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Many people credit the ARPAnet (the first computer network designed by the Advances Research Projects Agency) as the starting point of the Internet we all have come to know and love today, however this is not entirely true. It would be more accurate to say that the Internet grew from a number of indigenous technologies, which first started as ARPAnet, and then developed over the next thirty years to become what it is today. There have been enormous changes in the development of the Internet since it began in the 1960s revolutionizing the way people communicate and do business. The “Internet,” as defined by Microsoft® Encarta® 97 Encyclopaedia is the “interconnection of computer networks that enables connected machines to communicate directly. The term popularly refers to a particular global interconnection of government, education, and business computer networks that is available to the public. There are also smaller Internets usually for the private use of a single organization, called intranets. The fact that the Internet was created was a big surprise to the top leaders in computer technology. IBM president Thomas J. Watson declared, “There is a world market for about five computers,” in 1943. When Watson made this statement, he was being quite accurate. At the time, computers were not very practical, they were large, difficult to maintain and tremendously costly, the idea of linking these things together was unthinkable. The Sputnik was a major breakthrough, by launching this piece of metal into orbit; the Soviet Union proved its dominance in space technology. It also demonstrated that they had the ability to launch a nuclear warhead from anywhere in the world, at anywhere in the Unites States they desired. Leaders declared that “everything was threatened,” and a defensive response was seriously needed. The solution became visible to computer engineers, they must come up with a communication system that would not fail even if sections of it were destroyed, or buried under radioactive waste. The first essential technology that emerged from this was the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). The term TCP/IP stands for a pretty simple principal. It is a set of regulations that allow different computer networks on the Internet to communicate with each other. Instead of relying on a single unbroken electronic signal to exchange data between two computers (which could be taken out by a bomb), the data is sent in many little packets over a vast network of computers. If one computer, or route becomes obscured (with too much traffic, etc.) or destroyed, the packets are free to take any other route. A list of the packages and the order they go in is also sent along. If one package of information doesn’t make it, it will notify the computer who is sending the packages, and it will resend the missing information. This also enables the information to take the fastest route possible. For example, with today’s internet, if you live in London, and are accessing a web page based in Toronto, the packages will be sent from one computer to another, which will determine the fastest route to London, and pass it on, the information may pass through Australia or Timbuktu if this happens to be the fastest way from Toronto to London. Today this happens in a fraction of a second. TCP/IP was originally design by the United States Department of Defence of computers using the UNIX operating system. Today all computers connected to the Internet use this system for communicating, regardless of their operating system. TCP defines how certain packets of information are transferred across the Internet, and IP determined their final destination. Every computer connected to the Internet has an assigned IP address. The Internet Protocol (IP) is the identifying number that allows any computer to find any other computer over the Internet. The IP address is a set of four one, two, or three digit numbers separated by periods. For example, the IP address of a web page may be 219.154.79.201; this number is translated into the word based address “www.yourwebpagename.com,” by a Domain Name System (DNS) Server, and vice-versa. If you were to type 219.154.79.201 in the address bar of your browser, you should be brought back to yourwebpagename.com. In the lower-case word format of an internet address the suffix at the end of the path signifies the organization that owns that particular commuter network for example educational institutions have the abbreviation .edu, the military uses .mil, government offices use .gov, and non-profit organizations use .org. Networks based out side of the Britain use suffixes that indicate that particular country, for example .com for the U.S.A, .ca for Canada, .au for Australia and .de for Germany. Once a packet of information has been addressed it leaves the home network thorough a gateway. It is routed from gateway to gateway until it reaches it reaches the network containing the destination machine. There is no single computer, which directs the flow of information on an Internet, this makes differentiates an Internet form another online service, such as the Microsoft Network, CompuServe, AOL, or Sprint Canada. TCP/IP forms the foundation for the entire Internet community. However, when it was created, it only allowed data to be exchanged between a few supercomputers that existed in the 1960s. The next advancement towards today’s Internet was Ethernet. Ethernet allows any computer on a network to be connected to any other computer and exchange data through a single line, which was shared by all the computers on the network. It was developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre), it was similar to a single office phone line that is used by a number of workers – only Metcalfe was able to figure out a way to bring harmony to what otherwise would have been a mess of opposing voices. He was able to come up with a solution to the problem of more than one computer talking at a time. Ethernet allowed any computer to be connected to any other computer through a local area network. TCP/IP allows networks to communicate to each other over very large distances. Many more ingenious technologies were added to the creation of the Internet over the next ten years – making it a few steps closer to where it is today. One major contributor was the husband and wife team of Len Bosak and Sandy Lerner