Top Infrastructure Providers for Small Businesses in Your Area
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Understanding Infrastructure Needs for Small Businesses
Understanding Infrastructure Needs for Small Businesses
Okay, so youre a small business owner, right? IT services in sydney . And youre probably wearing, like, a million hats. Thinking about "infrastructure" might not be at the top of your "to-do" list, but honestly, it should be. Its basically the backbone of everything you do. We aint talking just about fancy servers and fiber optics (though those are cool, too). Its the whole shebang!
What kinds of things are we even talking about? Well, (hold on to your hats), its your internet connection, of course. You cant run a business without reliable internet these days, can ya? Then theres your phone system, whether its old-school landlines or some fancy VoIP setup. And dont even forget about your data storage and security (because nobody wants to get hacked, yikes!).
Now, the specific needs of your business definitely vary. A bakery, for example, probably needs a robust point-of-sale system and reliable Wi-Fi for customers, but may not need, like, a super-powerful server. Whereas, a graphic design firm? Theyre gonna need the fast internet and serious storage to handle those huge files. Its all about figuring out what you need to run smoothly (without breaking the bank, ouch!).
Dont underestimate the importance of scalable solutions either. Whats good now might not be adequate later. As you grow, your infrastructure gotta grow with you! Choosing providers that offer flexible plans and can accommodate your evolving requirements is a smart move, it really is. Ignoring this can cause problems!
So, yeah, understanding your infrastructure requirements isnt exactly thrilling. But hey, its a crucial step in ensuring your small business thrives. And thats something worth celebrating!
Top Local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for Reliability
When it comes to running a small business, having a reliable internet connection is absolutely crucial. You wouldnt want your online transactions or communications to be disrupted, right? That's why choosing the top local internet service providers (ISPs) for reliability is a big deal!
Now, you might think that all ISPs are created equal, but thats not the case. Some tend to offer better service than others, especially in terms of uptime and customer support. Its really important to check the reviews and ratings from other small businesses in your area. They can give you a good idea of which providers are dependable and which ones might leave you hanging when you need them most.
One thing to keep in mind is that price doesn't always equal quality. Just because a service is expensive doesn't mean it's the most reliable option. You gotta do your homework! Many times, local ISPs can provide great service at a more reasonable price compared to those big-name companies that dominate the market.
Also, don't forget about the importance of customer service! If something goes wrong, you'll want to talk to someone who can help you quickly, not be stuck on hold for hours. A lot of small businesses have shared stories about how responsive their local ISPs are, which really makes a difference when youre facing an internet outage.
In conclusion, when searching for the top local ISPs that prioritize reliability, take your time and research well. The right choice can make your business run smoother, ensuring you stay connected and productive. You wont regret investing a bit of effort into finding the best provider for your needs!
Cloud Computing Solutions for Scalability and Data Management
Cloud computing solutions have become an essential part of modern business operations, especially for small businesses looking to scale up and manage their data effectively. When you think about infrastructure providers, you might not realize just how many options are out there in your area! It's not just about having a server or two; it's about finding a provider that meets your unique needs without breaking the bank.
First off, scalability is a huge factor. Small businesses often start with a handful of customers but can grow rapidly. With the right cloud provider, you won't have to worry about outgrowing your infrastructure. Many providers offer flexible plans that grow along with your business. You can start small and expand your resources as needed, which is a game-changer for those who might not have the funds to invest in a large-scale setup right away.
Now, let's talk about data management. Data is the lifeblood of any business, and managing it can be a daunting task. Fortunately, many infrastructure providers offer comprehensive solutions that make data management a breeze. You'll find tools for storage, backup, and even analytics that help you understand your customer base better. Plus, these providers often ensure that your data is secure, which is something you can't overlook. Nobody wants to deal with the fallout of a data breach!
Another point to consider is customer support. It's not enough to just sign up for a service; you need to know theres help available if something goes wrong. Many local providers pride themselves on offering excellent customer service. You shouldn't have to wait days to get a response when an issue arises. Quick support can make all the difference in keeping your business running smoothly.
In conclusion, when searching for the right infrastructure provider, remember to look for those who offer robust cloud computing solutions that cater to scalability and efficient data management. Your business deserves the best tools to thrive, and with the right partner, you can achieve that without too much hassle. So, don't hesitate to explore your options!
Local IT Support and Managed Services Providers
When it comes to running a small business, having reliable IT support is absolutely essential! Local IT support and managed services providers can make a huge difference in keeping your operations smooth and efficient. You might think that hiring a big-name company is the best way to go, but sometimes, the local guys really know their stuff.
These local providers often understand the specific needs of small businesses in your area. They're not just another faceless corporation; they're part of your community. This means they're more likely to be available for on-site support when something goes wrong, which is a big plus! Plus, they usually offer more personalized service, which can be a game-changer when youre facing tech challenges.
Managed services are particularly beneficial because they take the burden off your shoulders. Instead of worrying about server maintenance or cybersecurity threats, you can focus on what you do best: running your business. And let's face it, you don't want to spend hours trying to fix a problem that could have been resolved by a professional in minutes.
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Moreover, local providers often have flexible pricing models that can suit your budget. They understand that not every small business has deep pockets, and they're willing to work with you to find a solution that fits. So, you really don't have to break the bank to get quality IT services.
All in all, if you're a small business owner, consider looking into local IT support and managed services providers in your area. You might be surprised at how much they can help you grow and thrive! Just remember, its all about finding the right fit for your unique needs.
Phone Systems and Communication Infrastructure
When it comes to running a small business, having a reliable phone system and a solid communication infrastructure is critical. You'd think that with all the options available, finding the right provider wouldn't be that hard, but it can actually be a bit overwhelming!
First off, its important to know what you need. Not every small business is the same, and what works for one might not work for another. Some companies might just need a basic phone system to manage calls, while others might require a more robust solution that includes video conferencing, messaging, and even customer relationship management (CRM) tools. You definitely dont wanna invest in something that doesn't fit your needs, right?
Now, let's talk about local providers. There are often some fantastic options right in your area that you might not be aware of.
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These local companies usually understand the unique challenges small businesses face, and they can tailor their services accordingly. It's not uncommon for them to offer personalized support, which can really make a difference when you're dealing with technical issues. Plus, you might find that they have better pricing than bigger, national brands!
However, you should also do your research and compare different options. Don't just settle for the first provider you come across. Look at reviews, ask for recommendations from fellow business owners, and even reach out to providers to ask questions. You might be surprised by how much you can learn from just a quick conversation!
Lastly, remember that communication infrastructure is more than just phones. It includes internet services, network management, and even data storage solutions. So, make sure you're considering all aspects of your communication needs. It's not something you wanna overlook, as a strong backbone can help your business thrive in today's fast-paced world.
In conclusion, when youre searching for phone systems and communication infrastructure, don't rush into a decision. Evaluate your needs, explore local options, and dont hesitate to ask questions. You'll be glad you took the time to find the right fit for your small business!
Physical Security and Access Control Providers
When it comes to choosing top infrastructure providers for small businesses in your area, physical security and access control companies often fly under the radar. But dont underestimate their importance! These providers play a crucial role in protecting your business from unauthorized access and potential threats. For example, one local company specializes in installing state-of-the-art surveillance systems that help keep an eye on things even when youre not around. They also offer a range of access control solutions, from keycards to biometric scanners, ensuring only authorized personnel can enter sensitive areas.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: "Isnt this stuff overkill for a small business?" Well, its not necessarily so. Many small business owners find that investing in basic physical security measures can save them from bigger hassles down the road. Plus, these providers often tailor their services to meet the specific needs of smaller operations, which means they wont hit you up with unnecessary expenses.
One thing to consider is their customer service. You want someone who not only installs the system but also provides regular maintenance and support. Believe me, its a pain to deal with a company that doesnt return your calls or offers lackluster service. So, make sure to ask about their response times and whether they offer 24/7 monitoring.
Another factor is compatibility with existing systems. If your small business already has certain infrastructure in place, you dont want to start from scratch just because of a new security provider. They should be able to integrate their solutions smoothly without disrupting your workflow.
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Thats why its always good to do your research and maybe even visit a few installations before making a decision.
Lastly, dont forget about the peace of mind they bring. Knowing that your business is secure can really boost morale, especially if youve had previous incidents that made you nervous. These companies are more than just vendors; theyre partners who help you feel safe and protect your investments.
In summary, while physical security and access control providers might not be the first names on your list, theyre definitely worth considering for small businesses looking to fortify their defenses. Just remember to check out their credentials, customer reviews, and ensure their solutions fit your unique needs!
Comparing Costs and Services: Making the Right Choice
Okay, so picking the best infrastructure provider, yknow, for your small biz aint exactly a walk in the park! Its like, you gotta really dig into what each company offers. Comparing costs? Absolutely crucial. But its more than just looking at the bottom line (the price tag).
You gotta consider the services included. Is their customer service any good? Do they offer the support youll inevitably need when things go wrong, which, lets be real, they will! And what about security? You definitely dont want to skimp on that!
Dont just blindly choose the cheapest option, or even the one your neighbor uses. What works for them might not work for you. Maybe they dont need all the bells and whistles; you might! It shouldnt be a one-size-fits-all thing.
