the clock, 365 days a year. 1. The biggest use of the Internet is communications. Among people who use e-mail, most prefer it to both fax and conventional mail. In one study, 80 percent of the business uses of the Internet were for e-mail. Quick communications is vital in today's business environment. 2. Research for products and locating services. Find vendors of everything from valves to engineering services. Companies can make their latest catalogs available on-line as soon as they are complete, which is much less expensive than printing them. It also saves shelf space and trees too! Because of the increasing cost of paper, expect to see a push for on-line catalogs. Since storage on computers is inexpensive, a huge volume of information can be made available such as complete technical specifications, photographs, video clips, audio descriptions, and drawings. All of it is just a click away. This is the second dominant use for the Internet after e-mail. The driving force is advertising budgets. The cost of maintaining an entire website for a year is comparable to that for taking out a single full-page ad in a leading maintenance magazine. The Internet has directories of installers and vendors. When you are looking for vendors or installers, you can ask members of a newsgroup of interest, make an electronic query from a home page on the World Wide Web, or e-mail a company's postmaster. 3. Technical bulletins and software changes. The latest technical problem and fixes can be available minutes after the vendor's engineers decide to put it on-line. No longer is a lead time of weeks to months needed to publish and mail the bulletins. Also, having the latest information is a click away. Software vendors are light years ahead of everyone else in this area and can give a higher level of support at a lower cost through this method (see below on software bug fix, software distribution). Almost all major vendors of software allow you access to the latest versions of their soft ware. You visit their site and can initiate a download of the latest version. Also, software that you want to sample is available as a download also. 4. Drawings, field modifications, and manuals. The same way you are updated by technical bulletins, you can view manuals and download drawings [download means to copy a file from a computer at a different location (called a server) to your computer. The file can be a manual, a drawing, just about anything]. Wouldn't this be great to access at 3 a.m. when you can't find the wiring diagram? Also, field modifications can be fed back to the OEM engineering departments if that is appropriate. 5. Commerce: parts information, parts purchasing, reducing the cost of acquisition. Some sites allow you to look up part numbers from exploded drawings. You can put your mouse cursor on the part and drag the number to an order form. Add your purchase order number and ship-to address and you have placed an order. This is an expansion of the idea above. You can currently shop for many MRO items from storefronts on the Internet. Major industrial distributors such as Grainger and McMaster Carr have a large presence on the World Wide Web. These storefronts currently cover all types of consumer goods and a few offer tools, maintenance supplies, and uniforms. Encryption (a fancy way to scramble up transmissions) is becoming widespread to allow high security for credit card numbers and bank information. 6. Technical help. Technical help is one of the greatest areas of the Internet. You can ask questions of the vendor's technical departments and get answers back to solve your problems. One great area is called FAQs (frequently asked questions). In every field and on every piece of equipment there are FAQs. These are what most of the time of the telephone response department is spent on. Novices or new customers can read the FAQ file. FAQs are on-line and available 24 hr/day, when you, the new user, have a question. In another variation of the FAQ's area, the technical departments develop a menu of canned e-mails that solve these common problems for immediate response. The technician can then spend time on the more uncommon or complicated problems. 7. Locating used equipment and parts. There are currently classified-ad sections where companies and individuals can purchase, sell, and trade equipment. For example, a local manufacturer buys and sells punch presses completely on the net. 8. Library access. Many university libraries and information databases are available on-line. The Library of Congress is putting its enormous library on-line. A group is making the complete texts of great books available via downloading. 9. User groups. Do you own a CMMS and want to talk to others with the same system? Many user groups are going on-line as newsgroups (see next entry). Here you can read others' comments about the software, ask questions of the whole group, get help, and gripe to your heart's content. 10. Newsgroups. Groups that are bound by a common love, hate, interest, membership or what ever. In early 1996, there were almost 20,000 newsgroups. Topics range from people who collect stamps to people who hate politicians, hate fast food, or love anagrams. 11. Killing time. If you have an hour or more to spare, the Internet is more fun then TV and can be a lot less predictable. In some homes Web surfing has almost replaced channel surfing. Where Did the Internet Come From? The Internet runs on a technique of communication called packet switching. