Brief History of the Internet
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like “bleiner@computer.org” and “http://www.acm.org” trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street.
This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much material currently exists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet.
In this paper, several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.
The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its history is complex and involves many aspects – technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.
Internet
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an unlimited range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States Federal Government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.[1] The linking of commercial networks and enterprises in the early 1990s marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet,[2] and generated rapid growth as institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. By the late 2000s, its services and technologies had been incorporated into virtually every aspect of modern life.
Most traditional communications media, including telephony, radio, television, paper mail and newspapers are being reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephony, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to websitetechnology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies.[3] Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
Advantages of Internet
1) Information on almost every subject imaginable.
2) Powerful search engines
3) Ability to do research from your home versus research libraries.
4) Information at various levels of study. Everything from scholarly articles to ones directed at children.
5) Message boards where people can discuss ideas on any topic. Ability to get wide range
of opinions. People can find others that have a similar interest in whatever they are interested in.
6) The internet provides the ability of emails. Free mail service to anyone in the country.
7) Platform for products like SKYPE, which allow for holding a video conference with anyone in the world who also has access.
8) Friendships and love connections have been made over the internet by people involved
in love/passion over similar interests.
9) Things such as Yahoo Answers and other sites where kids can have readily available help for homework.
10) News, of all kinds is available almost instantaneously. Commentary, on that news, from
every conceivable viewpoint is also available.
Disadvantages of Internet
1) There is a lot of wrong information on the internet. Anyone can post anything, and much
of it is garbage.
2) There are predators that hang out on the internet waiting to get unsuspecting people in
dangerous situations.
3) Some people are getting addicted to the internet and thus causing problems with their
interactions of friends and loved ones.
4) Pornography that can get in the hands of young children too easily.
5) Easy to waste a lot of time on the internet. You can start surfing, and then realize far
more time has passed than you realized. Internet and television together of added to the
more sedentary lifestyles of people which further exacerbates the obesity problem.
6) Internet has a lot of "cheater" sites. People can buy essays and pass them off as their
own far more easily than they used to be able to do.
7) There are a lot of unscrupulous businesses that have sprung up on the internet to take\
advantage of people.
8) Hackers can create viruses that can get into your personal computer and ruin valuable data.
9) Hackers can use the internet for identity theft.
10) It can be quite depressing to be on the internet and realize just how uneducated so
many people have become in today's society.