Look at the fine print, folks! Are there hidden fees? What are the limitations? What if your business grows? Can they scale with you? These are all super important questions.
Its not about finding the "perfect" provider, but about finding the one that best fits your specific needs and budget. Do your research, ask questions, and dont be afraid to negotiate. Good luck! You got this!
An information technology system (IT system) is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware, software, and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system.[3] IT systems play a vital role in facilitating efficient data management, enhancing communication networks, and supporting organizational processes across various industries. Successful IT projects require meticulous planning and ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with organizational objectives.[4]
Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, analysing and communicating information since the earliest writing systems were developed,[5] the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)."[6] Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing, the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making, and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.[6]
Antikythera mechanism, considered the first mechanical analog computer, dating back to the first century BC.
Based on the storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC – 1450 AD), mechanical (1450 – 1840), electromechanical (1840 – 1940), and electronic (1940 to present).[5]
Ideas of computer science were first mentioned before the 1950s under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, where they had discussed and began thinking of computer circuits and numerical calculations. As time went on, the field of information technology and computer science became more complex and was able to handle the processing of more data. Scholarly articles began to be published from different organizations.[7]
During the early computing, Alan Turing, J. Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly were considered some of the major pioneers of computer technology in the mid-1900s. Giving them such credit for their developments, most of their efforts were focused on designing the first digital computer. Along with that, topics such as artificial intelligence began to be brought up as Turing was beginning to question such technology of the time period.[8]
Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick.[9] The Antikythera mechanism, dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered the earliest known mechanical analog computer, and the earliest known geared mechanism.[10] Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until the 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed.[11]
Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanicalZuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. During the Second World War, Colossus developed the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages. Although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring.[12] The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Baby, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.[13]
The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison, the first transistorized computer developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version.[14]
By 1984, according to the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review, the term information technology had been redefined as "the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (...generally known in Britain as information technology)." We then begin to see the appearance of the term in 1990 contained within documents for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).[25]
Innovations in technology have already revolutionized the world by the twenty-first century as people have gained access to different online services. This has changed the workforce drastically as thirty percent of U.S. workers were already in careers in this profession. 136.9 million people were personally connected to the Internet, which was equivalent to 51 million households.[26] Along with the Internet, new types of technology were also being introduced across the globe, which has improved efficiency and made things easier across the globe.
As technology revolutionized society, millions of processes could be completed in seconds. Innovations in communication were crucial as people increasingly relied on computers to communicate via telephone lines and cable networks. The introduction of the email was considered revolutionary as "companies in one part of the world could communicate by e-mail with suppliers and buyers in another part of the world...".[27]
Not only personally, computers and technology have also revolutionized the marketing industry, resulting in more buyers of their products. In 2002, Americans exceeded $28 billion in goods just over the Internet alone while e-commerce a decade later resulted in $289 billion in sales.[27] And as computers are rapidly becoming more sophisticated by the day, they are becoming more used as people are becoming more reliant on them during the twenty-first century.
Electronic data processing or business information processing can refer to the use of automated methods to process commercial data. Typically, this uses relatively simple, repetitive activities to process large volumes of similar information. For example: stock updates applied to an inventory, banking transactions applied to account and customer master files, booking and ticketing transactions to an airline's reservation system, billing for utility services. The modifier "electronic" or "automatic" was used with "data processing" (DP), especially c. 1960, to distinguish human clerical data processing from that done by computer.[28][29]
Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete.[30] Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line.[31] The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, which was based on a standard cathode ray tube.[32] However, the information stored in it and delay-line memory was volatile in the fact that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932[33] and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.[34]
IBM card storage warehouse located in Alexandria, Virginia in 1959. This is where the United States government kept storage of punched cards.
IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system.[35]: 6 Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs.[36]: 4–5 Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007[update], almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally:[37] 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007,[38] doubling roughly every 3 years.[39]
All DMS consist of components; they allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity.[43] All databases are common in one point that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema.[40]
Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception.[46] It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.[38]
XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s,[47] particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP,[45] describing "data-in-transit rather than... data-at-rest".[47]
Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years.[38]
Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analyzed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited".[48] To address that issue, the field of data mining — "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data"[49] — emerged in the late 1980s.[50]
A woman sending an email at an internet cafe's public computer.
The technology and services IT provides for sending and receiving electronic messages (called "letters" or "electronic letters") over a distributed (including global) computer network. In terms of the composition of elements and the principle of operation, electronic mail practically repeats the system of regular (paper) mail, borrowing both terms (mail, letter, envelope, attachment, box, delivery, and others) and characteristic features — ease of use, message transmission delays, sufficient reliability and at the same time no guarantee of delivery. The advantages of e-mail are: easily perceived and remembered by a person addresses of the form user_name@domain_name (for example, somebody@example.com); the ability to transfer both plain text and formatted, as well as arbitrary files; independence of servers (in the general case, they address each other directly); sufficiently high reliability of message delivery; ease of use by humans and programs.
The disadvantages of e-mail include: the presence of such a phenomenon as spam (massive advertising and viral mailings); the theoretical impossibility of guaranteed delivery of a particular letter; possible delays in message delivery (up to several days); limits on the size of one message and on the total size of messages in the mailbox (personal for users).
A search system is software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to look for information on the Internet. A search engine usually means a site that hosts the interface (front-end) of the system. The software part of a search engine is a search engine (search engine) — a set of programs that provides the functionality of a search engine and is usually a trade secret of the search engine developer company. Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. Improving search is one of the priorities of the modern Internet (see the Deep Web article about the main problems in the work of search engines).
Companies in the information technology field are often discussed as a group as the "tech sector" or the "tech industry."[51][52][53] These titles can be misleading at times and should not be mistaken for "tech companies," which are generally large scale, for-profit corporations that sell consumer technology and software. From a business perspective, information technology departments are a "cost center" the majority of the time. A cost center is a department or staff which incurs expenses, or "costs," within a company rather than generating profits or revenue streams. Modern businesses rely heavily on technology for their day-to-day operations, so the expenses delegated to cover technology that facilitates business in a more efficient manner are usually seen as "just the cost of doing business." IT departments are allocated funds by senior leadership and must attempt to achieve the desired deliverables while staying within that budget. Government and the private sector might have different funding mechanisms, but the principles are more or less the same. This is an often overlooked reason for the rapid interest in automation and artificial intelligence, but the constant pressure to do more with less is opening the door for automation to take control of at least some minor operations in large companies.
Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers, networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. Companies have also sought to integrate IT with business outcomes and decision-making through a BizOps or business operations department.[54]
In a business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems".[55][page needed] The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded, and replaced.
Information services is a term somewhat loosely applied to a variety of IT-related services offered by commercial companies,[56][57][58] as well as data brokers.
U.S. Employment distribution of computer systems design and related services, 2011[59]
U.S. Employment in the computer systems and design related services industry, in thousands, 1990–2011[59]
U.S. Occupational growth and wages in computer systems design and related services, 2010–2020[59]
U.S. projected percent change in employment in selected occupations in computer systems design and related services, 2010–2020[59]
U.S. projected average annual percent change in output and employment in selected industries, 2010–2020[59]
The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s.[60]: 9 Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include:[61]: 20–21
Breaches of copyright by those downloading files stored without the permission of the copyright holders
Employers monitoring their employees' emails and other Internet usage
Research suggests that IT projects in business and public administration can easily become significant in scale. Research conducted by McKinsey in collaboration with the University of Oxford suggested that half of all large-scale IT projects (those with initial cost estimates of $15 million or more) often failed to maintain costs within their initial budgets or to complete on time.[62]
^On the later more broad application of the term IT, Keary comments: "In its original application 'information technology' was appropriate to describe the convergence of technologies with application in the vast field of data storage, retrieval, processing, and dissemination. This useful conceptual term has since been converted to what purports to be of great use, but without the reinforcement of definition ... the term IT lacks substance when applied to the name of any function, discipline, or position."[2]
^
Chandler, Daniel; Munday, Rod (10 February 2011), "Information technology", A Dictionary of Media and Communication (first ed.), Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0199568758, retrieved 1 August 2012, Commonly a synonym for computers and computer networks but more broadly designating any technology that is used to generate, store, process, and/or distribute information electronically, including television and telephone..
^Henderson, H. (2017). computer science. In H. Henderson, Facts on File science library: Encyclopedia of computer science and technology. (3rd ed.). [Online]. New York: Facts On File.
^Cooke-Yarborough, E. H. (June 1998), "Some early transistor applications in the UK", Engineering Science & Education Journal, 7 (3): 100–106, doi:10.1049/esej:19980301 (inactive 12 July 2025), ISSN0963-7346citation: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link).
^US2802760A, Lincoln, Derick & Frosch, Carl J., "Oxidation of semiconductive surfaces for controlled diffusion", issued 13 August 1957
^Information technology. (2003). In E.D. Reilly, A. Ralston & D. Hemmendinger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of computer science. (4th ed.).
^Stewart, C.M. (2018). Computers. In S. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. [Online]. Johns Hopkins University Press.