who came up with a simple, yet practical high-speed system of sorting through packets of data on a network, and deciding which ones should remain in the network an which ones should leave. This device is called a router. Meanwhile, in the late 80s and early 90s, others were coming up with the software, which would make take today’s Internet from being a dream into a reality. UNIX was developed by Bell Laboratories, and Novell’s Netware helped make networks talk in a language, which was actually useful to a large university or corporate environments. Others contributed a huge number of helper-languages, called “protocols,” that were custom designed for very specific uses over the developing Internet. One of the earliest to arrive was electronic mail (email), this enabled people anywhere in the world to instantly exchange short text messages. In 1989/1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist at the English Laboratory for Particle Physics (formerly known as CERN), then developed a way for scientists to lay out articles so that anyone else in the world could read them. He developed the first Internet browser, and also designed it so that any article could be linked to any other article with a system of “hyperlinks.” This system was given the common name of World Wide Web. The “World Wide Web” as defined by Microsoft® Encarta® 97 Encyclopaedia is a “system of resources that enable computer users to view and interact with a variety of information, including magazine archives, public- and university-library resources, current world and business news, and software programs. The WWW can be accessed by a computer connected to an Internet, an interconnection of computer networks or through the public Internet, the global consortium of interconnected computer networks. Web pages designed for the World Wide Web, are created using a format known as Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), and this data is transferred among computers using a system known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Other features may be added to html pages using special programs, one example is Java, which was developed by Sun Microsystems, it is a programming language which runs independently, regardless of the operating system. Java enabled web browsers use applets that run within an html formatted document. This allows more interactivity and animation within web pages. The only thing left to do was to make the Internet available to the people. Near the beginning of the 1990s, large bulletin board systems (like America Online, GEnie, and CompuServe) began to offer their Internet access services to the general public. Universities, community centres, and libraries began to invest in freenets, which allowed users to dial into servers using a modem and get the best the Internet had to offer. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to appear all over the world, each proving email, newsgroups, and, of course, Internet access. Then in 1992, the Unites States House of Representatives withdrew a law that had effectively stopped businesses from going online and selling their goods. With the barriers now gone, the power of the Internet was unlocked and it is still rapidly advancing, with improvements being made everyday. The Internet has inevitably changed many people’s lives. The Internet has bridges the barriers of time and distance. The advancement of the Information Superhighway will continue at an accelerating rate. The content of the Internet continues to increase dramatically; new advancement will make it easier to find information. New software will provide more secure transaction, allowing more opportunities for commerce. New technologies will increase the speed of data transfer, allowing the direct transfer of entertainment-on-demand (movies and other forms of entertainment if real time). Unicast is replacing broadcast television (in some places known as Digital Choice TV), in which each home has an addressable decoder to receive a signal tailored to what its residents want to see, and when they want to see it. The rapid growth and freedom on the Internet has raised many censorship issues. A call or voluntary standards among Internet Service Providers came in response to the growing number of websites denigrating minorities, promoting racist views or sexually explicit material. In 1996, the Communications Decency Act was put in place, making it illegal for Internet service providers to transfer offensive material. This caused am immediate uproar among users, industry experts and civil liberties groups who thought that the internet should be a place to voice their opinions and opposed such censorship laws. This law was later blocked by a panel of Federal judges in June of 1996. The panel described the Internet as a “never-ending worldwide conversation that deserved the highest protection from the government intrusion. This decision is expected to be appealed by the United States supreme court. Censorship poses many questions. The majority of online services cannot constantly monitor or control what is said through their servers, or who is saying it. Legal quandaries occur when dealing with information that originates outside a country’s borders. Even if such global control were possible, standards of international ethics and behaviour would need to first be determined. Today the internet is bigger than ever, four websites are created every second, traditional mail is being replaced with email, businesses are handing out less brochures and paper and putting the information on the internet instead, etc. The public is connecting in record numbers: about 75 000 users join the internet every day. In early 1996, more than 25 million computers were interconnected with the internet in over 180 countries, and it continues to increase at an extraordinary rate. 300 million users are expected to join the internet in the next three years! RealVideo and MP3s are providing consumers with excellent multimedia. The war continues between Microsoft and AOL (the new owners of Netscape) over who can give users the richest browsing experience possible. The internet has developed extensively over the last 30 years. The internet is now developing faster than ever, who knows where the next few years take us? Bibliography: College handouts Microsoft Encarta 97 WWW.whatis.com WWW.ask.co.uk Word Count: 2120
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