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the department of defense from the late 1960s through to the beginning of the 1990s funded packet switching technology. The first Internet was called the ARPANet. In 1990, the ARPANet was officially turned into the Internet. The Internet is a completely decentralized network with "communications backbones" (high speed communications lines) spread all over the world. It is designed to survive even if major sections are removed or damaged. Originally, it ran exclusively on text, no pictures, color, or sound (although the files transferred could contain pictures or anything else, they could not be viewed while on-line). Packet switching allowed computers to share communications lines, sending packets from many different people to many different people at once. Using packets, early researchers could exchange data, maps, diagrams, and electronic mail (radical at the time). In itself, e-mail created something of a revolution, offering the ability to send detailed letters at the speed of a phone call to many people. MAJOR CAPABILITIES OF THE INTERNET The early network had two additional features (which are still available but not commonly used). One feature was the ability to use someone else's computer as if you were live on it to run programs (called telnet-see below). The other feature was the ability to copy files from a remote computer to yours (called FTP-see below). As this system grew, some high school and college students developed a way to use it to conduct on-line conferences. These started as science-oriented discussions, but they soon branched out into virtually every other field, as people realized the power of being able to "talk" to hundreds, or even thousands, of people around the country. This capability became the popular newsgroups (see below). The last bit of the Internet was the World Wide Web (WWW), which allows for the exchange of pictures, sounds, and video. Engineers at CERN in Switzerland invented the WWW in the early 1990s. E-mail is one of the most used and most powerful parts of the Internet. This links the entire world together and enables researchers, business people, and even elementary school kids to send messages worldwide. There are no extra charges beyond the local phone call to your server. A recent survey showed that over half of the users of the Internet just used e-mail. E-mail has been around since 1976 (when Queen Elizabeth sent the first official e-mail). The World Wide Web (WWW, or just the Web) is the hot area of the net. The explosive growth mentioned earlier is in this part of the Internet. Every organization that can afford $100/ month can afford a home page on the WWW. All addresses that start with http:// are WWW sites. The WWW was designed to allow graphic transfers of information. One of the most powerful aspects is hot links (hyperlinks) to related sites on the WWW. This is also the area of most interest to the maintenance community. The FTP (file transfer protocol) was one of the early ARPANet capabilities; it allows you to visit thousands of computers and copy files to your own computer. These files could be weather maps, pro grams to solve engineering problems, games, electronic books, bibliographies, or just about anything else. FTP sites allow access and have public directories that you can browse (although you have to use the next capability, telnet to browse). In the newest browsers, FTP sites are indistinguishable from Websites. The interfaces look the same. The mechanics of the FTP are handled entirely by the browser. FTP has two main applications. The first is obtaining publicly accessible files from other systems on the Internet. Second, you can use FTP to transfer files between a desktop system connected to a network and other systems connected to the Internet both inside and outside your company. For example, FTP provides a fast way to transfer files from a computer in a university computing site to your computer (and vice versa). Obtaining Publicly Accessible Files There are many kinds of files available to users of the Internet, ranging from research data to archives of information to shareware for different computers. Often, people will refer to these files in postings made to a Usenet newsgroup or in a mail message. Let's say you know the location of a file that you want to retrieve. In order to do so, you need to log in to the computer where the file is located. Many sites allow anonymous FTP log-ins; that is, you are allowed to log in to that system, even though you do not have an account on that system, and get files from that system. In short, anonymous FTP allows those with Internet access to log in to remote computers for transferring publicly accessible files. The Internet tutorial on FTP at the University of Delaware has an illustration of anonymous FTP. Caveat: Anonymous FTP sites are often available to a limited number of users at any one time. This can prove frustrating if you try to access popular FTP sites during "rush hour" (e.g., during the business day at that site). Partially adapted from "Demystifying the Internet" at The University of Delaware, January 27, 1995. Telnet (the other original capability) allows you to go to a remote computer and act like you are directly connected. You can browse the directory, run programs, and do almost anything a local per son could do. Telnet and FTP were early great applications that made Internet computing powerful and useful. As of 1998, Telnet was not too common outside scientific sites (super computer centers allow researchers to Telnet in and run their programs). Newsgroups are groups of people interested in particular topics like real estate investing, wine tasting, or presidential politics. There were over 30,000 newsgroups in mid-1998. Related to news groups are mailing lists. Mailing lists are lists of people with common interests similar to newsgroups. The difference is that the conversation gets sent to your e-mail box. You send messages to the whole group by sending your message to a special address, which resends the message to the whole list. On the Internet there are literally thousands of newsgroups. Search sites are essential in an entity growing as fast as the Internet. These are WWW card catalogs of the Internet (and the newsgroups). Most of them include robot programs called spiders that periodically search all Internet sites for key words and ideas. The search site's server creates an index file from the spider's walk through the Web. For example if you are interested in albino reptiles, you enter the words "albino reptiles" into the engine's search screen and push the search button; the program searches its indexes for any sites that mention the two words albino and reptile. All sites that have references are listed in order of relevance (the number of entries that match or are close to your request). HOW TO GET ON THE INTERNET From Home or a Small Company If you are trying to get connected at home or at your office, then you will have to take three simple steps. 