^ abNorthrup, C.C. (2013). Computers. In C. Clark Northrup (Ed.), Encyclopedia of world trade: from ancient times to the present. [Online]. London: Routledge.
^Universität Klagenfurt (ed.), "Magnetic drum", Virtual Exhibitions in Informatics, archived from the original on 21 June 2006, retrieved 21 August 2011.
^Proctor, K. Scott (2011), Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN978-1-118-10263-3.
^Bynum, Terrell Ward (2008), "Norbert Wiener and the Rise of Information Ethics", in van den Hoven, Jeroen; Weckert, John (eds.), Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-85549-5.
^Reynolds, George (2009), Ethics in Information Technology, Cengage Learning, ISBN978-0-538-74622-9.
Lavington, Simon (1980), Early British Computers, Manchester University Press, ISBN978-0-7190-0810-8
Lavington, Simon (1998), A History of Manchester Computers (2nd ed.), The British Computer Society, ISBN978-1-902505-01-5
Pardede, Eric (2009), Open and Novel Issues in XML Database Applications, Information Science Reference, ISBN978-1-60566-308-1
Ralston, Anthony; Hemmendinger, David; Reilly, Edwin D., eds. (2000), Encyclopedia of Computer Science (4th ed.), Nature Publishing Group, ISBN978-1-56159-248-7
van der Aalst, Wil M. P. (2011), Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes, Springer, ISBN978-3-642-19344-6
Ward, Patricia; Dafoulas, George S. (2006), Database Management Systems, Cengage Learning EMEA, ISBN978-1-84480-452-8
Weik, Martin (2000), Computer Science and Communications Dictionary, vol. 2, Springer, ISBN978-0-7923-8425-0
Wright, Michael T. (2012), "The Front Dial of the Antikythera Mechanism", in Koetsier, Teun; Ceccarelli, Marco (eds.), Explorations in the History of Machines and Mechanisms: Proceedings of HMM2012, Springer, pp. 279–292, ISBN978-94-007-4131-7
The history of the Internet originated in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.[1][2][3]
ARPA awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran. The network of Interface Message Processors (IMPs) was built by a team at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, with the design and specification led by Bob Kahn. The host-to-host protocol was specified by a group of graduate students at UCLA, led by Steve Crocker, along with Jon Postel and others. The ARPANET expanded rapidly across the United States with connections to the United Kingdom and Norway.
In the late 1970s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol, designed by Rémi Després and others. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP on existing networks in the United States and around the world marked the beginnings of the Internet.[4][5][6] Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[7] Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990.[8] The optical backbone of the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic, as traffic transitioned to optical networks managed by Sprint, MCI and AT&T in the United States.
Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network.[9] The dramatic expansion of the capacity of the Internet, enabled by the advent of wave division multiplexing (WDM) and the rollout of fiber optic cables in the mid-1990s, had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology. This made possible the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, video chat, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber-optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, and 800 Gbit/s by 2019.[10] The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[11] The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking services. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.[12]
The practice of transmitting messages between two different places through an electromagnetic medium dates back to the electrical telegraph in the late 19th century, which was the first fully digital communication system. Radiotelegraphy began to be used commercially in the early 20th century. Telex became an operational teleprinter service in the 1930s. Such systems were limited to point-to-point communication between two end devices.
Early fixed-program computers in the 1940s were operated manually by entering small programs via switches in order to load and run a series of programs. As transistor technology evolved in the 1950s, central processing units and user terminals came into use by 1955. The mainframe computer model was devised, and modems, such as the Bell 101, allowed digital data to be transmitted over regular unconditioned telephone lines at low speeds by the late 1950s. These technologies made it possible to exchange data between remote computers. However, a fixed-line link was still necessary; the point-to-point communication model did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems. In addition, the applications were specific and not general purpose. Examples included SAGE (1958) and SABRE (1960).
J. C. R. Licklider, while working at BBN, proposed a computer network in his March 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis:[18]
A network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [...] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper
In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man-Computer Communication"[19] which was one of the first descriptions of a networked future.
In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within ARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos in 1963 describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network".[20]
Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus for one of his successors, Robert Taylor, to initiate the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.[21]
The infrastructure for telephone systems at the time was based on circuit switching, which requires pre-allocation of a dedicated communication line for the duration of the call. Telegram services had developed store and forward telecommunication techniques. Western Union's Automatic Telegraph Switching System Plan 55-A was based on message switching. The U.S. military's AUTODIN network became operational in 1962. These systems, like SAGE and SBRE, still required rigid routing structures that were prone to single point of failure.[24]
The technology was considered vulnerable for strategic and military use because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of a broken link. In the early 1960s, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation produced a study of survivable networks for the U.S. military in the event of nuclear war.[25][26] Information would be transmitted across a "distributed" network, divided into what he called "message blocks".[27][28][29][30] Baran's design was not implemented.[31]
In addition to being prone to a single point of failure, existing telegraphic techniques were inefficient and inflexible. Beginning in 1965 Donald Davies, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, independently developed a more advanced proposal of the concept, designed for high-speed computer networking, which he called packet switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted.[32][33][34][35]
Packet switching is a technique for transmitting computer data by splitting it into very short, standardized chunks, attaching routing information to each of these chunks, and transmitting them independently through a computer network. It provides better bandwidth utilization than traditional circuit-switching used for telephony, and enables the connection of computers with different transmission and receive rates. It is a distinct concept to message switching.[36]
Following discussions with J. C. R. Licklider in 1965, Donald Davies became interested in data communications for computer networks.[37][38] Later that year, at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom, Davies designed and proposed a national commercial data network based on packet switching.[39] The following year, he described the use of "switching nodes" to act as routers in a digital communication network.[40][41] The proposal was not taken up nationally but he produced a design for a local network to serve the needs of the NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching using high-speed data transmission.[42][43] To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and to datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control",[44] thus inventing what came to be known as the end-to-end principle. In 1967, he and his team were the first to use the term 'protocol' in a modern data-commutation context.[45]
In 1968,[46] Davies began building the Mark I packet-switched network to meet the needs of his multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions.[47][48] The network's development was described at a 1968 conference.[49][50] Elements of the network became operational in early 1969,[47][51] the first implementation of packet switching,[52][53] and the NPL network was the first to use high-speed links.[54] Many other packet switching networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design.[37] The Mark II version which operated from 1973 used a layered protocol architecture.[54] In 1977, there were roughly 30 computers, 30 peripherals and 100 VDU terminals all able to interact through the NPL Network.[55] The NPL team carried out simulation work on wide-area packet networks, including datagrams and congestion; and research into internetworking and secure communications.[47][56][57] The network was replaced in 1986.[54]
For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.... I said, oh man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.[59]
Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT in January 1967, he initiated a project to build such a network. Roberts and Thomas Merrill had been researching computer time-sharing over wide area networks (WANs).[60] Wide area networks emerged during the late 1950s and became established during the 1960s. At the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967, Roberts presented a proposal for the "ARPA net", based on Wesley Clark's idea to use Interface Message Processors (IMP) to create a message switching network.[61][62][63] At the conference, Roger Scantlebury presented Donald Davies' work on a hierarchical digital communications network using packet switching and referenced the work of Paul Baran at RAND. Roberts incorporated the packet switching and routing concepts of Davies and Baran into the ARPANET design and upgraded the proposed communications speed from 2.4 kbit/s to 50 kbit/s.[64][65]
Steve Crocker formed the "Network Working Group" in 1969 at UCLA. Working with Jon Postel and others,[73] he initiated and managed the Request for Comments (RFC) process, which is still used today for proposing and distributing contributions. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker and published on April 7, 1969. The protocol for establishing links between network sites in the ARPANET, the Network Control Program (NCP), was completed in 1970. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.
Roberts presented the idea of packet switching to the communication professionals, and faced anger and hostility. Before ARPANET was operating, they argued that the router buffers would quickly run out. After the ARPANET was operating, they argued packet switching would never be economic without the government subsidy. Baran faced the same rejection and thus failed to convince the military into constructing a packet switching network.[74][75]
Early international collaborations via the ARPANET were sparse. Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR),[76] via a satellite link at the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden, and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, the first international heterogenous resource sharing network.[77] Throughout the 1970s, Leonard Kleinrock developed the mathematical theory to model and measure the performance of packet-switching technology, building on his earlier work on the application of queueing theory to message switching systems.[78] By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213.[79] The ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used.
The Merit Network[80] was formed in 1966 as the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad to explore computer networking between three of Michigan's public universities as a means to help the state's educational and economic development.[81] With initial support from the State of Michigan and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the packet-switched network was first demonstrated in December 1971 when an interactive host to host connection was made between the IBMmainframe computer systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Wayne State University in Detroit.[82] In October 1972 connections to the CDC mainframe at Michigan State University in East Lansing completed the triad. Over the next several years in addition to host to host interactive connections the network was enhanced to support terminal to host connections, host to host batch connections (remote job submission, remote printing, batch file transfer), interactive file transfer, gateways to the Tymnet and Telenetpublic data networks, X.25 host attachments, gateways to X.25 data networks, Ethernet attached hosts, and eventually TCP/IP and additional public universities in Michigan join the network.[82][83] All of this set the stage for Merit's role in the NSFNET project starting in the mid-1980s.
