| What is the Internet?
The Internet is made up of
millions of computers linked together around the world in such a way
that information can be sent from any computer to any other 24 hours
a day. These computers can be in homes, schools, universities,
government departments, or businesses small and large. They can be
any type of computer and be single personal computers or
workstations on a school or a company network. The Internet is often
described as "a network of networks" because all the smaller
networks of organizations are linked together into the one giant
network called the Internet.
Why use the Internet?
There are so many things you can
do and participate in once connected to the Internet. They include
using a range of services to communicate and share information and
things quickly and inexpensively with tens of millions of people,
both young and old and from diverse cultures around the world. For
example:
- You'll be able to keep in
touch and send things to friends using electronic
mail, Internet telephone, keyboard chat and video conferencing.
- You can also tap into
thousands of databases, libraries and newsgroups around the world
to gather information on any topic. The information can be in the form of text, pictures
or even video material.
- This means you can stay up
to date with news, sports, weather and any current affairs around
the world with information updated daily, hourly or instantly.
- You can also locate and
download computer software and other products that are available
in cyberspace.
- You can listen to sounds
and music, and watch digital movies.
- There are also a growing
number of interactive multimedia games and educational tools.
And as well as using the
Internet for receiving things you will be able to publish
information about your school, hobbies or interests.
A Brief History of the Internet
Although it may seem like a
new idea, the net has actually been around for over 40 years. It all
began in the US during the Cold War, as a university experiment in
military communications. By linking lots of computers together in a
network, rather than serially (in a straight line), the Pentagon
thought that in the event of a nuclear attack on the US it was
unlikely that the entire network would be damaged, and therefore
they would still be able to send and receive intelligence.
At first each computer was
physically linked by cable to the next computer, but this approach
has obvious limitations, which led to the development of networks
utilizing the telephone system. Predictably, people found that
nuclear strike or not, they could talk to each other using this
computer network, and some university students started using this
network to do their homework together.
It seems a natural human
characteristic to want to communicate, and once people realized that
they could talk to other people via this computer network they began
to demand access, although initially the users were only from the
university and government sectors. But more and more people could
see the potential of computer networks, and various community groups
developed networks separate from the official networks for the use
of their local communities.
The sum of all these various
local, regional and national networks is the Internet as we
experience it today, an ever expanding network of people, computers
and information coming together in ways the Pentagon never dreamed
of 40 years ago. So what began as an exercise in military paranoia
has become a method of global communication.
"Cyberspace" is a term coined
by William Gibson in his fantasy novel Neuromancer to describe the
"world" of computers, and the society that gathers around them.
Gibson's fantasy of a world of connected computers has moved into a
present reality in the form of the Internet. In cyberspace people
"exist" in the ether; you meet them electronically, in a
disembodied, faceless form.
The Internet & the World Wide Web
Sometimes people use the words
Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) synonymously but they are
different. The WWW is a component of the Internet that presents
information in a graphical interface. You can think of the WWW as
the illustrated version of the Internet. It began in the late 1980's
when physicist Dr. Berners-Lee wrote a small computer program for
his own personal use. This program allowed pages, within his
computer, to be linked together using keywords. It soon became
possible to link documents in different computers, as long as they
were connected to the Internet. The document formatting language
used to link documents is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language.)
The Web remained primarily text
based until 1992. Two events occurred that year that forever changed
the way the Web looked. Marc Andreesen developed a new computer
program called the NCSA Mosaic and gave it away! The NCSA Mosaic was
the first Web browser.
The browser made it easier to access the different Web sites that
had started to appear. Soon Web sites contained more than just text,
they also had sound and video files. The development of the WWW has
been the catalyst for the popularity of the Internet and is also the
easiest part of the Internet to use. We now have Internet Chat,
Discussion Groups, Internet Phone capabilities, Video conferencing,
News Groups, Interactive Multimedia, Games and so much more.
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