1. You will need some hardware. The hardware will include a Windows (486 or better) or Apple computer with a modem. The modem needs to be hooked up to a working phone line. Modems can share lines with phones or faxes (if you have call waiting, it should be turned off whenever you use the modem). 2. The second thing you will need is an Internet service provider (ISP). There are thousands of ISPs throughout the country. They include the long distance companies and local bell companies. Consult the business section of your local newspaper for ISPs available in your area. 3. You will also need some software. The software is free with your operating system or from your ISP. The ISP allows you to dial into their computer (called a server). The server is connected to the Internet with high-speed communication lines 24 hr/day. Many people such as you share the ISP's high-speed lines to the Internet. In the major markets the flat fee is usually less than $20/month for a 55K (55,000 bits per second) hookup. While there are thousands of service providers, it is better to stick with the larger ones such as AT&T, Sprint, MCI, most of the Baby Bells, and AOL. AOL is unique in the group because it offers additional services over and above the Internet. AOL is also the ISP who sends out "try me for free" diskettes. The newest product (promised for years and now finally available) is high-speed Internet access via TV cables or special phone company hookups (ISDN,ASDL, DSL). In major markets, the Internet is so clogged that actual response times drop from 55K to 5K and slower. The high-speed access ser vices promise 600K downloads. These services are about $50/month with the ISP included. From a Large Company Your company probably has an Internet account (called either a PPP or SLIP account) or its own local server. The first people to ask are your friendly IT department (the computer people). The Internet might be available through a gateway available on your office PC local area network (LAN). In a few cases, the Internet is available by just turning the option on. YOU'RE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET: WHAT NEXT? When you sign up with a service provider, they will send you a disk with the needed software. Follow the directions and the setup will be completed in 20 min or less. The process to set up an Internet account is simple and highly automated. With AT&T WorldNet, my no off-brand modem didn't work with the software. A call on the service line to a WorldNet technician, fixed one up quite quickly. The whole process with waiting on hold only took 40 min. To start an Internet session just click (or double-click-depending on the computer) the Internet icon on your desktop. (If you don't know what "clicking on an icon" means, then you need to take a basic course on computers before proceeding.) Your computer will then start a program that calls your ISP's computer and logs you onto it. The ISP's computer (server) is always live on the Internet. After the connection is made, your computer launches a program called a browser. Netscape and Microsoft publish the major browsers. An opening page comes up on your screen. Usually you start at the home page of your ISP, which is filled with ISP news, advertisement banners, and links to useful sites, including news, weather, chat rooms, and support services sites. You are now live on the WWW. Whenever you want to visit a site, type in the address [called a universal resource locator (URL)] at the address line and hit return. Within seconds, you are surfing the Web. Possible addresses to visit can be found through advertisements, magazine articles, TV commercials, books, or on Websites themselves. As you move your mouse cursor over the Website, the cursor sometimes turns into a hand with a finger pointing. The shape of the cursor changes when it is over a hyperlink (an address of another page). Pushing the left mouse button loads the address and tells the computer to get that page. A hyperlink URL can be located on that server or on any server in the world. This is really surfing! What Does It Really Mean to "Surf" the Net? When you enter a URL and hit the enter key, you are actually making a request for a file. The file is the Web page in hypertext mark-up language (HTML). Your browser can turn HTML into a color Web page. The simple request starts a series of actions that end up with you viewing the page requested. Your server looks up the name of the site and translates it into the IP address. IP addresses are made up of all numbers. The list of IP addresses and domain names is kept up to date by the Internic. Internic is an agency that assigns domain names. After a domain name is approved, it is issued to the domain name servers (DNS) (also called root servers) all over the world. The DNS are the core of the Internet. Once your server has the address decoded into an IP number, it sends a request to that server for the file of the Web page you requested. The request travels along the network wires from node to node. Each node has a router that looks at the address and routes the request to the next node that is nearer to the one you want. Your request for a Web page might pass through 10 or more nodes on the way to the server. The server gets the request with the file name and locates the web page from its hard drive. All