The CYCLADES packet switching network was a French research network designed and directed by Louis Pouzin. In 1972, he began planning the network to explore alternatives to the early ARPANET design and to support internetworking research. First demonstrated in 1973, it was the first network to implement the end-to-end principle conceived by Donald Davies and make the hosts responsible for reliable delivery of data, rather than the network itself, using unreliable datagrams.[84][85] Concepts implemented in this network influenced TCP/IP architecture.[86][87]
Based on international research initiatives, particularly the contributions of Rémi Després, packet switching network standards were developed by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T) in the form of X.25 and related standards.[88][89] X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating traditional telephone connections. In 1974, X.25 formed the basis for the SERCnet network between British academic and research sites, which later became JANET, the United Kingdom's high-speed national research and education network (NREN). The initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976.[90] Existing networks, such as Telenet in the United States adopted X.25 as well as new public data networks, such as DATAPAC in Canada and TRANSPAC in France.[88][89]X.25 was supplemented by the X.75 protocol which enabled internetworking between national PTT networks in Europe and commercial networks in North America.[91][92][93]
Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use. Telenet offered its Telemail electronic mail service, which was also targeted to enterprise use rather than the general email system of the ARPANET.
The first public dial-in networks used asynchronous teleprinter (TTY) terminal protocols to reach a concentrator operated in the public network. Some networks, such as Telenet and CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the terminal sessions into their packet-switched backbones, while others, such as Tymnet, used proprietary protocols. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were America Online (AOL) and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and entertainment features.[95] Many bulletin board system (BBS) networks also provided on-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and amateur radio operators.[citation needed]
In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, originated the idea of using Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line UUCP connection with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software in 1980, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections, and the lack of strict use policies compared to later networks like CSNET and BITNET. All connects were local. By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984.[96]
Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy in 1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news groups messages throughout its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both by private individuals and small companies. Sublink Network evolved into one of the first examples of Internet technology coming into use through popular diffusion.
1973–1989: Merging the networks and creating the Internet
Cerf and Kahn published their ideas in May 1974,[103] which incorporated concepts implemented by Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann in the CYCLADES network.[84][104] The specification of the resulting protocol, the Transmission Control Program, was published as
RFC675 by the Network Working Group in December 1974.[105] It contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand for internetwork. This software was monolithic in design using two simplex communication channels for each user session.
With the role of the network reduced to a core of functionality, it became possible to exchange traffic with other networks independently from their detailed characteristics, thereby solving the fundamental problems of internetworking. DARPA agreed to fund the development of prototype software. Testing began in 1975 through concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN and University College London (UCL).[3] After several years of work, the first demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network (PRNET) in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was conducted by the Stanford Research Institute. On November 22, 1977, a three network demonstration was conducted including the ARPANET, the SRI's Packet Radio Van on the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network (SATNET) including a node at UCL.[106][107]
The software was redesigned as a modular protocol stack, using full-duplex channels; between 1976 and 1977, Yogen Dalal and Robert Metcalfe among others, proposed separating TCP's routing and transmission control functions into two discrete layers,[108][109] which led to the splitting of the Transmission Control Program into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) in version 3 in 1978.[109][110]Version 4 was described in IETF publication RFC 791 (September 1981), 792 and 793. It was installed on SATNET in 1982 and the ARPANET in January 1983 after the DoD made it standard for all military computer networking.[111][112] This resulted in a networking model that became known informally as TCP/IP. It was also referred to as the Department of Defense (DoD) model or DARPA model.[113] Cerf credits his graduate students Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine, Judy Estrin, Richard A. Karp, and Gérard Le Lann with important work on the design and testing.[114] DARPA sponsored or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating systems.
Decomposition of the quad-dotted IPv4 address representation to its binary value
After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary mission was funding cutting-edge research and development, not running a communications utility. In July 1975, the network was turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. MILNET subsequently became the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET, in parallel with the SECRET-level SIPRNET and JWICS for TOP SECRET and above. NIPRNET does have controlled security gateways to the public Internet.
The networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden.[115] This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were. Data transmission speeds depended upon the type of connection, the slowest being analog telephone lines and the fastest using optical networking technology.
NASA developed the TCP/IP based NASA Science Network (NSN) in the mid-1980s, connecting space scientists to data and information stored anywhere in the world. In 1989, the DECnet-based Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN) and the TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network (NSN) were brought together at NASA Ames Research Center creating the first multiprotocol wide area network called the NASA Science Internet, or NSI. NSI was established to provide a totally integrated communications infrastructure to the NASA scientific community for the advancement of earth, space and life sciences. As a high-speed, multiprotocol, international network, NSI provided connectivity to over 20,000 scientists across all seven continents.
In 1981, NSF supported the development of the Computer Science Network (CSNET). CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. CSNET played a central role in popularizing the Internet outside the ARPANET.[23]
In 1986, the NSF created NSFNET, a 56 kbit/s backbone to support the NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers. The NSFNET also provided support for the creation of regional research and education networks in the United States, and for the connection of university and college campus networks to the regional networks.[116] The use of NSFNET and the regional networks was not limited to supercomputer users and the 56 kbit/s network quickly became overloaded. NSFNET was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s in 1988 under a cooperative agreement with the Merit Network in partnership with IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan. The existence of NSFNET and the creation of Federal Internet Exchanges (FIXes) allowed the ARPANET to be decommissioned in 1990.
NSFNET was expanded and upgraded to dedicated fiber, optical lasers and optical amplifier systems capable of delivering T3 start up speeds or 45 Mbit/s in 1991. However, the T3 transition by MCI took longer than expected, allowing Sprint to establish a coast-to-coast long-distance commercial Internet service. When NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, its optical networking backbones were handed off to several commercial Internet service providers, including MCI, PSI Net and Sprint.[117] As a result, when the handoff was complete, Sprint and its Washington DC Network Access Points began to carry Internet traffic, and by 1996, Sprint was the world's largest carrier of Internet traffic.[118]
The research and academic community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as Internet2 in the United States and JANET in the United Kingdom.
The term "internet" was reflected in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675:[119] Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as a short form of internetworking, when the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was a collection of networks linked by a common protocol. In the time period when the ARPANET was connected to the newly formed NSFNET project in the late 1980s, the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being the large and global TCP/IP network.[120]
Opening the Internet and the fiber optic backbone to corporate and consumers increased demand for network capacity. The expense and delay of laying new fiber led providers to test a fiber bandwidth expansion alternative that had been pioneered in the late 1970s by Optelecom using "interactions between light and matter, such as lasers and optical devices used for optical amplification and wave mixing".[121] This technology became known as wave division multiplexing (WDM). Bell Labs deployed a 4-channel WDM system in 1995.[122] To develop a mass capacity (dense) WDM system, Optelecom and its former head of Light Systems Research, David R. Huber formed a new venture, Ciena Corp., that deployed the world's first dense WDM system on the Sprint fiber network in June 1996.[122] This was referred to as the real start of optical networking.[123]
As interest in networking grew by needs of collaboration, exchange of data, and access of remote computing resources, the Internet technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The hardware-agnostic approach in TCP/IP supported the use of existing network infrastructure, such as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic.
Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet created simple gateways for the transfer of electronic mail, the most important application of the time. Sites with only intermittent connections used UUCP or FidoNet and relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple mail peering, such as allowing access to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites via UUCP or mail.[124]
Finally, routing technologies were developed for the Internet to remove the remaining centralized routing aspects. The Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) was replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This provided a meshed topology for the Internet and reduced the centric architecture which ARPANET had emphasized. In 1994, Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) was introduced to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables.[125]
Forty years later, on November 13, 1957, Columbia University physics student Gordon Gould first realized how to make light by stimulated emission through a process of optical amplification. He coined the term LASER for this technology—Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.[127] Using Gould's light amplification method (patented as "Optically Pumped Laser Amplifier"),[128]Theodore Maiman made the first working laser on May 16, 1960.[129]
Gould co-founded Optelecom in 1973 to commercialize his inventions in optical fiber telecommunications,[130] just as Corning Glass was producing the first commercial fiber optic cable in small quantities. Optelecom configured its own fiber lasers and optical amplifiers into the first commercial optical communication systems which it delivered to Chevron and the US Army Missile Defense.[131] Three years later, GTE deployed the first optical telephone system in 1977 in Long Beach, California.[132] By the early 1980s, optical networks powered by lasers, LED and optical amplifier equipment supplied by Bell Labs, NTT and Perelli[clarification needed] were used by select universities and long-distance telephone providers.[citation needed]
In 1982, Norway (NORSAR/NDRE) and Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London (UCL) left the ARPANET and reconnected using TCP/IP over SATNET.[102][133] There were 40 British research groups using UCL's link to ARPANET in 1975;[77] by 1984 there was a user population of about 150 people on both sides of the Atlantic.[134]
Between 1984 and 1988, CERN began installation and operation of TCP/IP to interconnect its major internal computer systems, workstations, PCs, and an accelerator control system. CERN continued to operate a limited self-developed system (CERNET) internally and several incompatible (typically proprietary) network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe towards more widespread use of TCP/IP, and the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until 1989, when a transatlantic connection to Cornell University was established.[135][136][137]
The Computer Science Network (CSNET) began operation in 1981 to provide networking connections to institutions that could not connect directly to ARPANET. Its first international connection was to Israel in 1984. Soon after, connections were established to computer science departments in Canada, France, and Germany.[23]
In 1988, the first international connections to NSFNET was established by France's INRIA,[138][139] and Piet Beertema at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands.[140] Daniel Karrenberg, from CWI, visited Ben Segal, CERN's TCP/IP coordinator, looking for advice about the transition of EUnet, the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links), over to TCP/IP. The previous year, Segal had met with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about purchasing some TCP/IP routers for CERN, and Segal was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks. The NORDUnet connection to NSFNET was in place soon after, providing open access for university students in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.[141]
In January 1989, CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections.[142] This coincided with the creation of Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out coordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in Amsterdam.
