The Internet
The Internet is a computer network that connects millions of computers globally and provides world-wide communications to businesses, homes, schools, and governments.
The Internet has grown explosively in the 1990s. There are now more than twelve million server computers on the Internet, each providing some type of information or service. The number of users of the Internet is more difficult to measure. Since each service on the Internet is used by many people, many millions of users are currently online. The number of users and services on the Internet continues to grow as the variety of the services increases.
Perhaps the most popular Internet service, the World Wide Web, has accelerated the growth of the Internet by giving it an easy to use, point and click, graphical interface. Users are attracted to the World Wide Web because it is interactive, because it is easy to use, and because it combines graphics, text, sound, and animation into a rich communications medium.
How the Internet Began
The beginning of Internet technology can be traced to 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, conducted research on networking. Their goal was to design a network that allowed computers on different types of networks to communicate with each other.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many computer networking technologies were created, each based on a particular hardware design. Some of these networks, called Local Area Networks (LANs), connect computers over short distances, using cables and hardware installed on each computer. Other larger networks, called Wide Area Networks (WANs), connect many computers over larger distances, using transmission lines similar to those used in telephone systems.
Although LANs and WANs made it much easier to share information within organizations, the information stopped at the boundaries of each network. Each networking technology moved information around in a different way, often based on the design of its hardware. A particular LAN technology could only work with specific computers, and most LAN and WAN technologies were incompatible with each other.
The Internet was designed to interconnect the different types of networks and allow information to move freely among users, regardless of the machines or networks they used. It did this by adding special computers, called routers, to connect LANs and WANs of different types. The connected computers needed a common protocol, a shared set of rules describing how to transmit data. The new networking protocol was called TCP/IP. Together, TCP/IP and the system of connected networks formed the Internet.
