The History Of The Internet

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The History of The Internet

Imagine talking about the latest elections with someone three thousand miles away without receiving a tremendous phone bill. Or sending a letter to a friend or relative and having it arrive one second later. How would it feel to know that any source of information is at your fingertips at the press of a button? All of these are possible and more with a system of networks all connected and sending information at light speed from place to place known as the Internet. This is a trend word for the nineties yet it has a background that spans all the way back to the sixties. The history of the Internet is a full one at that even though it has only been around for about 30 years. It has grown to be the greatest collection of networks in the world, its origins go back to 1962.

In 1962 the original idea for this great network of computers sprung forth from a question "How could U.S. authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?" The answer came from the Rand Corporation, America's foremost
Cold War think-tank. Why not create a network of computers without one central main authoritative unit (Sterling 1) The Rand Corporation working along side the
U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) devised a plan. The network itself would be considered unreliable at all times; therefore it would never become too dependable and powerful. Each computer on the network or node would have its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The name given to this network was the ARPANET.

To fully understand the ARPANET, an understanding of how a network works is needed. A network is a group of computers connected by a permanent cable or temporary phone line. The sole purpose of a network is to be able to communicate and send information electronically. The plan for the ARPANET was to have the messages themselves divided into packets, each packet separately addressed to be able to wind its way through the network on an individual basis.
If one node was gone it would not matter, the message would find a way to another node.

The idea was kicked around by MIT, UCLA, and RAND during the sixties.
After the British setup a test network of this type, ARPA decided to fund a larger project in the USA. The fir...

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... 4 hours to kill. One tip on how to limit time online is: download a timer that disconnects if a time limit has been passed. These programs usually know what day it is and allow only so much time online per day.
Self discipline is another method to; train yourself to get up and leave. The consequence of being online for long periods of time is large access bill from the ISP.

Day by day the Internet grows. Some people are predicting a crash because of the excessive traffic online and the limited capabilities of the servers that are visited. AOL did crash for 15 hours several months ago and the question was raised "Can our servers handle the traffic?" The answer though is in the future. As the Internet progresses so does technology. Every 5 months newer computers are released and the computers released 5 months earlier go out of date. The technological forecast call for Virtual Reality Markup Language
(VRML) in the near future. This enables the user to explorer in 3D. Imagine walking through the Sistine chapel while sitting in an office in Spokane. Many ask "What does the future of the Internet hold?" the answer only time will tell.

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