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| Facts about the Internet
The Internet, or simply the Net, is the worldwide, publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of business, academic, domestic, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
Contrary to common usage, the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are not synonymous. The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections etc.; while the World Wide Web is a collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, and is accessible using the Internet. The Internet also provides many other services such as e-mail, file sharing, streaming media such as radio and television broadcasts, and the lastest innovation, VoIP (Voice over IP, a sort of online telephone). The most popular WWW service is e-mail, with trillions of emails being sent every month.
Internet History Time Line
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, triggering US President Dwight Eisenhower to create the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) to regain the technological lead in the arms race. During the Cold War, it became apparent that there was a need for a bombproof communications system. A concept was devised to link computers together throughout the country. With such a system in place large sections of the country could be nuked and messages could still get through.
In the beginning, only government "think tanks" and a few universities were linked. Basically the Internet was an emergency military communications system operated by ARPA. The whole operation was referred to as ARPANet and the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969. Eventually, it linked 13 universities and six military research labs. The first networking protocol used on the ARPANET was the Network Control Program (NCP).
The first communications were between Leonard Kleinrock's research center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and Douglas Engelbart's center at the Stanford Research Institute.
In time, ARPANet computers were installed at every university in the United States that had defense related funding. Gradually, the Internet went from a military pipeline to a communications tool for scientists.
As more scholars came online, the administration of the system transferred from ARPA to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In 1972, the ARPANet project was fizzling so a PR project was conceived. A system called TIP was created, which permitted a user at a terminal in the basement of the Washington Hotel to remotely login to any computer on the ARPAnet. The terminal was made available to the public and it was a huge hit, probably because people could log into places like MIT and run some of the first computer games like Adventure, Chess, and Star Trek.
In 1974, work began on a new network protocol for the ARPAnet called TCP. At this time, TCP included IP.
Then, in 1977, a new network was demonstrated that combined the ARPAnet, radio packet networks, and SATNet, a satellite network, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of a mobile battlefield with an intercontinental network. This new network was called the Internet.
The first demonstration was given when Jim Mathis sent a message from his van while driving on the San Francisco Bayshore Freeway. The message's final destination was a Digital System-10 computer at USC in Los Angeles. But before getting there, the message traveled 94,000 miles over satellite to Norway, on a landline to London, then back to North America.
The U.S. Military picked TCP as the new protocol for the ARPAnet in 1980. Two years later, the ARPAnet switched from NCP to TCP/IP. At this time the ARPAnet had around 100 nodes. The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational on January 1, 1983. This date is often given as the birth of the Internet.
Important separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged into the NSFNet include Usenet, Bitnet and the various commercial and educational X.25 Compuserve and JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network aka UKERNA). Telenet (later called Sprintnet), was a large privately-funded national computer network with free dialup access in cities throughout the U.S. that had been in operation since the 1970's. This network eventually merged with the others in the 90's as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular. The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth. Use of Internet as a phrase to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this time.
In 1985, the National Science Foundation created the NSFNet, a network that would connect five ARPA supercomputer centers to provide a computer network for research and education. Finally, in 1986, NSFnet was born. This infusion of non-military research funding to the network launched the Internet and it began to explode in popularity.
The first commercial use of the Internet occurred in 1990, with the creation of an Internet gateway for MCImail. MCImail was a commercial email system. The gateway allowed email traffic to flow between the two networks.
In August 1991 CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN.
The Internet was text-based until a team of researchers based in Champaign, Illinois developed the first popular graphic Web browser, Mosaic, in 1993. Thousands of early adapters downloaded Mosaic for free from the NCSA's web site.
With this tool, text and graphics and video and audio could be included and seen on web sites. Shortly after these developments, the federal government allowed the first widespread commercial use of the Internet, and the World Wide Web was born.
Marc Andreessen and other developers of Mosaic left NCSA to form Netscape, the first major commercial web browser.
Then came Microsoft, one of more than 100 companies to license Mosaic software, which developed Internet Explorer, now the most popular web browser.
In 1990, the ARPANET was retired and transferred to the NSFNET. The NSFNET was soon connected to the CSNET, which linked Universities around North America, and then to the EUnet, which connected research facilities in Europe. Thanks in part to the NSF's enlightened management, and fueled by the popularity of the web, the use of the Internet exploded after 1990, causing the US Government to transfer management to independent organizations starting in 1995.
By 1996 the word "Internet" was in common use, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, over the course of the last decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate). This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
Some statistics that illustrate the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web in the last decade:
- As of January 2006, over 1 billion people use the Internet.
- According to the 2005 Harris poll, 67 percent of Americans 18 or older now have access to the Internet -- up from just 9 percent in 1995 when Harris first began tracking such data. In 2005, 78.6 percent of Americans go online somewhere, even if they don't have Internet access at home. They spend an average of13.3 hours per week online.
- High-speed Internet access is available in most schools and business, and 22 percent of American households are served by broadband Internet connectivity. Telephone modems are no longer the most popular mode of connection.
- Netcraft Web Surver estimates that there are more than 38 million websites, and the number of emails is in the trillions every month.
- Consumers spent some $74 billion shopping online in 2002 -- up 39 percent over 2001. The projected spending online for 2006 is estimated at $198 billion. The average male spends more money shopping online per month than the average female — $204 to $186, respectively.
- Forrester Research estimates the value of the dot-com sector of the world economy to be worth $6.8 trillion -- virtually all created in just the last decade!
The Internet Today
At this time no one party "operates" the Internet, there are several entities that "oversee" the system and the protocols that are involved.
There also appears to be a continuing gender shift in the number of American adults going online. In early 2000, Mediamark reported the milestone that women for the first time ever accounted for half of the online adult population. Now 51 percent of U.S. surfers - some 50.6 million - are women.
Nearly 95% of all schools are now online. More than 120 years after the creation of Ma Bell, six percent of Americans, and about seven percent in inner city areas, are not connected to the world with a telephone. Yet in just the 10 years since the Internet became widely available, more than 43% of American households currently have access to the Internet.
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