The Internet Today

The Internet is a gateway to a large amount of knowledge and information, with a limitless amount of uses. The Internet is part of our everyday lives. Its our source for news, announcements and facts; a tool of communication that allows everyone on the whole world to connect with each other all the time; its a way for us to do things like shop, bank and invest; and its an entertaining and educational system for everyone to learn more about the world and to have fun.

Advantages: How the Internet Changed Banking

You can pay your bills at home with the use of the Internet. You don't have to constantly write checks to pay the bills and payments using the Internet will be made on the proper day to avoid charges. And you can receive bills through the internet. And you can also move money from your checking account to your savings by using the Internet.

Advantages: How the Internet Changed Information Sharing

People can share information on the Internet. Since there are somethings only experiences can teach, people can share their experiences with everyone in the whole world using the Internet. There are a lot of good reliable information that is found in the Internet. All you need to do is Google it, and there is a high possibility that you can find the information you're looking for.

Advantages: How the Internet Changed Communication and Socialization

Before, people had to go to post offices and drop letters into a mailbox inorder to communicate from their friends in far away places. The letters usually take a long time before it even reaches to the recipient. Now, through the email, we can write the letter or message, click send, and the recipient can read the letter that was sent in just a few minutes. People no longer have to wait for a long time and even go to post offices thanks to the email.

Socializing with people has never been easier. Thanks to the many social networking sites in the Internet, we can have many opportunities to meet and befriend people even if we never met them before in person.

Advantages: How the Internet Changed Business

Businesses used to rely on patrons to communicate with their customers. Now, businesses can communicate with all of their customers all around the world with a few presses of the keyboard since nearly all of the people around the world use the internet today. The internet also helps businesses and companies to do credit checks and to get background information on future employees.

Disadvantages of the Internet

Security Complications

     Websites can be damaged and hacked by hackers and very important information and data may be deleted by the hacker. Also, personal data and information can be stolen and can be accessed by unauthorized people.

Accuracy of Information

      Information from particular websites might be incorrect because everyone can edit the info, it becomes very hard to know and select the correct info and we can get very confused.

Internet Addiction

      People can get addicted when using the Internet to play games, watch videos and etc without any good purpose, thus wasting a lot of time for the better things in life.

Viruses

      Most of viruses are released from the internet. A virus wrecks havoc in the system of a computer and can cause a lot of damage. A lot of websites are notorious for sending viruses and other malicious softwares that can slowdown your computer and can even harm it. Emails sent from spamming may also contain viruses that can corrupt your computer.

Life Before the Internet

Before the internet, life was absolutely different. The library was the primary source of information for people before, you can watch movies and videos in a movie theater or inside a cinema, you buy books in a bookstore, you can buy the stuff you need in the mall and you engage with a conversation with friends by using a telephone or meeting them in parks and malls.

Now, we can just search in Google to find the information we need, we can watch videos and movies using internet websites like Youtube, we can buy books in sites like Amazon, we can buy or sell stuff in eBay, and we can chat with friends in social networking sites like Facebook, and its all thanks to the Internet.

Who Invented the Internet?

First of all. There is no one or a certain person who invented the internet. Internet is invented when visionaries thought that one day, computers will communicate with each other. The real fact is, there are only some people who improved it. Or used it for information, one of them is Vannevar Bush.



Vannevar Bush was a man on the Defense Research Committee during World War 2. Bush invented an automatic device that could manage information. It was something like a computerized library. He called this theoretical machine the memex. It was not really a group of computers. It was more on conceptual approach on information problems. But his ideas will also become an inspiration to future scientists to build real memex device.








But Vannevar Bush's ideas was picked up by another man whose idea also became an inspiration to visionaries build the ARPANET. It was J.C.R Licklider. He called his idea the Intergallactic Network.








The first big steps in building the Internet stemmed from the project called ARPANET. The project was funded by the Department of Defense (DoD). The project is to build a technology that could support computer even if the other computers are composed of different computers softwares. Before ARPANET, computers can only connect if they are identical.




The project manager of the ARPANET is Larry Roberts. He created the first functioning long-distance computer networks in 1965 and designed the ARPANET.

Ray Tomlinson invented the network E-mail and introduced it in 1972. The E-mail was the first messaging system to send messages across a network to other users.

Robert Kahn (left) and Vinton Cerf (right) developed the TCP or the Transmission Control Protocol and which is now used to move data to the modern Internet.

Robert Metcalfe invented the Ethernet which is the basic communication standard in networked computers.

   

Jon Postel (left) and Paul Mockapetris (right) introduced DNS in 1984, DNS or the Domain Name System is used to convert a computer's host name into an IP address on the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee developed the HTML in 1990 and introduced the WWW on 1991. The HTML or the Hyper Text Markup Language, is used to create web pages. It is a means for being able to convert any document on a simple word processor into a file viewable on the internet. The WWW or the World Wide Web is a large number of different kinds of files all over the world that are linked with each other.

Brief History of the Internet

The internet can be traced be traced back in the late 1960s. In July 1968, the US Department  of Defense, Advanced Research Protection Agency (ARPA) announced a proposition requesting the development of protocols to link 4 sites: University of Utah, University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, and University of California at Santa Barbara. 

They were all connected at 1969 and the network was called the ARPANET. There were only a small number of facilities available for the ARPANET, but users can login, like for example a user of the University of Utah could log into the compter at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and can transfer files between systems.

In the year 1981, 200 sites were connected together through the ARPANET which was composed of many incompatible networks using different types of technology. The problems of enabling the communication between users of different types of technology were, little by little, overcome by the specification of the communication protocols, TCP and IP.

Arpanet Logical Map

 By the middle of the 1980's, all US and many worldwide inter-university networks ware using TCP/IP protocols to communicate with one another. As the usage of the internet grew, some business men began to realize that it was a highly exploitable resource. Never before, there had been a medium with the capacity to reach so many people across such a wide geographical area in such a short space of time.

This has been increased by the influence of the World Wide Web, a mechanism for publishing information and offering electronics services for anyone with access to the internet. The World Wide Web was launched during 1992 when there were 50 web servers. By the end of 1993 there were 700 servers on the web and at the turns of the millenium the numbers involved are so enormous, that no-one is rate they are increasing, prepared to estimate exactly how many web servers exist, or at what rate they are increasing.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a group of many computers around the whole world that are all connected with each other. The computers are connected by the use of phone lines, fiber optic lines, coaxial cable, satellites, and wireless connections. When you use the Internet, you are given access to many computers all  around the world. Once you are able to use the Internet, you can do many things, like like sending and receiving e-mail, you can chat with other users, you can look through the world wide web, and etc.