to and from military sites and other government locations vital for national defense. The National Science Foundation (NSF) took over ARPAnet and merged it into a high-speed network called NSFnet (Benta 2). The NSFnet was the prototype for the national Internet backbones that we have today. It provided high-speed links among scientists and supercomputing facilities and served as the main Internet traffic arteries for the United States. People at universities and elsewhere immediately began using the increased speed for everything other than supercomputing, and this led to the birth of the national Internet infrastructure. In 1995, the NSF handed over control of the Internet backbone to commercial carriers (Glen 3). In the last couple of years Internet usage has shifted from the university environment to that of becoming more commercial. The primary thing that has led to this shift was the development of the World Wide Web (the Web) by CERN (the high-energy physics research institute in Geneva, Switzerland). Coupled with this came the development of the first practical web browser, Mosaic, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) (Glen 3). Today, the Internet is being used by all sorts People - educators, librarians, hobbyists, and business people - for a variety of purposes, from communicating with each other, to accessing valuable information and resources. To appreciate what the. Internet has to offer, imagine discovering a whole system of highways and high-speed connectors that cut hours off your commuting time. Or a library you could use any time of the day or night, with acres of books and resources and unlimited browsing. That's the Internet. Web browsers allowed people to explore the resources of the Internet in a way that was far easier than the original text-based applications like FTP (file transfer protocol, Gopher (a search engine), Telnet (remotely accessing a computer), etc. As more people become in...
