Thirteen years ago on Sept. 11, a date that at the time meant nothing to most Americans, a company announced a new name that also meant nothing to most then.

"It will be called America Online," said a spokeswoman for a Reston, Va.-based service for computer messengers that had been known as Quantum Computer Service.

A few miles away, in Falls Church, a formerly nonprofit computer network called UUNET had begun gaining subscribers who wanted a source of "public-domain software, or simply a fast, reliable method for sending messages to far-off places."

The new age of communications they eagerly promised did arrive and spurred enormous growth at both companies, one into AOL Time Warner Inc., the other as part of WorldCom Inc.

Now their futures are uncertain, and so is the Internet's. But even though investors have all but given up on the companies based in the medium, engineers are working on systems that one day are likely to make what is being used today seem primitive.

It isn't a coincidence that two of the business scandals gripping Wall Street and Washington this summer involve two of the biggest players in the Internet. AOL Time Warner, now the parent of America Online, is under investigation for accounting questions and recently named a new chief executive officer for America Online from outside the company to right the ship. WorldCom, parent of UUNet, has seen its stock delisted, its top accountants arrested and its lawyers in bankruptcy court handling the largest Chapter 11 filing in history.

The two communications giants - responsible, in one way or another, for connecting most users to the Internet - mistakenly counted on rapid growth of the medium and might have altered their accounting when reality failed to match expectations.

Similar miscalculations have felled hundreds of smaller dot-com businesses, cost about 150,000 jobs and burned billions of invested capital since last year.

"The problem that WorldCom and AOL had in common was an overreaching, an overestimation, of how fast the uptake was going to be," said Tim Miller, who tracks Internet mergers and acquisitions for Webmergers.com, a San Francisco company. "It's a classic pattern of technology booms to overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact."

The past five years of the commercial Internet were a roller coaster of boom and bust.

What will the next five years bring?

Many think the Internet will become more integral to the inner workings of business, with software tied to the Internet, rather than using it just as a marketing or sales tool. Some predict greater uses for consumers - perhaps a future in which you could use your handheld Internet device while vacationing down the ocean to check whether you forgot to turn off the stove at home - and switch it off by remote control if you did leave it on.

"The AOL problem, the WorldCom problem, it all comes down to management of change," said Shohreh A. Kaynama, a professor who is chairman of marketing and electronic business studies at Towson University. "Technology needs to adapt to people, not vice versa. It has to become what we call 'refrigerator technology.' When you open the refrigerator door, you don't think about the technology behind it. It just ought to work."

Whatever the future holds for AOL and WorldCom, the Internet seems to be here to stay.

Few technologies have gained broad popularity so quickly.

About 70 percent of Americans use the Internet, 45 percent communicate by e-mail, and 40 percent have bought something online, according to a recent federal study, "A Nation Online."

Napster, the music-sharing Web site that was bankrupted by legal problems, had as many users within two years as it took the telephone 80 years to gain. A greater percentage of people pay extra for high-speed broadband Internet connections than bought color televisions at a comparable early stage. (Broadband and color television were both dismissed as business failures initially.)

Obstacles abound

Plenty of obstacles confront the future of the Internet. A technology devised in university labs 40 years ago for the U.S. military to survive a Cold War attack must survive the cold feet of investors.

Capital has become tighter as a bear market that insists on profitability replaces a bull market that was mostly impressed by market share.

About $2.6 billion of venture capital was invested in Internet companies this year through June.

That was comparable to 1998, when $5.1 billion went into Internet start-ups for the year. That's a tenth of the amount in 2000, when Internet ideas absorbed $49 billion and consumed half of all venture capital, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Va. Today, 3 percent of all venture capital flows to Internet businesses.

Technological hurdles also stand in the way.

Basic "dial-up" connections to the Internet have become slower as Web sites have become "heavier" with fancier graphics and video.

But only one in five residential users of the Internet has been willing to pay $40 a month or more for faster broadband connections that can handle more video and data. Many rural and inner-city communities can't get a high-speed connection by telephone or cable line even if they want it because a shrinking pool of telecommunications companies is willing or able to make the investment.

Meanwhile, "pop-up" ads and pornographic "spam" have become the bane of users who had finally gained control over their televisions with remote control and TiVo.

The turmoil masks the fact that the Internet is ingrained in most people's lives to an extent they couldn't have imagined a decade ago. Internet traffic is twice the volume of long-distance voice calls in the United States in carrying information, according to RHK, a San Francisco researcher.

"A mistake that people make is to think that the fate and role of the Internet is tied to the Nasdaq," said Harrison Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington. "Users are pretty happy, and happy in larger numbers, but the commercial side is a disaster."

Finding the "price point" - what the public will pay - is a historic key to the emergence of any new technology and can take decades.

