In this post we will be looking at a Meaning of Internet, brief history of internet, Uses of the internet, Types of internet connections, Applications and services.
INTRODUCTION.
The internet originated with the U.S. government, which began building a computer network in the 1960s known as ARPANET. In 1985, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the development of a university network backbone called NSFNET. The system was replaced by new networks operated by commercial internet service providers in 1995. The internet was brought to the public on a larger scale at around this time. Since then, the Internet has grown and evolved over time to facilitate services like: Email, Web-enabled audio/video conferencing services, Online movies and gaming, Data transfer/file-sharing, often through File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Instant messaging, Internet forums, social networking, Online shopping, financial services. As a global network responsible for vast amounts of data transfer and process facilitation, the Internet is constantly evolving. For instance, an initial protocol called IPv4 distributing Internet Protocol (IP) addresses has largely been replaced by a new IPv6 model that will increase the number of addresses available for each continent around the globe. The Internet has also expanded beyond the traditional workstation, as the “Internet of Things,” (IoT) as it’s called, is born. There’s still somewhat of a delineation between traditional Internet nodes, which use a classic web browser, and Internet-connected devices which will more commonly use reduced instruction set software, but the Internet of Things is blurring the line of where the Internet stops and the analog world begins. In addition, there is a key framework that helps people to understand how the Internet is changing, and where it’s likely to go in the future. This is composed of three versions or iterations of the World Wide Web, as defined above.
Web 1.0 is the original incarnation of the Internet as a place where most data was read-only. Web 1.0 is often described by experts as an Internet where the most common kinds of activity are passive – reading, doing research, or learning about products and services before making a purchase over traditional media, for example, by telephone.
Web 2.0: As engineers added things like JavaScript applets and modules to the web, Web 2.0 emerged. Web 2.0 is the read/write web or the functional web, where web fields and forms have allowed users to participate in transactions, upload resources or post their own suggestions in active conversation. Web 2.0 is, by most people’s assertions, the Internet that we now use. The problem of “stateless” web-delivered functionality as is Web 2.0, is largely solved by digital “cookies,” trackers that save individual user data in the browser to enable things like saved passwords. The trade-off is that user activity is inherently tracked: when a user erases the cookies, that session data is gone, and the user will have to start over as a new guest in any future sessions.
Web 3.0 is the posited future Internet called the “semantic web,” where Internet data will have evolved relationships, and mapping will help automate a lot of what we now do on the Internet manually. The semantic web, proponents suggest, will be a web that is in many ways automated by linking individual virtual objects and websites together in a seamless manner. With that in mind, Web 3.0 may help us to do away with the current model of using cookies for session data retrieval.
WHAT IS INTERNET?
The internet is a globally connected network system facilitating worldwide communication and access to data resources through a vast collection of private, public, business, academic and government networks. It is governed by agencies like the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (or IANA) that establish universal protocols. The terms internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably, but they are not exactly the same thing; the internet refers to the global communication system, including hardware and infrastructure, while the web is one of the services communicated over the internet. The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic,
business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
HISTORY OF INTERNET.
In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense funded research into time-sharing of computers. Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design for the ARPANET and other resource sharing networks such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, which were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1970s, ARPANET initially connected only a few sites in several metropolitan areas of Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Then ARPANET gradually developed into a highly de-urbanized and decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard Kleinrock, and the NLS system at SRI International (SRI) by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969. The third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In a sign of future growth, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) via a satellite station in Tanum, Sweden, and to Peter Kirstein’s research group at University College London which provided a gateway to British academic networks. The ARPA projects and international working groups led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network or “a network of networks”. In 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675 and later RFCs repeated this use. Cerf and Kahn credit Louis Pouzin with important influences on TCP/IP design. Commercial PTT providers were concerned with developing X.25 public data networks. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[36] The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and CompuServe established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Six months later Tim Berners-Lee would begin writing Worldwide Web, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9,[40] the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also a HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server and the first Web pages that described the project itself.
USES OF THE INTERNET.
