FREE ESSAY ON THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET

The Internet is the name for a group of worldwide information resources. These resources
are so vast as to be well beyond the comprehension of a single human being. Not only is
there no one who understands all of the Internet, there is no one who even understands
most of the Internet (Harley 2). The Internet is often thought of as a computer network,
or sometimes a group of computer networks connected to one another. The computer networks
are simply the medium that carries the information. The beauty and utility of the
Internet lie in the information itself that is being transmitted.
The Internet has undergone a remarkable transformation since its early days. The original
Internet was a low-speed, text-based network used to connect a few government sites to
the research and defense contracting community. The Department of Defense began a project
known as ARPAnet (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) back in the late 1960's,
starting the first internet. It was designed by the network architects to interconnect
government computers with defense contractors (Banta 2). The design of the network was
such that no one computer system was dependent upon the functioning of any of the other
computer systems. If any one computer network node was destroyed, such as in a nuclear
attack, the rest of the network would continue to operate (Banta 2). 
In the 1970s, the Internet began to be interconnected with large universities and
research organizations (Banta 2). The type of information going across the Internet began
to change from that of being primarily government oriented to that of research oriented.
During the 1980s, more universities and government contractors began using the internet
contributing to its growth. As the amount of network traffic increased, the speed of the
Internet began to slow down. In the mid - 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense split the
network into the ARPAnet and the MilNet. The MilNet consists of only traffic to and from
military sites and other government locations vital for national defense. The National
Science Foundation (NSF) took over ARPAnet and merged it into a high-speed network called
NSFnet (Benta 2). 
The NSFnet was the prototype for the national Internet backbones that we have today. It
provided high-speed links among scientists and supercomputing facilities and served as
the main Internet traffic arteries for the United States. People at universities and
elsewhere immediately began using the increased speed for everything other than
supercomputing, and this led to the birth of the national Internet infrastructure. In
1995, the NSF handed over control of the Internet backbone to commercial carriers (Glen
3). 
In the last couple of years Internet usage has shifted from the university environment to
that of becoming more commercial. The primary thing that has led to this shift was the
development of the World Wide Web (the Web) by CERN (the high-energy physics research
institute in Geneva, Switzerland). Coupled with this came the development of the first
practical web browser, Mosaic, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) (Glen 3). 
Today, the Internet is being used by all sorts People - educators, librarians, hobbyists,
and business people - for a variety of purposes, from communicating with each other, to
accessing valuable information and resources. To appreciate what the. Internet has to
offer, imagine discovering a whole system of highways and high-speed connectors that cut
hours off your commuting time. Or a library you could use any time of the day or night,
with acres of books and resources and unlimited browsing. That's the Internet. 
Web browsers allowed people to explore the resources of the Internet in a way that was
far easier than the original text-based applications like FTP (file transfer protocol,
Gopher (a search engine), Telnet (remotely accessing a computer), etc. As more people
become interested in the Internet, the more web browsers were developed and came into
use. The main web browsers in use today are Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Web browsers were developed that were more graphically (picture) oriented and easier to
use than the old text based applications. This led to an increase in the number of people
that began connecting themselves to the Internet and this led to a slow down in the
traffic of the Internet. Graphic files are very large and the amount of bandwidth (amount
of information that can be transmitted in a line in a given period of time (Pfaffenberger
53))required to send them across the Internet is also large, thereby causing a natural
slowdown in the system when many people are on it. 
As more people began using the Internet, businesses also became interested in it for its
huge market potential. Businesses began building web sites to attract customers that were
very complex and rich in graphics (photographs, movies, sound clips, and animations).
This further led to a slowdown in the current Internet bandwidth. The bigger the file,
the longer it takes to send it to your computer and the longer that you must be connected
on-line. The more people on-line, the greater the demand on the Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) to increase their bandwidth to the Internet backbone. The more demand on
the backbone, the greater the pressure to upgrade it to an ever increasing capacity. 
Every- six months surveys are taken as to the number of people using the Internet. Below,
is a chart showing the number of users in the United States, and their projected growth
by the year 2000.
As can be seen by the graph, the amount of growth from people using the Internet is
tremendous and is almost geometrical in nature (Kantor 1-4). With more and more people
connecting through American On-line, CompuSereve, Prodigy, and local ISPs, growth is
expected to continue to increase at an outstanding rate. It has caused change and
adaptation in almost all walks of life, from grade school students to corporate
chairpersons. And its size and impact on the world will only become larger.
Bibliography
Banta, Glen. Internet Pipe Schemes. October 1996.
http://www.internetworld.com/print/monthly/1996/10/schemes.html.
Hahn, Harley. Internet Complete Reference. Osborn McGraw-Hill. Berkeley, CA. 1994.
Kantor, Andrew. Off the Charts The Internet 1996. December 1996.
http://www.internetworld.com/print/monthly/1996/12/charts.html.
Pfaffenberger, Bayan. Internet in Plain English. MIS:Press. NewYork, NY. 1994.