Alexander Graham Bell's telephone languished for years until a Buffalo, N.Y., businessman decided to charge people per call rather than a large flat fee. Suddenly, not only rich people could afford a phone.

Some in Internet commerce foresee a system of "micropayments," in which people would pay a few cents to find what they want on the Web. The concept, being developed by Microsoft and others, might annoy a public that has become accustomed to mining cyberspace for free. But it might work in a way similar to electricity, which people use and pay for continually, flicking a light switch with hardly a thought.

"The value the Internet provides far exceeds what people are paying to achieve that value," said Gary T. Almes, president of Interlocking Media, a Web development company in Timonium. "The Internet is here to stay, but a lot of its infrastructure is managed by companies that don't follow a profitable business model."

Robert E. Kahn, who led the U.S. government's development of the Internet in the 1970s and was involved in its first commercial application in the late 1980s with an e-mail system for MCI, foresees an Internet possibly geared to different demands - and resources.

"It could end up like the transportation service, where some get bus service ... and some have chartered jets," said Kahn, who since 1986 has led the not-for-profit Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va.

Patrick J. Kerins, a general partner and lead technology investor at Grotech Capital Group, a Timonium venture firm, also sees parallels between the Internet and the development of air travel. Both were once seen as too expensive or impractical for business use but are now indispensable, he said.

"We're seeing companies using the Internet for a number of things, not just as a marketing tool or purely a revenue tool," said Lisa Melsted of the Yankee Group, a Boston research firm. A recent survey by Yankee found business confidence in the Internet rebounding to 1999 levels.

"When we did this survey last year, there were a lot of votes of 'no confidence,'" she said. "Management no longer felt that the Internet was important to their companies' strategies. But they're starting to see some of the internal efficiencies."

The most resilient electronic businesses provide a clearinghouse of information, which plays to a strength of the global network. They include online travel brokers such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, and eBay, an online auction house.

Consumers spent $10 billion in electronic commerce during the last quarter of last year, twice as much as in the corresponding quarter in 1999. That amounts to 1.2 percent of retail sales, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Tomorrow's consumers will be increasingly sophisticated about and comfortable with computers.

About 90 percent of children ages 5 to 17 use computers at home or school, according to the federal government. Toddlers are adept with a keyboard and a mouse. Universities report that they are struggling to get freshmen to assimilate into college because instant-messaging and cellular telephones have made it easier to maintain links to high school chums.

"Their friends never go away when they go to college," said Sean Carton, an executive with Baltimore media company Carton Donofrio Partners Inc. and author of The Dot.Bomb Survival Guide. "When people are used to living virtually, they don't respond in the same way that those of us who knew a world before this one do."

The next few years might be an easier time to nurture Internet businesses, with less of the pressure, influence and control of investors and stock analysts because more the companies would privately owned, technologists say.

"The people who just wanted to get rich have gone," said Esther Dyson, a prominent figure in the industry and former chairwoman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international agency that governs Web site names. "The people who just want to build something amazing are still around, the people who'll live with their parents and work out of a garage, who have a passion."

Some researchers who were involved in the development of the Internet have been at work for years on the next phase.

Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the computer code that is the foundation of the World Wide Web, is working with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others on the Semantic Web, a project that sounds like science fiction.

The international World Wide Web Consortium wants to devise a system with a form of artificial intelligence that would understand human language and thought processes. Instead of navigating through an online travel agency or auto-dealer Web site, the user would type in - or perhaps one day speak - the things he wants, as if dealing with a human being. The computer would process the variables and find the best match.

About 300 universities and corporations are involved in Internet 2, a project designed to refine the technology. Participants include the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Johns Hopkins University.

Donald R. Riley, vice president and chief information technology officer at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has been involved in Internet research for 30 years, said the medium's progress was stunted when business became "interested in how to get the next $19.95 out of everybody's house."

'Kind of absurd'

"Corporate and individual greed caused stupid things," he said. "I'm going to take a picture of my shoes and put it on the Web and make money off it? It really was kind of absurd. We were in a dynamic that was totally destructive, and now we have to take corrective actions, some of which are in the criminal courts."

Researchers aim to build a system that is more reliable, secure and able to operate things from afar, not just transfer information.

Riley foresees a surgeon able to perform procedures thousands of miles from the operating table, or an astronomer conducting research without traveling to a distant mountaintop observatory, or technicians able to maneuver a robot at a distant production facility.

"You will see the Internet become more focused on how to solve specific business problems," said Mark A. Wesker, a Baltimore attorney and entrepreneur who made millions when he was part of a group that sold a software company in Columbia last year before he joined another start-up. "You can develop something with more patience and more focus without needing to spend tons of money to put on Super Bowl ads.

"It's a communications medium that rivals anything that's come before. We're just starting to scratch the surface of its potential."