Nonetheless, for a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations were polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.[100][147][148]
Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to CSNET,[23] and later to NSFNET in 1989, marking the spread of the Internet to Asia.
South Korea set up a two-node domestic TCP/IP network in 1982, the System Development Network (SDN), adding a third node the following year. SDN was connected to the rest of the world in August 1983 using UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy); connected to CSNET in December 1984;[23] and formally connected to the NSFNET in 1990.[149][150][151]
In Australia, ad hoc networking to ARPA and in-between Australian universities formed in the late 1980s, based on various technologies such as X.25, UUCPNet, and via a CSNET.[23] These were limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989, Australian universities joined the push towards using IP protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network for Australia.
New Zealand adopted the UK's Coloured Book protocols as an interim standard and established its first international IP connection to the U.S. in 1989.[152]
While developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the Internet, developing countries began to experience a digital divide separating them from the Internet. On an essentially continental basis, they built organizations for Internet resource administration and to share operational experience, which enabled more transmission facilities to be put into place.
At the beginning of the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications.
In August 1995, InfoMail Uganda, Ltd., a privately held firm in Kampala now known as InfoCom, and NSN Network Services of Avon, Colorado, sold in 1997 and now known as Clear Channel Satellite, established Africa's first native TCP/IP high-speed satellite Internet services. The data connection was originally carried by a C-Band RSCC Russian satellite which connected InfoMail's Kampala offices directly to NSN's MAE-West point of presence using a private network from NSN's leased ground station in New Jersey. InfoCom's first satellite connection was just 64 kbit/s, serving a Sun host computer and twelve US Robotics dial-up modems.
Africa is building an Internet infrastructure. AFRINIC, headquartered in Mauritius, manages IP address allocation for the continent. As with other Internet regions, there is an operational forum, the Internet Community of Operational Networking Specialists.[156]
There are many programs to provide high-performance transmission plant, and the western and southern coasts have undersea optical cable. High-speed cables join North Africa and the Horn of Africa to intercontinental cable systems. Undersea cable development is slower for East Africa; the original joint effort between New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy) has broken off and may become two efforts.[157]
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), headquartered in Australia, manages IP address allocation for the continent. APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).[158]
In South Korea, VDSL, a last mile technology developed in the 1990s by NextLevel Communications, connected corporate and consumer copper-based telephone lines to the Internet.[159]
The People's Republic of China established its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET in 1991. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.[160]
Japan hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.[161]
Initially, as with its predecessor networks, the system that would evolve into the Internet was primarily for government and government body use. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use was unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and the X.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNET connections.
As a result, during the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Software were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. In 1989, MCI Mail became the first commercial email provider to get an experimental gateway to the Internet.[163] The first commercial dialup ISP in the United States was The World, which opened in 1989.[164]
In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, 42 U.S.C.§ 1862(g), which allowed NSF to support access by the research and education communities to computer networks which were not used exclusively for research and education purposes, thus permitting NSFNET to interconnect with commercial networks.[165][166] This caused controversy within the research and education community, who were concerned commercial use of the network might lead to an Internet that was less responsive to their needs, and within the community of commercial network providers, who felt that government subsidies were giving an unfair advantage to some organizations.[167]
By 1990, ARPANET's goals had been fulfilled and new networking technologies exceeded the original scope and the project came to a close. New network service providers including PSINet, Alternet, CERFNet, ANS CO+RE, and many others were offering network access to commercial customers. NSFNET was no longer the de facto backbone and exchange point of the Internet. The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs), and later Network Access Points (NAPs) were becoming the primary interconnections between many networks. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on April 30, 1995, when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service.[168][169] NSF provided initial support for the NAPs and interim support to help the regional research and education networks transition to commercial ISPs. NSF also sponsored the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) which continued to provide support for the supercomputing centers and research and education in the United States.[170]
An event held on 11 January 1994, The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce Hall, was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its implications".[171]
The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, as an application on the Internet,[172] brought many social and commercial uses to what was, at the time, a network of networks for academic and research institutions.[173][174] The Web opened to the public in 1991 and began to enter general use in 1993–4, when websites for everyday use started to become available.[175]
During the first decade or so of the public Internet, the immense changes it would eventually enable in the 2000s were still nascent. In terms of providing context for this period, mobile cellular devices ("smartphones" and other cellular devices) which today provide near-universal access, were used for business and not a routine household item owned by parents and children worldwide. Social media in the modern sense had yet to come into existence, laptops were bulky and most households did not have computers. Data rates were slow and most people lacked means to video or digitize video; media storage was transitioning slowly from analog tape to digitaloptical discs (DVD and to an extent still, floppy disc to CD). Enabling technologies used from the early 2000s such as PHP, modern JavaScript and Java, technologies such as AJAX, HTML 4 (and its emphasis on CSS), and various software frameworks, which enabled and simplified speed of web development, largely awaited invention and their eventual widespread adoption.
The Internet was widely used for mailing lists, emails, creating and distributing maps with tools like MapQuest, e-commerce and early popular online shopping (Amazon and eBay for example), online forums and bulletin boards, and personal websites and blogs, and use was growing rapidly, but by more modern standards, the systems used were static and lacked widespread social engagement. It awaited a number of events in the early 2000s to change from a communications technology to gradually develop into a key part of global society's infrastructure.
During the period 1997 to 2001, the first speculative investmentbubble related to the Internet took place, in which "dot-com" companies (referring to the ".com" top level domain used by businesses) were propelled to exceedingly high valuations as investors rapidly stoked stock values, followed by a market crash; the first dot-com bubble. However this only temporarily slowed enthusiasm and growth, which quickly recovered and continued to grow.
In the final stage of IPv4 address exhaustion, the last IPv4 address block was assigned in January 2011 at the level of the regional Internet registries.[181] IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses which limits the address space to 232 addresses, i.e. 4294967296 addresses.[110] IPv4 is in the process of replacement by IPv6, its successor, which uses 128-bit addresses, providing 2128 addresses, i.e. 340282366920938463463374607431768211456,[182] a vastly increased address space. The shift to IPv6 is expected to take a long time to complete.[181]
2004–present: Web 2.0, global ubiquity, social media
The rapid technical advances that would propel the Internet into its place as a social system, which has completely transformed the way humans interact with each other, took place during a relatively short period from around 2005 to 2010, coinciding with the point in time in which IoT devices surpassed the number of humans alive at some point in the late 2000s. They included:
The call to "Web 2.0" in 2004 (first suggested in 1999).
Accelerating adoption and commoditization among households of, and familiarity with, the necessary hardware (such as computers).
Accelerating storage technology and data access speeds – hard drives emerged, took over from far smaller, slower floppy discs, and grew from megabytes to gigabytes (and by around 2010, terabytes), RAM from hundreds of kilobytes to gigabytes as typical amounts on a system, and Ethernet, the enabling technology for TCP/IP, moved from common speeds of kilobits to tens of megabits per second, to gigabits per second.
High speed Internet and wider coverage of data connections, at lower prices, allowing larger traffic rates, more reliable simpler traffic, and traffic from more locations.
The public's accelerating perception of the potential of computers to create new means and approaches to communication, the emergence of social media and websites such as Twitter and Facebook to their later prominence, and global collaborations such as Wikipedia (which existed before but gained prominence as a result).
The mobile device revolution, particularly with smartphones and tablet computers becoming widespread, which began to provide easy access to the Internet to much of human society of all ages, in their daily lives, and allowed them to share, discuss, and continually update, inquire, and respond.
Non-volatile RAM rapidly grew in size and reliability, and decreased in price, becoming a commodity capable of enabling high levels of computing activity on these small handheld devices as well as solid-state drives (SSD).
An emphasis on power efficient processor and device design, rather than purely high processing power; one of the beneficiaries of this was Arm, a British company which had focused since the 1980s on powerful but low cost simple microprocessors. The ARM architecture family rapidly gained dominance in the market for mobile and embedded devices.
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.
The term resurfaced during 2002–2004,[187][188][189][190] and gained prominence in late 2004 following presentations by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference. In their opening remarks, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as Platform", where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that "customers are building your business for you".[191][non-primary source needed] They argued that the activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures) could be "harnessed" to create value.
