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The Internet resulted from the effort to connect various research networks in America and Europe. First DARPA established a program to investigate the interconnection of heterogeneous networks. This program, called Interesting, was based on the newly introduced concept of open architecture networking, in which networks with defined standard interfaces would be interconnected by gateways. By the 1980 s other U.
S. governmental bodies were heavily involved with networking, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). While DARPA had played a seminal role in creating a small-scale version of the Internet among its researchers, NSF worked with DARPA to expand access to the entire scientific and academic community and to make TCP/IP the standard in all federally supported research networks. In 198586 NSF funded the first five supercomputing centers, at Princeton University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of California at San Diego, the University of Illinois, and Cornell University.
In the 1980 s NSF also funded the development and operation of the NSFNET, a national backbone network to connect these centers. By the late 1980 s the network was operating at millions of bits per second. NSF also funded various nonprofit local and regional networks to connect other users to the NSFNET. A few commercial networks also began in the late 1980 s; these were soon joined by others, and the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was formed to allow transit traffic between commercial networks that otherwise would not have been allowed on the NSFNET backbone. In 1995, after extensive review of the situation, NSF decided that support of the NSFNET infrastructure was no longer required, since many commercial providers were now willing and able to meet the needs of the research community, and its support was withdrawn. Meanwhile, NSF had fostered a competitive collection of commercial Internet backbones connected to one another through so-called network access points (NAPs).
From its origin in the early 1970 s, control of the Internet steadily devolved from government stewardship to private sector participation and finally to private custody with government oversight and forbearance. Today a loosely structured group of several thousand interested individuals known as the Internet Engineering Task Force participates in a grassroots development process for Internet standards. Internet standards are maintained by the nonprofit Internet Society, an international body with headquarters in Reston, Virginia. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), another nonprofit, private organization, oversees various aspects of policy regarding Internet domain names and numbers.
The rise of commercial Internet services and applications helped to fuel a rapid commercialization of the Internet. This phenomenon was the result of several other factors as well. One important factor was the introduction of the personal computer and the workstation in the early 1980 sa development that in turn was fueled by unprecedented progress in integrated circuit technology and an attendant rapid decline in computer prices. Another factor, which took on increasing importance, was the emergence of Ethernet and other local area networks to link personal computers. But other forces were at work too. Following the restructuring of AT&T in 1984, NSF took advantage of various new options for national-level digital backbone services for the NSFNET.
In 1988 the Corporation for National Research Initiatives received approval to conduct an experiment linking a commercial e-mail service (MCI Mail) to the Internet. This application was the first Internet connection to a commercial provider that was not also part of the research community. Approval quickly followed to allow other e-mail providers access, and the Internet began its first explosion in traffic. In 1993 federal legislation allowed NSF to open the NSFNET backbone to commercial users. Prior to that time, use of the backbone was subject to an acceptable use policy, established and administered by NSF, under which commercial use was limited to those applications which served the research community. NSF recognized that commercially supplied network services, now that they were available, would ultimately be far less expensive than continued funding of special-purpose network services.
Also in 1993 the University of Illinois made widely available Mosaic, a new type of computer program, known as a browser that ran on most types of computers and, through its point-and-click interface, simplified access, retrieval, and display of files through the Internet. Mosaic incorporated a set of access protocols and display standards originally developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) by Tim Berners-Lee for a new Internet application called the World Wide Web (WWW). In 1994 Netscape Communications Corporation (originally called Mosaic Communications Corporation) was formed to further develop the Mosaic browser and server software for commercial use. Shortly thereafter the software giant Microsoft Corporation became interested in supporting Internet applications on personal computers (PCs) and developed its Internet Explorer Web browser (based initially on Mosaic) and other programs. These new commercial capabilities accelerated the growth of the Internet, which as early as 1988 had already been growing at the rate of 100 percent per year. By the late 1990 s there were approximately 10, 000 Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world, more than half located in the United States.
However, most of these ISPs provided only local service and relied on access to regional and national ISPs for wider connectivity. Consolidation began at the end of the decade with many small to medium-size providers merging or being acquired by larger ISPs. Among these larger providers were groups such as America Online, Inc. (AOL), which started as a dial-up information service with no Internet connectivity but made a transition in the late 1990 s to become the leading provider of Internet services in the world with more than 25 million subscribers by 2000 and with branches in Australia, Europe, South America, and Asia. Widely used Internet portals such as AOL, Yahoo! , Excite, and others were able to command advertising fees owing to the number of eyeballs that visited their sites.