Web pages are files on hard drives with specific file names and paths. The server then sends the file (Web page) to its modem and router and starts the same process back to your server. The web page file gets passed from node to node until it reaches you. When the response is slow, it usually means that many messages are being sent at the same time. The routers are queuing the messages (putting the messages into a line) because of the volume. Videos, music, and complex pictures absorb much of the capacity (also called bandwidth). Web pages with lots of pictures, sounds, or video clips take up bandwidth and may move slowly over the Internet. Many people set their browsers to turn off the pictures, video, and sound to speed up the process. It's not as much fun but it does work. The page you requested appears on your screen. If you have a conventional hookup from home, you probably complained about how long it took or how slow the Internet is running today. INTERNET ADDRESSES Each address is unique. An address has three or four parts and cannot have commas or spaces. By historic convention, only lowercase letters are used (this has been changing). In addition, some sites include the path to the directory where the information is stored. In UNIX (the original operating system for most of the Internet) forward slashes are used to show the directory level (rather then backward slashes on PCs running some version of DOS). Parts of an Internet Address Protocol. The very first part of the address is usually http://. This tells the browser to expect hyper text transfer protocol (which runs the World Wide Web). Other protocols could be ftp://, telnet://, and gopher://. Domain. This is the very last part after the period. It puts you into a large category like .com for commercial, .edu for education, .gov for government. Outside the United States the domain might be a country such as .uk for Great Britain or .fr for France. There is a move afoot to open up more high-level domains (such as firm for companies) since many of the common ones are running out. User name Domain The author's e-mail address: Organization Domain The author's Web page URL: maintrainer.com Organization or Location. Each user is part of an organization. For example, a commercial organization tries to get its name or initials, such as omega.com for Omega Corp. Some try to get a related slogan or memorable phrase for the organization, like maintrainer for a company that trains maintenance professional. In e-mail addresses the "@" symbol is the divider between the user name "jdl" and the organization name "maintrainer." The organization name follows the @ symbol. User Name. This is the unique name of the specific user, such as "jdl." Each user is assigned a name within the organization and domain. A user name (like johnjones) could be duplicated in another organization but not in that organization. Many organizations use some variant of the first initial and the last name such as jlevitt for Joel Levitt. They might add a middle initial if the first one is taken. A tip on extended addresses (the ones with slashes after the domain, like maintrainer.com/ newsletters/april.html): If the address you are looking for gives you an error and says the site is "not found," try the following. Strip off the last part and try again. Keep stripping off parts until you reach the domain. Frequently a webmaster will change the name of one page (the one you are looking for, of course). So if maintrainer.com doesn't work, try maintrainer.com/newsletters, and if that doesn't work, try maintrainer.com/. You may get lucky and pick up a reference to the new address of the page you are looking for. How Do You Find Things among the 80,000,000 Different Web Pages? Soon after the WWW was developed, programmers developed search engines. Search engines (there are hundreds now) narrow the search down from millions of sites to a few hundred. A well-designed search can save hundreds of hours. The search engines use different techniques to catalog the sites. Some search sites require submission of a request to include your site to be sent to them. You give them the key words that you want your site indexed under. The first popular search site Yahoo is designed this way. Other sites use programs called spiders to search all the sites on the Web one at a time. The spider takes the text of the site and creates an index of all the words. When you look up a topic on a spider search site, it reviews the index it has created of all the search results. Each search site is different. Now search sites are big business because of advertising. The tops of the screen of many search engines contain advertisement banners. The advantage of banners is that if you are interested in the product, you can surf over to the advertised site with a single click. In the best cases, the advertisement is directly related to the topic that you searched. On one of my searches on maintenance, a banner came up featuring books for sale on maintenance topics. The section on search engines will demonstrate the different sites. ALL ABOARD FOR A TOUR OF THE INTERNET Any tour starts at a transportation center like an airport, train station, or port. On the Internet, the transportation centers are called supersites. Supersites are sites that are filled with hyperlinks to related sites similar to a packaged tour. You can also design a tour yourself by typing in the individual URLs that you want to visit. One of the fears of management (a well-founded one) is that maintenance professionals will go on the Web and get lost for hours at a time. This can easily happen. I suggest that you both schedule the sessions and limit the surfing time. Unlike a bus tour, this Internet tour can take as little as 10 min or as long as 10 or more hours if you follow many leads. You might want to make a journal of your trip. Your browser contains a history file of all sites visited, which you can view. This history