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The technology revolution is upon us. In the past there have been many triumphs in the world of technology. To this date, people are able to communicate over thousands of miles with the greatest of ease. The Internet connects nearly 400 million users worldwide and is an essential part of how we work, play, communicate, and conduct commerce. We use the Internet in ways that seemed unimaginable The term "Internet" refers to the global information system that is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions / follow -ons. is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions / follow -ons, and / or other IP-compatible protocols; and provides, uses or makes accessible layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein. ", either publicly or privately, high level services.
Computers speak to one another and send information back and forth, which is accomplished, by sending and receiving electronic impulses and decoding them into messages. In order to communicate with one another the computers are linked up in a network. They are then able to access information from thousands of other computers. The World Wide Web may have apparently burst fully-formed onto the world stage in the mid- 1990 s, but it was in fact the result of a gradual development process dating back half a century. Credit for actually inventing the web belongs to British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989 at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.
It emerged from its academic ghetto onto the desktops of ordinary Macintosh and PC users four years later when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA, at the University of Illinois, released its Mosaic browsers, giving virtually all computer users easy access to sites and information on a network. The World Wide Web (since shortened to www, the commonest prefix of Internet addresses) rapidly became a household name, cyber-cafes sprang up in cities around the world, and Internet start-ups began to redefine the rules of commerce. it seemed like a revolution, but the real revolution had started long before. The web's roots go back as far as the 1940 s, when visionary US engineer, Vannevar Bush, dreamt of a "future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanism private file and library." He named it the member, and went on to describe "new forms of encyclopaedias, ready made with associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the member." What Mr Bush had in fact described was hypertext, which links sites and pages together, although he didn't call it that.
Along with personal computing and the Internet, hypertext is an essential ingredient of the web. But in the 1940 s, computers were in their infancy and networks nonexistent. Mr Bush's dream lay dormant until the 1960 s when the first networks were designed, the first hypertext systems built, and the first mouse was demonstrated. Hypertext acquired its name early on in the decade thanks to Ted Nelson, whose conceptual Xanadu system, in which information would be stored in the form of linked text, inspires workers in the field to this day. But it is to Doug Engelbart that we owe the first working hypertext system, famously demonstrated at a U. S.
computer conference in 1968, complete with mouse, graphical display, and all the trappings of a modern desktop computer. For the final ingredient - communication - computer networks owe their origins to two very differently motivated people. Paul Baran in the US saw his country and the Soviet Union pointing huge nuclear arsenals at each other, while both had vulnerable communications networks. He believed this raised the incentive for one side or the other to attack, since whoever made the "first strike" would wipe out his adversary's communications system, making the country more vulnerable. If communications systems were made robust enough to survive a first strike, Mr Baran reasoned, the world would be a safer place. Donald Davies in England, on the other hand, simply wanted to find an efficient way for computers to talk to each other.
Both Mr Baran and Mr Davies separately came up with the concept of packet -- switching. This divides information up into small address-bearing chunks that are sent out onto the network. The chunks can follow different routes to get to their destination, and when they arrive they are reassembled. It's a bit like sending a letter using several postcards in different mailbags - it may be inefficient for human communication, but it is ideal for machines and is how all computers talk to each other today. Paul Baran and Donald Davies had laid the technological cornerstone of the Internet, but the political impetus had come earlier as a direct consequence of the 1957 launch of the Russian Sputnik. America's first satellite went up just a few months later, but few now remember that.
President Eisenhower declared that never again would the United States be taken off guard by the Soviet Union, and he established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to make sure that the United States stayed one step ahead. One of ARPA's creations was a robust computer network spanning the United States. This was the ARPANET, precursor of the Internet. By the 1980 s, Mr Engelbart's hypertext ideas had entered the mainstream, being developed first at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and then commercialized by Apple in the form of the Macintosh. The main ingredients of the World Wide Web were all in place. All that remained was to complete the recipe.
Brian Carpenter, at the time head of CERN networking, remembers, "We knew there would be a killer-application, but we didn't know what it would be" until the World Wide Web was born. CERN was the natural place for that final touch to be made. In the early 1980 s the laboratory, already host to some of the worlds largest and most widespread scientific collaborations, was planning a big jump. Work from hundreds of scientists around the world was coming together to build experiments for the laboratory's next high-energy big particle accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron collider, LEP. New ways of keeping in touch and sharing data were desperately needed.
Tim Berners-Lee was to provide the solution. He arrived at CERN in 1984 to work on networking Lev's computers. One of the things that struck him was how inefficient it was that information on one computer at CERN could not be accessed by another. At the same time a Belgian colleague, Robert Cailliau, was thinking along similar lines. While Mr Berners-Lee dreamed of putting hypertext on the Internet, Mr Cailliau wanted to build a hypertext system for CERN's Macintosh networks, based on Apple's own hypertext system, hypercard.
Their collaboration was to change the face of the Internet forever. In 1989, Mr Berners-Lee came up with a proposal for a "Distributed Information Management System" for CERN and its collaborating institutes. It was a document high on ideas, but low on practical details. Still, his boss, Mike Sendall, was sufficiently impressed to pencil it in as "vague, but exciting." A year later the World Wide Web was born, and even though in the beginning the web only stretched from one office to the next, its global intentions were stated. By Christmas 1990, Mr Berners-Lee had written programmes for the first web server and browser. This browser, which is the tool that finds and hauls in information from the web remains the state-of-the-art, but it only worked on rare computers called NeXT cubes, so the web's range was initially limited.