"Web 2.0" does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the way Web pages are made and used. "Web 2.0" describes an approach, in which sites focus substantially upon allowing users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking services, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, video sharing sites, hosted services, Web applications, and mashups.[192]Terry Flew, in his 3rd edition of New Media, described what he believed to characterize the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:
[The] move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging (folksonomy).[193]
This era saw several household names gain prominence through their community-oriented operation – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia being some examples.
Telephone systems have been slowly adopting voice over IP since 2003. Early experiments proved that voice can be converted to digital packets and sent over the Internet. The packets are collected and converted back to analog voice.[194][195][196]
The process of change that generally coincided with Web 2.0 was itself greatly accelerated and transformed only a short time later by the increasing growth in mobile devices. This mobile revolution meant that computers in the form of smartphones became something many people used, took with them everywhere, communicated with, used for photographs and videos they instantly shared or to shop or seek information "on the move" – and used socially, as opposed to items on a desk at home or just used for work.[citation needed]
Location-based services, services using location and other sensor information, and crowdsourcing (frequently but not always location based), became common, with posts tagged by location, or websites and services becoming location aware. Mobile-targeted websites (such as "m.example.com") became common, designed especially for the new devices used. Netbooks, ultrabooks, widespread 4G and Wi-Fi, and mobile chips capable or running at nearly the power of desktops from not many years before on far lower power usage, became enablers of this stage of Internet development, and the term "App" (short for "Application program" or "Program") became popularized, as did the "App store".
This "mobile revolution" has allowed for people to have a nearly unlimited amount of information at all times. With the ability to access the internet from cell phones came a change in the way media was consumed. Media consumption statistics show that over half of media consumption between those aged 18 and 34 were using a smartphone.[197]
The first Internet link into low Earth orbit was established on January 22, 2010, when astronaut T. J. Creamer posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account from the International Space Station, marking the extension of the Internet into space.[198] (Astronauts at the ISS had used email and Twitter before, but these messages had been relayed to the ground through a NASA data link before being posted by a human proxy.) This personal Web access, which NASA calls the Crew Support LAN, uses the space station's high-speed Ku band microwave link. To surf the Web, astronauts can use a station laptop computer to control a desktop computer on Earth, and they can talk to their families and friends on Earth using Voice over IP equipment.[199]
Communication with spacecraft beyond Earth orbit has traditionally been over point-to-point links through the Deep Space Network. Each such data link must be manually scheduled and configured. In the late 1990s NASA and Google began working on a new network protocol, delay-tolerant networking (DTN), which automates this process, allows networking of spaceborne transmission nodes, and takes the fact into account that spacecraft can temporarily lose contact because they move behind the Moon or planets, or because space weather disrupts the connection. Under such conditions, DTN retransmits data packages instead of dropping them, as the standard TCP/IP Internet Protocol does. NASA conducted the first field test of what it calls the "deep space internet" in November 2008.[200] Testing of DTN-based communications between the International Space Station and Earth (now termed disruption-tolerant networking) has been ongoing since March 2009, and was scheduled to continue until March 2014.[201][needs update]
This network technology is supposed to ultimately enable missions that involve multiple spacecraft where reliable inter-vessel communication might take precedence over vessel-to-Earth downlinks. According to a February 2011 statement by Google's Vint Cerf, the so-called "bundle protocols" have been uploaded to NASA's EPOXI mission spacecraft (which is in orbit around the Sun) and communication with Earth has been tested at a distance of approximately 80 light seconds.[202]
The IANA function was originally performed by USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and it delegated portions of this responsibility with respect to numeric network and autonomous system identifiers to the Network Information Center (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) in Menlo Park, California. ISI's Jonathan Postel managed the IANA, served as RFC Editor and performed other key roles until his death in 1998.[205]
As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by ISI's Paul Mockapetris in 1983.[206] The Defense Data Network—Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract.[204] In 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point) to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.[207][208]
The increasing cultural diversity of the Internet also posed administrative challenges for centralized management of the IP addresses. In October 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 1366,[209] which described the "growth of the Internet and its increasing globalization" and set out the basis for an evolution of the IP registry process, based on a regionally distributed registry model. This document stressed the need for a single Internet number registry to exist in each geographical region of the world (which would be of "continental dimensions"). Registries would be "unbiased and widely recognized by network providers and subscribers" within their region. The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) was established as the first RIR in May 1992. The second RIR, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), was established in Tokyo in 1993, as a pilot project of the Asia Pacific Networking Group.[210]
Since at this point in history most of the growth on the Internet was coming from non-military sources, it was decided that the Department of Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the .mil TLD. In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation, after a competitive bidding process in 1992, created the InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases, and awarded the contract to three organizations. Registration Services would be provided by Network Solutions; Directory and Database Services would be provided by AT&T; and Information Services would be provided by General Atomics.[211]
Over time, after consultation with the IANA, the IETF, RIPE NCC, APNIC, and the Federal Networking Council (FNC), the decision was made to separate the management of domain names from the management of IP numbers.[210] Following the examples of RIPE NCC and APNIC, it was recommended that management of IP address space then administered by the InterNIC should be under the control of those that use it, specifically the ISPs, end-user organizations, corporate entities, universities, and individuals. As a result, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) was established as in December 1997, as an independent, not-for-profit corporation by direction of the National Science Foundation and became the third Regional Internet Registry.[212]
In 1998, both the IANA and remaining DNS-related InterNIC functions were reorganized under the control of ICANN, a California non-profit corporation contracted by the United States Department of Commerce to manage a number of Internet-related tasks. As these tasks involved technical coordination for two principal Internet name spaces (DNS names and IP addresses) created by the IETF, ICANN also signed a memorandum of understanding with the IAB to define the technical work to be carried out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.[213] The management of Internet address space remained with the regional Internet registries, which collectively were defined as a supporting organization within the ICANN structure.[214] ICANN provides central coordination for the DNS system, including policy coordination for the split registry / registrar system, with competition among registry service providers to serve each top-level-domain and multiple competing registrars offering DNS services to end-users.
The IETF is a loosely self-organized group of international volunteers who contribute to the engineering and evolution of Internet technologies. It is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet standard specifications. Much of the work of the IETF is organized into Working Groups. Standardization efforts of the Working Groups are often adopted by the Internet community, but the IETF does not control or patrol the Internet.[215][216]
The IETF grew out of quarterly meetings with U.S. government-funded researchers, starting in January 1986. Non-government representatives were invited by the fourth IETF meeting in October 1986. The concept of Working Groups was introduced at the fifth meeting in February 1987. The seventh meeting in July 1987 was the first meeting with more than one hundred attendees. In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society, was formed and IETF began to operate under it as an independent international standards body. The first IETF meeting outside of the United States was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in July 1993. Today, the IETF meets three times per year and attendance has been as high as ca. 2,000 participants. Typically one in three IETF meetings are held in Europe or Asia. The number of non-US attendees is typically ca. 50%, even at meetings held in the United States.[215]
The IETF is not a legal entity, has no governing board, no members, and no dues. The closest status resembling membership is being on an IETF or Working Group mailing list. IETF volunteers come from all over the world and from many different parts of the Internet community. The IETF works closely with and under the supervision of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)[217] and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).[218] The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG), peer activities to the IETF and IESG under the general supervision of the IAB, focus on longer-term research issues.[215][219]
RFCs are the main documentation for the work of the IAB, IESG, IETF, and IRTF.[220] Originally intended as requests for comments, RFC 1, "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker at UCLA in April 1969. These technical memos documented aspects of ARPANET development. They were edited by Jon Postel, the first RFC Editor.[215][221]
RFCs cover a wide range of information from proposed standards, draft standards, full standards, best practices, experimental protocols, history, and other informational topics.[222] RFCs can be written by individuals or informal groups of individuals, but many are the product of a more formal Working Group. Drafts are submitted to the IESG either by individuals or by the Working Group Chair. An RFC Editor, appointed by the IAB, separate from IANA, and working in conjunction with the IESG, receives drafts from the IESG and edits, formats, and publishes them. Once an RFC is published, it is never revised. If the standard it describes changes or its information becomes obsolete, the revised standard or updated information will be re-published as a new RFC that "obsoletes" the original.[215][221]
The Internet Society (ISOC) is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 "to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". With offices near Washington, DC, US, and in Geneva, Switzerland, ISOC has a membership base comprising more than 80 organizational and more than 50,000 individual members. Members also form "chapters" based on either common geographical location or special interests. There are currently more than 90 chapters around the world.[223]
Since the 1990s, the Internet's governance and organization has been of global importance to governments, commerce, civil society, and individuals. The organizations which held control of certain technical aspects of the Internet were the successors of the old ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day technical aspects of the network. While recognized as the administrators of certain aspects of the Internet, their roles and their decision-making authority are limited and subject to increasing international scrutiny and increasing objections. These objections have led to the ICANN removing themselves from relationships with first the University of Southern California in 2000,[225] and in September 2009 gaining autonomy from the US government by the ending of its longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations with the U.S. Department of Commerce continued.[226][227][228] Finally, on October 1, 2016, ICANN ended its contract with the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), allowing oversight to pass to the global Internet community.[229]
The IETF, with financial and organizational support from the Internet Society, continues to serve as the Internet's ad-hoc standards body and issues Request for Comments.