The Internet is a global networking system that can be used on most devices nowadays and has become an essential part of our lives. In today’s technological era, most of the companies are getting their operations done over the Internet. There are various uses of the Internet by which companies and individuals are making their daily tasks more productive and more comfortable. It supports human communication via social media, electronic mail (e-mail), “chat rooms,” newsgroups, and audio and video transmission and allows people to work collaboratively at many different locations. It supports access to digital information by many applications, including the World Wide Web. The major uses of the Internet are as follows:
- Online Booking & Orders
- Education
- Cashless Transactions
- Online Banking & Trading
- Electronic Mail
- Job Search
- Social Networking
- Collaboration
- Entertainment
- E-Commerce
- File Transfer
- Navigation
- Advertising
- Real-time updates
TYPES OF INTERNET CONNECTIONS
There are many ways a personal electronic device can connect to the internet. They all use different hardware and each has a range of connection speeds. As technology changes, faster internet connections are needed to handle those changes. I thought it would be interesting to list some of the different types of internet connections that are available for home and personal use, paired with their average speeds.
- Dial-Up (Analog 56K): Dial-up access is cheap but slow. A modem (internal or external) connects to the Internet after the computer dials a phone number. This analog signal is converted to digital via the modem and sent over a land-line serviced by a public telephone network. Telephone lines are variable in quality and the connection can be poor at times.
- DSL: DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line. It is an internet connection that is always “on”. This uses 2 lines so your phone is not tied up when your computer is connected. There is also no need to dial a phone number to connect. DSL uses a router to transport data and the range of connection speed, depending on the service offered, is between 128K to 8 Mbps.
- Cable: Cable provides an internet connection through a cable modem and operates over cable TV lines. There are different speeds depending on if you are uploading data transmissions or downloading. Since the coax cable provides a much greater bandwidth over dial-up or DSL telephone lines, you can get faster access. Cable speeds range from 512K to 20 Mbps.
- Wireless: Wireless, or Wi-Fi, as the name suggests, does not use telephone lines or cables to connect to the internet. Instead, it uses radio frequency. Wireless is also an always on connection and it can be accessed from just about anywhere. Wireless networks are growing in coverage areas by the minute so when I mean access from just about anywhere, I really mean it. Speeds will vary, and the range is between 5 Mbps to 20 Mbps.
- Satellite: Satellite accesses the internet via a satellite in Earth’s orbit. The enormous distance that a signal travels from earth to satellite and back again, provides a delayed connection compared to cable and DSL. Satellite connection speeds are around 512K to 2.0 Mbps.
- Cellular: Cellular technology provides wireless Internet access through cell phones. The speeds vary depending on the provider, but the most common are 3G and 4G speeds. A 3G is a term that describes a 3rd generation cellular network obtaining mobile speeds of around 2.0 Mbps. 4G is the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. The goal of 4G is to achieve peak mobile speeds of 100 Mbps but the reality is about 21 Mbps currently.
APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES
The Internet has many important applications. Of the various services available via the Internet, the three most important are e-mail, web browsing, and peer-to-peer services. E-mail, also known as electronic mail, is the most widely used and successful of Internet applications. Web browsing is the application that had the greatest influence in dramatic expansion of the Internet and its use during the 1990s. Peer-to-peer networking is the newest of these three Internet applications and also the most controversial, because its uses have created problems related to the access and use of copyrighted materials.
E-Mail: Whether judged by volume, popularity, or impact, e-mail has been and continues to be the principal Internet application. This is despite the fact that the underlying technologies have not been altered significantly since the early 1980s. In recent years, the continuing rapid growth in the use and volume of e-mail has been fueled by two factors.
Web Browsing: The web browser is another Internet application of critical importance. Unlike e-mail, which was developed and then standardized in the early, noncommercial days of the Internet, the web browser was developed in a highly commercialized environment dominated by such corporations as Microsoft and Netscape, and heavily influenced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While Microsoft and Netscape have played the most obvious parts in the development of the web browser, particularly from the public perspective, the highly influential role of the W3C may be the most significant in the long term.
Peer-To-Peer Computing: One of the fastest growing, most controversial, and potentially most important areas of Internet applications is peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. Peer-to-peer networking is based on the sharing of physical resources, such as hard drives, processing cycles, and individual files among computers and other intelligent devices.