The following year Nicola Pillow, a British student at CERN, wrote a programme for a simple browser that could be used on any computer, and the world's particle physics community began to take notice. Mr Berners-Lee embarked on a world tour of particle physics labs, touting the new web software. Soon physicists in Hamburg were consulting online phone books at Stanford in California while scientists at CERN were looking up documentation at the United Kingdom's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The web finally took on its worldwide dimension in 1993 when CERN issued a statement relinquishing intellectual property rights and placing web software in the public domain, allowing anyone to download web software over the Internet and work on it. It was a controversial move, but it meant that anyone was free to contribute to (and benefit from) the web's development. Sophisticated browsers began to appear, none more influential than NCSAs Mosaic, the first sophisticated browser for UNIX, Macintosh or Microsoft windows systems that was easy to install.
Copies were soon being downloaded at the rate of thousands per day. In 1994 stewardship of the web passed to the World Wide Web Consortium, W 3 C, hosted by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), leaving CERN to get on with its core task of fundamental research. Mr Berners -- Lee moved to MIT to become W 3 C's director, where his role remains today much as it was then - trying to ensure that the web remains free and open, and steering it towards a realisation of his original dream. The entrepreneurs, small business owners, and large corporations are changing the Internet. Some of the information that use to be free is now being held for a price to subscribe to a companies web site.
This is mainly because of the money involved in the E-commerce businesses and the amount of information everyday in the use of the Internet. Internet businesses have gone from poor to rich overnight. The three main reasons why people use the Internet, communication, education and business. Communication allows for lower long distance charges than the telephone, technology being developed to make long distance phone calls for free. E-mail is less expensive than postage stamps and paper, it is less time consuming, its available 24 hours a day 7 days a week and it had unlimited boundaries, meaning, e-mail can be sent anywhere in the world (Reid 28).
Education is becoming popular with the Internet. More than 51 % of instructional rooms had Internet access in 1998, classes and seminars can be taken over the Internet. Nearly all schools in the US are connected to the Internet and hookups in the classrooms have increased 20 % since 1994. The Internet provides a convenience for people to learn at home.
Internet based training has become a common business tool used to gain advancements in current jobs. Tutoring over the Internet is also available (Reid 42). Business on the Internet is a growing technology. There are approximately 80 million out of 150 million that are on the Internet for business opportunities, business on the Internet has no geographic boundaries, it has access to more consumers. Approximately 150 businesses join the Internet every day, there is less labor force needed and it is open 24 hours a day. The Internet is also a bigger and cheaper way to advertise.
In the past 20 years, the Internet has changed a number of areas in society, especially the business world. In the last 40 years, the Internet has gone from a method of defense communication for the government, to a business venture for an entrepreneur or a fortune 500 -company. The Internet is a way for gaining consumers, products and capital for a business (Reid 35). The Internet being free and uncensored presents many problems. Children using the Internet have caused a fight for regulation. Parents cannot always monitor their children; therefore the Internet needs to be a safe place for children.
Children have access to the Internet in schools, libraries, and just about anywhere. In schools it nearly as impossible for a teacher to watch all the children, and in libraries it is not the librarians job to monitor them. Access to pornography has been one of the greatest concerns among parents. Children are naturally curious and love to explore.
Just like on television advertisers try to lure children in with pictures and web sites, which include games and chat rooms. The biggest danger is not what they find on the Internet but who they find. The information they access is not as dangerous as the people they meet. There have been many cases of molesters and kidnappers searching for pray on-line.
Nicknames are used to protect the identity of the children but can also be used to disguise adults. The molesters enter childrens chat rooms and coax the children to trust them. Molesters and kidnappers are not the only people with access to the Internet we should fear. Those mischievous thinkers also pose a threat. These thinkers are known as hackers or crackers, they search for vulnerable computer systems then strike.
Businesses can lose trade secrets, and the damages can be a disaster (Methvin 229). Government computers are just as vulnerable. The United States enemies could have access to military codes and top-secret files. Hackers do not target the average person, but they are in danger of fraud and con artists. Stolen credit card numbers have been believed to be a major problem. The criminals get the number of a credit card and charge ridiculously high bills, but by the time the bill arrives they have already moved on to the next victim.
Many schemes come in the form of junk mail. They offer deals that sound too good to be true and chances are they are bogus. They only ask for a small fee up front, next they cash the check and move on (Methvin 273). Secure passwords can prevent hackers from accessing computers. Passwords should consist of numbers, letters and symbols. No matter how secure and high tech the computer security system is, all it takes is a simple, password like hello to render the whole system worthless (Methvin 276).
Though the Internet has its advantages it also has its disadvantages. New users are springing up everyday, making it impossible to predict future of the Internet. One thing certain is that the Internet has revolutionized the computer and communication technology. The Internet is a worldwide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for association and interaction between individuals without regard to geographic location. (Comer 81) Bibliography: Bunnell, David. Making the Cisco Connection, The Story Behind the Real Internet Super Power Feb. 2000 Comer, Douglas. The Internet Book: Everything You Need to Know About Computer Networking and How the Internet Works Jan. 1997 Methvin, David W.
Safety on the Net PC World Online Feb. 1997 Reid, Robert. Architects of the Web: 1000 Days that Built the Future of Business July 1997
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