In November 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunis, called for an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to be convened by United Nations Secretary General. The IGF opened an ongoing, non-binding conversation among stakeholders representing governments, the private sector, civil society, and the technical and academic communities about the future of Internet governance. The first IGF meeting was held in October/November 2006 with follow up meetings annually thereafter.[230] Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.[231][232]
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, was becoming concerned about threats to the web's future and in November 2009 at the IGF in Washington DC launched the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) to campaign to make the web a safe and empowering tool for the good of humanity with access to all.[233][234] In November 2019 at the IGF in Berlin, Berners-Lee and the WWWF went on to launch the Contract for the Web, a campaign initiative to persuade governments, companies and citizens to commit to nine principles to stop "misuse" with the warning "If we don't act now - and act together - to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering" (its potential for good).[235]
Due to its prominence and immediacy as an effective means of mass communication, the Internet has also become more politicized as it has grown. This has led in turn, to discourses and activities that would once have taken place in other ways, migrating to being mediated by internet.
Recruitment of followers, and "coming together" of members of the public, for ideas, products, and causes;
Providing and widely distributing and sharing information that might be deemed sensitive or relates to whistleblowing (and efforts by specific countries to prevent this by censorship);
On March 12, 2015, the FCC released the specific details of the net neutrality rules.[261][262][263] On April 13, 2015, the FCC published the final rule on its new "Net Neutrality" regulations.[264][265]
On December 14, 2017, the FCC repealed their March 12, 2015 decision by a 3–2 vote regarding net neutrality rules.[266]
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of electronic mail. An experimental inter-system transferred mail on the ARPANET shortly after its creation.[268] In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet electronic mail addressing format, using the @ sign to separate mailbox names from host names.[269]
A number of protocols were developed to deliver messages among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET email system. Email could be passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP. See the history of SMTP protocol.
In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide range of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNET similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed on the sflovers mailing list).
During the early years of the Internet, email and similar mechanisms were also fundamental to allow people to access resources that were not available due to the absence of online connectivity. UUCP was often used to distribute files using the 'alt.binary' groups. Also, FTP e-mail gateways allowed people that lived outside the US and Europe to download files using ftp commands written inside email messages. The file was encoded, broken in pieces and sent by email; the receiver had to reassemble and decode it later, and it was the only way for people living overseas to download items such as the earlier Linux versions using the slow dial-up connections available at the time. After the popularization of the Web and the HTTP protocol such tools were slowly abandoned.
Resource or file sharing has been an important activity on computer networks from well before the Internet was established and was supported in a variety of ways including bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1980), Kermit (1981), and many others. The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for use on the Internet was standardized in 1985 and is still in use today.[270] A variety of tools were developed to aid the use of FTP by helping users discover files they might want to transfer, including the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) in 1991, Gopher in 1991, Archie in 1991, Veronica in 1992, Jughead in 1993, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in 1988, and eventually the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991 with Web directories and Web search engines.
In 1999, Napster became the first peer-to-peer file sharing system.[271] Napster used a central server for indexing and peer discovery, but the storage and transfer of files was decentralized. A variety of peer-to-peer file sharing programs and services with different levels of decentralization and anonymity followed, including: Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and Freenet in 2000, FastTrack, Kazaa, Limewire, and BitTorrent in 2001, and Poisoned in 2003.[272]
All of these tools are general purpose and can be used to share a wide variety of content, but sharing of music files, software, and later movies and videos are major uses.[273] And while some of this sharing is legal, large portions are not. Lawsuits and other legal actions caused Napster in 2001, eDonkey2000 in 2005, Kazaa in 2006, and Limewire in 2010 to shut down or refocus their efforts.[274][275]The Pirate Bay, founded in Sweden in 2003, continues despite a trial and appeal in 2009 and 2010 that resulted in jail terms and large fines for several of its founders.[276] File sharing remains contentious and controversial with charges of theft of intellectual property on the one hand and charges of censorship on the other.[277][278]
File hosting allowed for people to expand their computer's hard drives and "host" their files on a server. Most file hosting services offer free storage, as well as larger storage amount for a fee. These services have greatly expanded the internet for business and personal use.
Google Drive, launched on April 24, 2012, has become the most popular file hosting service. Google Drive allows users to store, edit, and share files with themselves and other users. Not only does this application allow for file editing, hosting, and sharing. It also acts as Google's own free-to-access office programs, such as Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets. This application served as a useful tool for University professors and students, as well as those who are in need of Cloud storage.[279][280]
Dropbox, released in June 2007 is a similar file hosting service that allows users to keep all of their files in a folder on their computer, which is synced with Dropbox's servers. This differs from Google Drive as it is not web-browser based. Now, Dropbox works to keep workers and files in sync and efficient.[281]
Mega, having over 200 million users, is an encrypted storage and communication system that offers users free and paid storage, with an emphasis on privacy.[282] Being three of the largest file hosting services, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Mega all represent the core ideas and values of these services.
The earliest form of online piracy began with a P2P (peer to peer) music sharing service named Napster, launched in 1999. Sites like LimeWire, The Pirate Bay, and BitTorrent allowed for anyone to engage in online piracy, sending ripples through the media industry. With online piracy came a change in the media industry as a whole.[283]
Total global mobile data traffic reached 588 exabytes during 2020,[284] a 150-fold increase from 3.86 exabytes/year in 2010.[285] Most recently, smartphones accounted for 95% of this mobile data traffic with video accounting for 66% by type of data.[284] Mobile traffic travels by radio frequency to the closest cell phone tower and its base station where the radio signal is converted into an optical signal that is transmitted over high-capacity optical networking systems that convey the information to data centers. The optical backbones enable much of this traffic as well as a host of emerging mobile services including the Internet of things, 3-D virtual reality, gaming and autonomous vehicles. The most popular mobile phone application is texting, of which 2.1 trillion messages were logged in 2020.[286] The texting phenomenon began on December 3, 1992, when Neil Papworth sent the first text message of "Merry Christmas" over a commercial cell phone network to the CEO of Vodafone.[287]
The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland in 1996. The viability of Internet services access on mobile phones was limited until prices came down from that model, and network providers started to develop systems and services conveniently accessible on phones. NTT DoCoMo in Japan launched the first mobile Internet service, i-mode, in 1999 and this is considered the birth of the mobile phone Internet services. In 2001, the mobile phone email system by Research in Motion (now BlackBerry Limited) for their BlackBerry product was launched in America. To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny keypad and one-handed operation typical of mobile phones, a specific document and networking model was created for mobile devices, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Most mobile device Internet services operate using WAP. The growth of mobile phone services was initially a primarily Asian phenomenon with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all soon finding the majority of their Internet users accessing resources by phone rather than by PC.[288] Developing countries followed, with India, South Africa, Kenya, the Philippines, and Pakistan all reporting that the majority of their domestic users accessed the Internet from a mobile phone rather than a PC. The European and North American use of the Internet was influenced by a large installed base of personal computers, and the growth of mobile phone Internet access was more gradual, but had reached national penetration levels of 20–30% in most Western countries.[289] The cross-over occurred in 2008, when more Internet access devices were mobile phones than personal computers. In many parts of the developing world, the ratio is as much as 10 mobile phone users to one PC user.[290]
Global Internet traffic continues to grow at a rapid rate, rising 23% from 2020 to 2021[291] when the number of active Internet users reached 4.66 billion people, representing half of the global population. Further demand for data, and the capacity to satisfy this demand, are forecast to increase to 717 terabits per second in 2021.[292] This capacity stems from the optical amplification and WDM systems that are the common basis of virtually every metro, regional, national, international and submarine telecommunications networks.[293] These optical networking systems have been installed throughout the 5 billion kilometers of fiber optic lines deployed around the world.[294] Continued growth in traffic is expected for the foreseeable future from a combination of new users, increased mobile phone adoption, machine-to-machine connections, connected homes, 5G devices and the burgeoning requirement for cloud and Internet services such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple Music and YouTube.
There are nearly insurmountable problems in supplying a historiography of the Internet's development. The process of digitization represents a twofold challenge both for historiography in general and, in particular, for historical communication research.[295] A sense of the difficulty in documenting early developments that led to the internet can be gathered from the quote:
"The Arpanet period is somewhat well documented because the corporation in charge – BBN – left a physical record. Moving into the NSFNET era, it became an extraordinarily decentralized process. The record exists in people's basements, in closets. ... So much of what happened was done verbally and on the basis of individual trust."
Notable works on the subject were published by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (1996), Roy Rosenzweig, Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet (1998), and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (2000).[297]
Most scholarship and literature on the Internet lists ARPANET as the prior network that was iterated on and studied to create it,[298] although other early computer networks and experiments existed alongside or before ARPANET.[299]
These histories of the Internet have since been criticized as teleologies or Whig history; that is, they take the present to be the end point toward which history has been unfolding based on a single cause:
In the case of Internet history, the epoch-making event is usually said to be the demonstration of the 4-node ARPANET network in 1969. From that single happening the global Internet developed.