file is generally overwritten on a rolling 20- to 30-day basis (the number of days can be set in your browser). Your browser also has the capability to permanently record all the addresses of your trip. If you activate your bookmarks or favorites button, when you are on an interesting page, the site URL will be recorded. The great thing about an Internet tour is you can get off the tour at any time to explore a site in-depth. As you explore a site in-depth, you can go on your own and follow the site's links wherever they take you. I encourage you to stay as long as you like and look at any pages of interest. Jump back on the tour whenever you want by pushing the bookmarks or favorites button and returning to maintrainer.com. Alternatively, you can return to the tour by pushing the back button until you return. The third way is to manually type the last URL that you visited. The Tour Maintenance Consultant and Supersite: Springfield Resources (maintrainer.com) This is the author's site, which contains most of the sites he's visited as hyperlinks. If you find a site you want to visit, just click on it. Find the supersite section; then find Vibration Institute of Canada for the first stop of the tour. Maintenance Supersite: Vibration Institute of Canada (vibrate.net) This site has about 50 links to other sites, newsgroups, and associations. Maintenance professionals will be very interested in many of the organizations. Associations are generally good sources for leads to interesting sites in a particular industry. Stanford is a major university for research of all types. Its virtual Mechanical Engineering Library can be an excellent resource for research. This is a pointer site (supersite). It lists resources in mechanical engineering throughout the university and outside organizations. It also has a research site for predictive maintenance that links to 50 or 60 other outside resources. Maintenance Magazine: Plant Services The maintenance magazines are also excellent supersites. Add to that an archive of articles, chat forums, and advertisements, and you have a potent useful blend. Plant Services magazine has a service where they send you e-mail when the site has changed with the table of contents of the new issue. Maintenance Department Web Page Many maintenance departments proudly promote their activities via a Web page. Some offer service requests via the Web (which is great if your customers are wired). Most of the maintenance departments that I have found are from universities (where every department has a Web presence). Equipment Sites We will visit a sample of the OEM equipment, component manufacturers, distributors, and equipment dealers' sites. The bulk of the interest in the Internet comes from the powerful advantages offered by instant communications with this group. It is recommended that someone in the maintenance or purchasing department make a list of the URLs of the sites of the organizations that you do business with. General Pump (generalpump.com.) General Pump of Mendota Heights, Minnesota, has developed a service on the Internet it calls "Datalink." This site is up 24 hr/day, year round. It features downloadable engineering drawings, bills of materials for their pumps, new product information, discussion groups, training capabilities, and the ability to place electronic orders. Look closely because this is the future of the Internet. Omega (omega.com) The most user-friendly company in the transducer field is Omega. In fact, they are my favorite transducer company. Their colorful and useful catalogs have graced my shelf for almost two decades. I imagine that the printing costs for the catalog are quite high each year. When people start using the Website, they never want to go back to catalogs again. Companies with large, expensive catalogs like Omega or AMP can lower costs, speed dissemination of new information, and improve customer services at the same time. Government Site of Interest to Maintenance: Department of Energy (www.doe.gov) The government is the biggest user of the Internet. It has thousands of home pages for all agencies, departments, and bureaus. The Department of Energy has resources of use to the maintenance field in the area of energy conservation, research, and grants for energy reduction projects. Industrial Distributor: W. W. Grainger grainger.com The 3 1/2-in. Grainger catalog has also been a mainstay reference book for whatever I needed since I entered the manufacturing world. Even as a consultant, I still order things from it. W. W. Grainger is one of the largest industrial distributors in the world. This company has had a proactive approach toward technology. Its CD ROM has been available for years and included a proprietary interface to allow access to the company's computer system. It is no surprise that Grainger has a complete Website. Imagine the possibility of direct computer-to-computer linkage through the Internet with Grainger. Using these link ages, the acquisition cost of maintenance parts and service items has plummeted. New and Used Machinery Sales (cayceco.com/index.html/index.html:) You can buy almost anything on the Internet. The used machinery companies have staked out a section of the Web for their offerings. These pages show typical layouts with master equipment lists, prices, equipment ages, and, if you are lucky, photographs. Search Engine: Yahoo (yahoo.com) Yahoo was first. In a typical Internet story, some college-age people wrote the program and created the search site. Their idea was almost an instant success. Yahoo is one of the most popular search sites. Yahoo uses human knowledge engineers to create the indexes. Advertising banner revenue funds Yahoo and most of the other search engines (except AltaVista which is funded by Digital Equipment as a showcase for their fastest servers). REFERENCE Levitt, Joel. 1998. Internet for Maintenance Management, New York, Industrial Press, Inc. PREV | NEXT | Article Index | HOME |