Indeed, during the late 1990 s advertising revenue became the main quest of many Internet sites, some of which began to speculate by offering free or low-cost services of various kinds that were visually augmented with advertisements. By 2001 this speculative bubble had burst. The network society introduces new connections between the net as a whole and the individual self where there are continuous global flows of wealth, power and media images, and the search for identity becomes acute and difficult. People look for identity and meaning in forms of collective association, which run counter to the diffuse and mobile communications of the network society. In the network society, information technology and globalization promote one another. Competitiveness in the global economy depends upon the capacity of units (firms, regions, and nations) to generate and apply knowledge-based information.
The new global economy, which functions only in and through information technology, works on a global scale in real time. Instantaneous electronic communication, made possible by global computer networks and satellite transmission, allows for continuous economic decision-making to be enacted globally. Vast capital sums can be transferred immediately from any part of the planet to another. The global opportunities of e-commerce are truly momentous. E-commerce has the ability to destroy the barriers posed by a global landscape and create a harmonized electronic community with fewer gaps between people. It has the potential to create jobs, provide a better quality of life for people in both urban and rural areas, strengthen international relationships, improve technology, increase market competitiveness and generate economic growth and prosperity.
E-commerce is an advanced business tool which is carrying us to tomorrows reality. The network society is organized around new forms of time and space, timeless time and the space of flows. The space of flows is the material organization of time sharing social practices that work through flows. The space of places continues to be the predominant space of experience. In the network society a fundamental form of social domination is the prevalence of the logic of the space of flows over the space of places and induces a metropolitan dualism and a form of social / territorial exclusion, which bypasses and marginalizes people and places. (Castells) The Internet offers small companies a historic opportunity to create world class brands and businesses. Learn the basic steps in getting your business on the Web, the best way to craft a sophisticated electronic image, how to use the power of the Net in your business and how to manage the technology effectively.
The development of always-on broadband access and the emergency of the home Internet entertainment network are accelerating the convergence of TV, movies, music and the Web. In these wide-ranging discussions, see the latest advancements in the world of digital entertainment. In the modern Internet-fueled economy, enterprises are looking for opportunities to leverage their assets in ways that they have never done before. Get an overview of XML, and see a future where companies are able to access information from other systems and enterprises in a way that is based on open standards instead of proprietary and platform-specific technologies. While the precise structure of the future Internet is not yet clear, many directions of growth seem apparent. One is the increased availability of wireless access.
Wireless services enable applications not previously possible in any economic fashion. For example, global positioning systems (GPS) combined with wireless Internet access would help mobile users to locate alternate routes, generate precise accident reports and initiate recovery services, and improve traffic management and congestion control. In addition to wireless laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs), wearable devices with voice input and special display glasses are under development. Another future direction is toward higher backbone and network access speeds.
Backbone data rates of 10 billion bits (10 gigabits) per second are readily available today, but data rates of 1 trillion bits (1 terabit) per second or higher will eventually become commercially feasible. If the development of computer hardware, software, applications, and local access keeps pace, it may be possible for users to access networks at speeds of 100 gigabits per second. At such data rates, high-resolution video indeed, multiple video streams would occupy only a small fraction of available bandwidth. Remaining bandwidth could be used to transmit auxiliary information about the data being sent, which in turn would enable rapid customization of displays and prompt resolution of certain local queries.
Both public and private research has gone into integrated broadband systems that can simultaneously carry multiple signals data, voice, and video. In particular, the U. S. government has funded research to create new high-speed network capabilities dedicated to the scientific research community. It is clear that communications connectivity will be an important function of a future Internet as more machines and devices are interconnected. In 1998, after four years of study, the Internet Engineering Task Force published a new 128 -bit IP address standard intended to replace the conventional 32 -bit standard.
By allowing a vast increase in the number of available addresses this standard will make it possible to assign unique addresses to almost every electronic device imaginable. Thus the expressions wired office, home, and car may all take on new meanings, even if the access is really wireless. The dissemination of digitized text, pictures, and audio and video recordings over the Internet, primarily available today through the World Wide Web, has resulted in an information explosion. Clearly, powerful tools are needed to manage network-based information. Information available on the Internet today may not be available tomorrow without careful attention being paid to preservation and archiving techniques. The key to making information persistently available is infrastructure and the management of that infrastructure.
Repositories of information, stored as digital objects, will soon populate the Internet. At first these repositories may be dominated by digital objects specifically created and formatted for the World Wide Web, but in time they will contain objects of all kinds in formats that will be dynamically resolvable by users computers in real time. Movement of digital objects from one repository to another will still leave them available to users who are authorized to access them, while replicated instances of objects in multiple repositories will provide alternatives to users who are better able to interact with certain parts of the Internet than with others. Information will have its own identity and, indeed, become a first-class citizen on the Internet.
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Research essay sample on Form Of Social University Of Illinois
