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The Internet |
The Internet does not exist. At least, not in the sense that it has a location, a shape, or an owner.
It is no more real than "The World-Wide Telephone Company". There are telephone companies of various sizes all over the world, as big as our own Southwestern Bell or as small as the tiny company that serves Jefferson City and Columbia, MO. So how can you call all over the world directly from your own phone, despite the vast difference in engineering standards across the oceans? Because the telephone companies have agreed upon a common interconnect standard, a set of rules by which the individual companies pass calls to one another.
Similarly, computer networks exist all over the world, as big as the one that links all IBM locations or as small as one serving just a one-room laboratory. There is an agreement on how to transfer data between those individual networks, and a complex connection system that links them all together. Those links, and those standards (called "protocols") are the Internet - literally the INTERconnections between NETworks.
The birth of the Internet
The first person to actually state, on paper, the need to have computers speak to each other using some common language was (in 1963) J. C. R. Licklider, a native of St. Louis and a graduate of Washington University. The idea of placing the communicating and protocol-conversion responsibilities on separate computers dedicated to those tasks was proposed in the mid-1960's by Wes Clark of the Washington University Biomedical Computer Laboratories at the corner of Euclid and McKinley in St. Louis.
The Internet began in 1969 as a joint project between the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and UCLA. A short time later Stanford, UCSB and the University of Utah joined. In that form, as ARPANET, it was conceived as a way to maintain vital communications links between various defense sites even if some communications links were knocked out by the enemy. By creating a web-like mesh of connections, communications could be routed around any missing link without interruption. Soon packet radio and satellite links were included.
By 1971 there were 23 hosts, and in 1973 the first international connections were made to England and Norway. In 1984 there were over 1000 hosts and in 1987, over 10,000. In 1986 The National Science Foundation created NSFNET, which linked researchers across the country with five supercomputer centers. NSFNET soon became tightly linked to ARPANET, and as more universities and other agencies joined, the size and cost of ARPANET could no longer be maintained by DOD and in March 1990 it was put in the hands of its major users - mostly universities and defense contractors. Thus the Internet was born.
Similar international networks sprang up rapidly all over the world and the Internet began growing by leaps and bounds, showing exponential gains in number of networks, human participants, and computers. The number of hosts grew to 80,000 in 1989, 313,000 in October 1990 and 727,000 in January 1992.
Practical considerations
Several communications protocols are in common use on the Internet: ftp, gopher, telnet, http, etc. The World-Wide Web is an overall name for the system of documents which can be retrieved with the http protocol and are linked to each other with hypertext. A "home page" is a point of origination with hypertext links to other documents of similar interest.
Home pages using too many graphic images are slow to load and may cause users to move on. Web pages which employ high-tech html programming just because it is possible soon grow tiring. The emphasis should be on the information the documents provide. A little "flash" for the sake of attention-holding is fine, just like color illustrations in books; but beware of over-indulgance unless the prime purpose of the page is to demonstrate possibilities.
A typical telephone connection should yield 2000-3000 bytes/second download speed, but when the service provider (or the file server storing the desired documents) is busy that typically deteriorates to 400-500 bytes/second. Thus, one could roughly predict the time required to download a page by multiplying its size (in kilobytes) by two.
To get started and review some possibilities:
 St.
Louis Community College home page |
| Dan@Work |
| Great tips from Dave
Siegel |
| Glossary
of Internet terms |
The future of the Internet
It is hard to know what will happen in the future. Internet experts don't have a good track record when it comes to predicting how people are actually going to use it for their everyday needs. The developers of the early ARPANET envisioned it being used to bring expensive hardware resources closer to researchers. What they didn't expect was that electronic mail would become so heavily used by researchers at geographically distant sites wanting to talk and collaborate with other. Although the NSFNET was built to use supercomputers, it is now used more for collaboration and access to information.
As the Internet connects more people and starts to yield more applications, it will be used for more than just electronic mail and transferring files. Internet engineering groups have experimented with connecting vending machines and household appliances such as toasters and stereos to the Internet, allowing them to be monitored or operated remotely. Several experiments allowed network engineering meetings in San Diego and Boston to be "virtually attended" by researchers in Australia and Europe and other parts of the United States by transmitting audio and video images of the conference. No doubt, other virtual reality applications incorporating multimedia (sound and graphics) will appear soon.
The future of the Internet, while hard to foretell, will be exciting. Many future applications will make the Internet "transparent" to users. That is, the network and computer will be integrated in the home and office, performing important, vital functions without making the user aware of the nitty-gritty details. Already there are interesting applications appearing that are making the Internet easy to use by simply hiding the network details. You don't actually have to know where the information is or where resources are located, the applications figure that out for you; and you may suddenly find yourself linked to a computer in France or Australia without even knowing it happened!
