Internet Inventions

Internet Inventions

Several inventions have changed the way people communicate with each other.

From the old fashioned telegraph to today's modern electronic forms of communicating, people have beencreating easier ways to correspond. Electronic communication, such as e-mail and other internet offerings, have created a cheap and incredibly fast communications system which is gaining steady popularity. E-mail is basically information, usually in letter form,addressed to a destination on the internet. The internet is aninternational web of interconnected networks--in essence,  anetwork of networks; these consist of government, education, and business networks. Software on these networks between the source and destination networks "read" the addresses on packets and forward them toward their destinations. E-mail is a very fast and efficient way of sending information to any internet location. Once an e-mail is sent, it arrives at its destination almost instantly. This provides people with a way to communicate with people anywhere in the world quickly without the costs of other forms of communicating such as telephone calls or postage for letters.

The savings to be gained from e-mail were enough of an inducement for many businesses to invest heavily in equipment and network connections in the early

1990s. The employees of a large corporation may send hundreds of thousands of pieces of E-mail over the Internet every month, thereby cutting back on postal and telephone costs. It is not uncommon to find internet providers from twenty to thirty dollars a month for unlimited access to internet features. Many online services such as America Online and Prodigy offer e-mail software and internet connections which work in an almost identical way, however, the cost is more expensive.

The World Wide Web (WWW) and USENET Newsgroups are amongother internet offerings which have changed the way people communicate with each other. The WWW can be compared to a electronic bulletin board where information consisting o fanything can be posted. One can create visual pages consisting of text and graphics which become viewable to anyone with WWW access. Anything from advertisements to providing people with information and services can be found on the WWW. File transfers between networks can also be accomplished on the WWW though Gopher and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. Newsgroups are very similar, but run in a different way. Newsgroups basically create a forum where people can discuss a vast array of subjects. There are thousands of newsgroups available. Once one finds a subject that interests them, they may post notes which are visible to anyone visiting that particular newsgroup, and others may respond to such notes. Again, this can be advertising, information, or, more commonly, gossip.

Though the internet can be a convenient way of communication, it can become