Internet

Internet

The Internet has revolutionized many aspects of our daily lives. It has affected the way we do business as well as the way we spend our leisure time. Count the ways you've used the Internet recently. Perhaps you've sent electronic mail (e-mail) to a business associate, paid a utility bill, read a newspaper from a distant city, or looked up a local movie schedule-all by using the Internet. Or maybe you researched a medical topic, booked a hotel reservation, chatted with a fellow Trekkie, or comparison-shopped for a car. The Internet is a communication system that has brought a wealth of information to our fingertips and organized it for our use.

A Brief History

A network is a group of connected communicating devices such as computers and printers. An internet (note the lowercase letter i) is two or more networks that can communicate with each other. The most notable internet is called the Internet (uppercase letter I), a collaboration of more than hundreds of thousands of interconnected networks. Private individuals as well as various organizations such as government agencies, schools, research facilities, corporations, and libraries in more than 100 countries use the Internet. Millions of people are users. Yet this extraordinary communication system only came into being in 1969.
In the mid-1960s, mainframe computers in research organizations were standalone devices. Computers from different manufacturers were unable to communicate with one another. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Department of Defense (DoD) was interested in finding a way to connect computers so that the researchers they funded could share their findings, thereby reducing costs and eliminating duplication of effort.
In 1967, at an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting, ARPA presented its ideas for ARPANET, a small network of connected computers. The idea was that each host computer (not necessarily from the same manufacturer) would be attached to a specialized computer, called an inteiface message processor (IMP). The IMPs, in tum, would be connected to one another. Each IMP had to be able to communicate with other IMPs as well as with its own attached host. By 1969, ARPANET was a reality. Four nodes, at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the University of Utah, were connected via the IMPs to form a network. Software called the Network Control Protocol (NCP) provided communication between the hosts.
In 1972, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, both of whom were part of the core ARPANET group, collaborated on what they called the Internetting Projec1. Cerf and Kahn's landmark 1973 paper outlined the protocols to achieve end-to-end delivery of packets. This paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) included concepts such as encapsulation, the datagram, and the functions of a gateway. Shortly thereafter, authorities made a decision to split TCP into two protocols: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internetworking Protocol (lP). IP would handle datagram routing while TCP would be responsible for higher-level functions such as segmentation, reassembly, and error detection. The internetworking protocol became known as TCPIIP.

The Internet Today

The Internet has come a long way since the 1960s. The Internet today is not a simple hierarchical structure. It is made up of many wide- and local-area networks joined by connecting devices and switching stations. It is difficult to give an accurate representation of the Internet because it is continually changing-new networks are being added, existing networks are adding addresses, and networks of defunct companies are being removed. Today most end users who want Internet connection use the services of Internet service providers (lSPs). There are international service providers, national service providers, regional service providers, and local service providers. The Internet today is run by private companies, not the government.