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Revision as of 13:05, 24 October 2006 by 150.104.193.58 (talk) (→Creation of the Internet)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For the more general networking concept, see computer networking and internetworking.The Internet is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
Contrary to some common usage, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous: the Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc.; the Web is a collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is accessible via the Internet, as are many other services including e-mail, file sharing, and others described below.
Leisure
The Internet has been a major source of leisure since before the World Wide Web, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much of the main traffic. Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. Over 6 million people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the sharing of ideas.
The pornography and gambling industries have both taken full advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other Web sites. Although many governments have attempted to put restrictions on both industries' use of the Internet, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity. A song in the Broadway musical show Avenue Q is titled "The Internet is for Porn" and refers to the popularity of this aspect of the internet.
One main area of leisure on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of leisure creates communities, bringing people of all ages and origins to enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing games to online gambling. This has revolutionized the way many people interact and spend their free time on the Internet.
While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with services such as GameSpy and MPlayer, which players of games would typically subscribe to. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of gameplay or certain games.
Many use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. As discussed above, there are paid and unpaid sources for all of these, using centralised servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Discretion is needed as some of these sources take more care over the original artists' rights and over copyright laws than others.
Many use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book holidays and to find out more about their random ideas and casual interests.
People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. Social networking Web sites like Friends Reunited and many others like them also put and keep people in contact for their enjoyment.
Cyberslacking has become a serious drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spends 57 minutes a day surfing the Web at work, according to a study by Peninsula Business Services.
Complex architecture
Many computer scientists see the Internet as a "prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system". The Internet is extremely heterogeneous. (For instance, data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely.) The Internet exhibits "emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal self-similarity.
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Marketing
The Internet has also become a large market for companies; some of the biggest companies today have grown by taking advantage of the efficient nature of low-cost advertising and commerce through the Internet; also known as e-commerce. It is the fastest way to spread information to a vast amount of people simultaneously. The Internet has also subsequently revolutionized shopping—for example; a person can order a CD online and receive it in the mail within a couple of days, or download it directly in some cases. The Internet has also greatly facilitated personalized marketing which allows a company to market a product to a specific person or a specific group of people more so than any other advertising medium.
Examples of personalized marketing include online communities such as Myspace, Friendster, and others which thousands of Internet users join to advertise themselves and make friends online. Many of these users are young teens and adolescents ranging from 13 to 25 years old. In turn, when they advertise themselves they advertise interests and hobbies, which online marketing companies can use as information as to what those users will purchase online, and advertise their own companies' products to those users.
A very ineffective way of advertising on the internet is through spamming an email with advertisements. This is ineffective because, now, most email providers offer protection against email spam. Most spam messages are sent automatically to everybody in the email database of the company/person that is spamming. This way of advertising is almost like using adware.
Adware is another ineffective way of advertising because most people simply close a popup window when it shows up, not bothering to read it.
The name Internet
Further information: Internet capitalization conventionsInternet is traditionally written with a capital first letter, as it is a proper noun. The Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the World Wide Web Consortium, and several other Internet-related organizations use this convention in their publications.
Many newspapers, newswires, periodicals, and technical journals capitalize the term. Examples include the New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and Communications of the ACM.
Others assert that the first letter should be written small (internet). A significant number of publications use this form, including The Economist, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2005, many publications using internet appear to be located outside of North America—although one U.S. news source, Wired News, has adopted the lower case spelling.
Historically, Internet and internet have had different meanings, with internet being a contraction of internetwork or internetworking and Internet referring to the worldwide network. Under this distinction, the Internet is a particular internet, but the reverse does not apply. The distinction was evident in many RFCs, books, and articles from the 1980s and early 1990s (some of which, such as RFC 1918, refer to "internets" in the plural), but has recently fallen into disuse.
Significant Internet events
Malfunctions and attacks
- SQL Slammer worm — January 24, 2003
- 2002 DNS Backbone DDoS — October 22, 2002
- UUNet/Worldcom backbone difficulties — October 3, 2002
- Predicted Y2K Bug - January 1, 2000
- Morris worm — November 2, 1988
See also
Major aspects and issues
Functions
Underlying infrastructure
Regulatory bodies
- Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
- Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
References
Citations and notes
- Walter Willinger, Ramesh Govindan, Sugih Jamin, Vern Paxson, and Scott Shenker. (2002). Scaling phenomena in the Internet. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, suppl. 1, 2573 – 2580.
General
- Living Internet — Internet history and related information, including information from many creators of the Internet.
- First Monday peer-reviewed journal on the Internet
External links
General
- Read Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding the Internet
- Glossary of Computer and Internet Terms
- Internet Health Report from Keynote
- Internet World Stats
Articles
- "EU and U.S. clash over control of the Net" - International Herald Tribune article by Tom Wright
- "10 Years that changed the world" - WiReD looks back at the evolution of the Internet over last 10 years
- Internet Explained Seven part article explaining the origins to the present and a summary of predictions for the future of the Internet.
- John Walker: The Digital Imprimatur
- How Stuff Works explanation of the Infrastructure of the Internet
- How the Internet actually works An article summarising the core Internet technologies, written for non-experts
- Personal internet use at work costs £200 billion Survey by PandaLabs shows that almost 40 per cent of internet browsing at work is personal
History
- The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal M. Mitchell Waldrop
- The Internet Society History Page
- How the Internet Came to Be
- Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.1
- Futures and Non-futures for Scholarly Internet.
- History of the Internet links
- RFC 801, planning the TCP/IP switchover
- Video of a report on the Internet - before the Web
- Vinton Cerf's short history of the Internet
- Archive - A searchable database of old cached versions of Web sites dating back to 1996
- A comprehensive history with people, concepts and many interesting quotations
- CBC Digital Archives – Inventing the Internet Age
- A list of lectures, some of which relate to the Internet, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is available here. Of particular interest is lecture #3 The Next Big Thing: Video Internet which is delivered in Real Player format. The lecture gives a brief history of networking; discusses convergence between the Internet/telephone/television networks; the expansion of broadband access; makes predictions about the future of delivery of video over the Internet.