Summary
The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks that connects people from different locations in over 150 countries. There are many networks, tens of thousands of computers, and millions of users on the Internet, with the numbers of users getting bigger everyday. Using the Internet, you can send e-mail, chat with friends around the world, and obtain information on a wide range of topics.
Social Impact
Many people use the Internet to access news, weather and sports, and many other useful things. They use different types of chat like, messaging and email to stay in touch with friends all around the world. The Internet has seen a growing number of Web desktops, where users can access their files and settings using the Internet.
History
“1969 - The first node is connected to the internet's military ancestor, ARPANET. With no HQ and the ability to bounce messages between surviving nodes until they reach their destination, ARPANET was intended to be America's bomb-proof communications network at the height of the Cold War.
1971 - Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg to make copyright-free works electronically available. The first is the US declaration of independence.
1972 - Bolt Beranek and Newman computer engineer Ray Tomlinson invents email by adapting an internal messaging program and extending it to use the ARPANET to send messages between sites. Within a year, three quarters of ARPANET traffic is email.
1973 - University College of London is one of the first international connections to ARPANET.
1986 - Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams at the Center for Seismic Studies releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using internet-standard TCP/IP connections. His software builds on work begun in 1979 at Duke University to exchange information between Unix machines.
1989 - Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invent the World Wide Web to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.
1993 - Marc Andreesen of the National Center for SuperComputer Applications in the US launches web-browser Mosaic. It introduces proprietary HTML tags and more sophisticated image capabilities. The browser is a massive success and businesses start to notice the web's potential. Andreesen goes on to develop the Netscape web browser.
1995 - Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab launches search engine Alta Vista, which it claims can store and index the HTML from every internet page. It also introduces the first multilingual search.
2008 - The mobile web reaches critical mass for advertising, according to Nielsen Mobile. In the US, there are 95 million mobile internet subscribers and 40 million active users. US mobile penetration is 15.6%, compared to 12.9% in the UK. Mobile internet generated $1.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2008.” History of Internet
How the Internet is set up
The Internet is a heterarchical set up because if one nod breaks down it will not shut down the whole system. When a nod is shut down dynamic routing is used to find a new route for the packet to take.
90 % of the internet uses the client/ server model, which is when the client tells the computer what they want and the computer gives it to you. Some web sites that use this model are Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube. While another way users use the internet is Peer to Peer use. This is when someone from one computer has information that a peer wants and then they transfer it between eachother without any use of the server. Napster was the most popular one of these until they were shut down.
News of the Internet
What has been an intersting topic the past few days is how Facebook was considering allowing kids younger than 13 to use the service with parental supervision. Some of the options the company is looking into is connecting kids' accounts to their parents' accounts and giving the parents control over what their children can do on the site. For example who they can friend and the different apps and games they can play.
Links with more information
Wikipedia Internet
Beginning of the Internet
History of Internet