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About the Internet                   

The Beginnings of the Internet
Computers Talking to Computers
Searching for Information
Going Commercial
How Big Is the Internet?
Glossary of Terms
Bibliography of Sources

The Beginnings of the Internet                   Back to Top

While the World Wide Web made its appearance in the early 1990's, the Internet itself has been around since 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted BBN Corporation to develop a networked connection between four computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.  This network was called the ARPANET, after the Agency's initials.  The idea of the Internet, developed by ARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Paul Baran of the RAND  Corporation, was to create a decentralized military communications network that would be able to function even if some of its sites were destroyed during a nuclear attack.  In this way, the government would be able to maintain control over its missiles and bombers in an emergency situation.  So at first, the Internet was funded by the government and was limited to research, educational and government use.  Unless it fit into one of these categories, commercial use of the Internet was not allowed.

Computers Talking to Computers                 Back to Top

Once the four original computers were successfully communicating, the need for easier and better communications increased.  BBN's Ray Tomlinson created the first E-mail program in 1972.  During the next few years, BBN's Bob Kahn and Stanford's Vinton Cerf developed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which allowed computer networks with different systems and configurations to communicate with each other.  A 1974 paper on TCP by Kahn and Cerf gave us the first use of the term "Internet."  Their protocol was adopted by the Defense department in 1980 and was universally adopted in 1983.

The real breakthrough, though, came in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, proposed a new protocol: hypertext .  This protocol became the World Wide Web, which Berners-Lee had working on his own computer by Christmas Day, 1990 (Berners-Lee, 30). After CERN released the World Wide Web for public use, it didn't take long to develop a graphical, rather than text-based, interface to the World Wide Web.  Marc Andreessen and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) did this in 1993, and called their browser "Mosaic."

Searching for Information                            Back to Top

Until 1989, there was no way to look for information on the Internet, without a knowledge of computer command languages and and without knowing which other computer to contact. In 1989, Peter Deutsch created a program named ARCHIE (short for Archiver/Retriever) which could build a searchable index to all known FTP sites.  Two years later, the University of Minnesota developed a user-friendly way to access the Internet, which by then consisted of 617,000 host sites (Kristula). They called their interface a "gopher," after the school mascot (Howe, 5).  Very shortly there were many gophers, indexed by a program called VERONICA at the University of Nevada at Reno, and another program called JUGHEAD.

Going Commercial                                       Back to Top

By the early 1990's, independent commercial networks had begun to develop enough that they didn't need the government network to operate. In 1995, the National Science Foundation quit its funding of the Internet, marking an end to government sponsorship.  Today, all traffic over the Internet flows by commercial networks (Howe, 6).  It's difficult to say how many Internet users this traffic involves, though.  Newsweek magazine estimated in September of 1999 that there were "196 million Internet users worldwide," (about 3.5 or 4 % of the world's population) and said that by the year 2003, there would be "500 million people surfing the web" ("The Dawn of E-life," 41).  Fortune magazine gives a more conservative number: "Every day, thousands of people join the 115 million current members of the world's Internet community" ("Number Crunching," 30), which brings the number to only 2.5% of the world's population.

How Big is the Internet?                               Back to Top

It's nearly impossible to tell how many web sites exist, but it's far fewer than you might think.  In 1999, Children's Software Press estimated "over two million web sites, with thousands more added every day" (Marsh, 3). This means that for every 200 people who have access in some way to the Internet, 3 of them maintain their own website or a business, educational, or government site.  Many search engines confuse the issue, though, with phrases such as " x web pages match your query" in their document counts.  These counts make it seem that there are hundreds of millions of different web sites, which would mean that every web user had created at least one site, and perhaps three or four.  Obviously, that's not the case.  In reality, " web pages " and " web sites " are not the same.  A web site is made up of at least one web page - a home page or an index page - but may include hundreds more web pages, much as an individual book may have hundreds or even thousands of pages.  So, using a search engine is somewhat similar to using an index in a book, in that each item in the index may have several page numbers listed after it, but all the pages are still in the same book.

If the Internet were a library of books, most of the "books" would only be a few pages long.  Some of them would have ten or fifteen pages, and a few books would be thick enough to look like a book.  Most of the thin books would be advertisements for businesses and introductions to individual people.  If all the web sites on the Internet had an average of ten pages, and each page contained one kilobyte of information (about one typewritten page), the whole Internet would contain about the same number of pages - personal pages and ads included - as a one-million volume library.  A larger university library might have this many books, but there would not be any personal pages or ads in them. So, while the Internet is one of the greatest sources of information available to us, it definitely does not have all the world's information on it.  And, if we want facts, we need to know how to wade through the advertising and evaluate the information that we find, double checking facts in another, dependable source, like a book, magazine, journal or newspaper.

Glossary of Terms                                           Back to Top

browser :    a computer program that allows you to easily access the Internet.  Examples include Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

hypertext :    a system of linking text to other text by putting electronic codes in the text.

interface :    what we see on a computer screen that allows us to use programs on a computer or sites on the Internet.   

Internet :    the worldwide system of computers, linked together to allow us to send and receive information electronically.  The Internet includes text-only e-mail systems and chat, electronic banking and financing systems, file-transfer systems, the World Wide Web, etc. 

protocol :    a system of rules that govern how computers communicate with each other.

URL :    Uniform Resource Locator.  The "address" of a web site, which most often begins with http://

web page :    one unit of a web site

web site :    a location on the Internet that is made up of one or more pages.  Its location is described using a URL.

World Wide Web :   the part of the Internet that includes graphics and hypertext.

Bibliography of Sources                                Back to Top

Berners-Lee, Tim, with Mark Fischetti.  Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor .  San Francisco: Harper, 1999.

Cerf, Vinton, and Bernard Aboba. "How the Internet Came to Be." The Online User's Encyclopedia . Addison-Wesley, 1993. Online.  Accessed 15 Dec.1999.    http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/How_the_Internet_came_to_Be

Cowley, Geoffrey and Anne Underwood. "Finding the Right Rx." Newsweek (20 Sept.1999): 66-7.

"The Dawn of E-Life." Newsweek (20 Sept. 1999): 38-41.

Fineman, Howard. "Pressing the Flesh Online." Newsweek (20 Sept 1999): 50-3.

Howe, Walt. "A Brief History of the Internet." The Internet . Ed. Gray Young.  New York: Wilson, 1998.

Kristula, Dave.  "The History of the Internet." Web Site Workstation . Mar. 1997. Accessed 15 Dec. 1999.

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml

Marsh, Merle M. A Student Guide to Misinformation on the Web: Finding Accurate Information for Reports & Papers .  Houston, TX: Children's Software Press, 1999.

"Number Crunching: Statistics Confirm That the Web - and E-Commerce - Is Thriving." Sidebar in "Logging On." Fortune Tech Guide 1999 (Winter 2000): 30.