In addition to these characteristics, historians have cited methodological problems arising in their work:
"Internet history" ... tends to be too close to its sources. Many Internet pioneers are alive, active, and eager to shape the histories that describe their accomplishments. Many museums and historians are equally eager to interview the pioneers and to publicize their stories.
^Abbate 1999, p. 3 "The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States"
^ abby Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). "How the Internet Came to Be". Archived from the original on September 26, 2017. Retrieved September 25, 2017. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.
^"The Untold Internet". Internet Hall of Fame. October 19, 2015. Retrieved April 3, 2020. many of the milestones that led to the development of the modern Internet are already familiar to many of us: the genesis of the ARPANET, the implementation of the standard network protocol TCP/IP, the growth of LANs (Large Area Networks), the invention of DNS (the Domain Name System), and the adoption of American legislation that funded U.S. Internet expansion—which helped fuel global network access—to name just a few.
^"Study into UK IPv4 and IPv6 allocations"(PDF). Reid Technical Facilities Management LLP. 2014. As the network continued to grow, the model of central co-ordination by a contractor funded by the US government became unsustainable. Organisations were using IP-based networking even if they were not directly connected to the ARPAnet. They needed to get globally unique IP addresses. The nature of the ARPAnet was also changing as it was no longer limited to organisations working on ARPA-funded contracts. The US National Science Foundation set up a national IP-based backbone network, NSFnet, so that its grant-holders could be interconnected to supercomputer centres, universities and various national/regional academic/research networks, including ARPAnet. That resulting network of networks was the beginning of today's Internet.
^"Reminiscences on the Theory of Time-Sharing". John McCarthy's Original Website. Retrieved January 23, 2020. in 1960 'time-sharing' as a phrase was much in the air. It was, however, generally used in my sense rather than in John McCarthy's sense of a CTSS-like object.
^"About Rand". Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet. Retrieved July 25, 2012.
^Pelkey, James L. "6.1 The Communications Subnet: BBN 1969". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988. As Kahn recalls: ... Paul Baran's contributions ... I also think Paul was motivated almost entirely by voice considerations. If you look at what he wrote, he was talking about switches that were low-cost electronics. The idea of putting powerful computers in these locations hadn't quite occurred to him as being cost effective. So the idea of computer switches was missing. The whole notion of protocols didn't exist at that time. And the idea of computer-to-computer communications was really a secondary concern.
^Barber, Derek (Spring 1993). "The Origins of Packet Switching". The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society (5). ISSN0958-7403. Retrieved September 6, 2017. There had been a paper written by [Paul Baran] from the Rand Corporation which, in a sense, foreshadowed packet switching in a way for speech networks and voice networks
^Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018). The Dream Machine. Stripe Press. p. 286. ISBN978-1-953953-36-0. Baran had put more emphasis on digital voice communications than on computer communications.
^"On packet switching". Net History. Retrieved January 8, 2024. [Scantlebury said] Clearly Donald and Paul Baran had independently come to a similar idea albeit for different purposes. Paul for a survivable voice/telex network, ours for a high-speed computer network.
^Metz, Cade (September 3, 2012). "What Do the H-Bomb and the Internet Have in Common? Paul Baran". WIRED. He was very conscious of people mistaken belief that the work he did at RAND somehow led to the creation of the ARPAnet. It didn't, and he was very honest about that.
^Edmondson-Yurkanan, Chris (2007). "SIGCOMM's archaeological journey into networking's past". Communications of the ACM. 50 (5): 63–68. doi:10.1145/1230819.1230840. ISSN0001-0782. In his first draft dated Nov. 10, 1965 [5], Davies forecast today's "killer app" for his new communication service: "The greatest traffic could only come if the public used this means for everyday purposes such as shopping... People sending enquiries and placing orders for goods of all kinds will make up a large section of the traffic... Business use of the telephone may be reduced by the growth of the kind of service we contemplate."
^Davies, D. W. (1966). "Proposal for a Digital Communication Network"(PDF). Computer developments in the distant future might result in one type of network being able to carry speech and digital messages efficiently.
^Roberts, Dr. Lawrence G. (May 1995). "The ARPANET & Computer Networks". Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Retrieved April 13, 2016. Then in June 1966, Davies wrote a second internal paper, "Proposal for a Digital Communication Network" In which he coined the word packet,- a small sub part of the message the user wants to send, and also introduced the concept of an "Interface computer" to sit between the user equipment and the packet network.
^Rayner, David; Barber, Derek; Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (2001). NPL, Packet Switching and the Internet. Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers 2001. Archived from the original on August 7, 2003. Retrieved June 13, 2024. The system first went 'live' early in 1969
^John S, Quarterman; Josiah C, Hoskins (1986). "Notable computer networks". Communications of the ACM. 29 (10): 932–971. doi:10.1145/6617.6618. S2CID25341056. The first packet-switching network was implemented at the National Physical Laboratories in the United Kingdom. It was quickly followed by the ARPANET in 1969.
^Haughney Dare-Bryan, Christine (June 22, 2023). Computer Freaks (Podcast). Chapter Two: In the Air. Inc. Magazine. 35:55 minutes in. Leonard Kleinrock: Donald Davies ... did make a single node packet switch before ARPA did
^Clarke, Peter (1982). Packet and circuit-switched data networks(PDF) (PhD thesis). Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. "As well as the packet switched network actually built at NPL for communication between their local computing facilities, some simulation experiments have been performed on larger networks. A summary of this work is reported in [69]. The work was carried out to investigate networks of a size capable of providing data communications facilities to most of the U.K. ... Experiments were then carried out using a method of flow control devised by Davies [70] called 'isarithmic' flow control. ... The simulation work carried out at NPL has, in many respects, been more realistic than most of the ARPA network theoretical studies."
^Press, Gil (January 2, 2015). "A Very Short History Of The Internet And The Web". Forbes. Archived from the original on January 9, 2015. Retrieved February 7, 2020. Roberts' proposal that all host computers would connect to one another directly ... was not endorsed ... Wesley Clark ... suggested to Roberts that the network be managed by identical small computers, each attached to a host computer. Accepting the idea, Roberts named the small computers dedicated to network administration 'Interface Message Processors' (IMPs), which later evolved into today's routers.
^SRI Project 5890-1; Networking (Reports on Meetings), Stanford University, 1967, archived from the original on February 2, 2020, retrieved February 15, 2020, W. Clark's message switching proposal (appended to Taylor's letter of April 24, 1967 to Engelbart)were reviewed.
^Strickland, Jonathan (December 28, 2007). "How ARPANET Works". HowStuffWorks. Archived from the original on January 12, 2008. Retrieved March 7, 2020.
^Roberts, L. (January 1, 1988). "The arpanet and computer networks". A history of personal workstations. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 141–172. doi:10.1145/61975.66916. ISBN978-0-201-11259-7.
^Roberts, Larry (1986). "The Arpanet and computer networks". Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the history of personal workstations. pp. 51–58. doi:10.1145/12178.12182. ISBN0897911768.
^ abKirstein, P.T. (1999). "Early experiences with the Arpanet and Internet in the United Kingdom". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 21 (1): 38–44. doi:10.1109/85.759368. S2CID1558618.
^The Merit Network, Inc. is an independent non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation governed by Michigan's public universities. Merit receives administrative services under an agreement with the University of Michigan.
^ abGreen, Lelia (2010). The internet: an introduction to new media. Berg new media series. Berg. p. 31. ISBN978-1-84788-299-8. OCLC504280762. The original ARPANET design had made data integrity part of the IMP's store-and-forward role, but Cyclades end-to-end protocol greatly simplified the packet switching operations of the network. ... The idea was to adopt several principles from Cyclades and invert the ARPANET model to minimise international differences.
^Bennett, Richard (September 2009). "Designed for Change: End-to-End Arguments, Internet Innovation, and the Net Neutrality Debate"(PDF). Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. pp. 7, 9, 11. Retrieved September 11, 2017. Two significant packet networks preceded the TCP/IP Internet: ARPANET and CYCLADES. The designers of the Internet borrowed heavily from these systems, especially CYCLADES ... The first end-to-end research network was CYCLA DES, designed by Louis Pouzin at IRIA in France with the support of BBN's Dave Walden and Alex McKenzie and deployed beginning in 1972.
^"A Technical History of CYCLADES". Technical Histories of the Internet & other Network Protocols. Computer Science Department, University of Texas Austin. Archived from the original on September 1, 2013.
^"The internet's fifth man". The Economist. November 30, 2013. Retrieved April 22, 2020. In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet.
^ abRybczynski, Tony (2009). "Commercialization of packet switching (1975–1985): A Canadian perspective [History of Communications]". IEEE Communications Magazine. 47 (12): 26–31. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2009.5350364. S2CID23243636.
^ abSchwartz, Mischa (2010). "X.25 Virtual Circuits - TRANSPAC IN France - Pre-Internet Data Networking [History of communications]". IEEE Communications Magazine. 48 (11): 40–46. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2010.5621965. S2CID23639680.
^Ikram, Nadeem (1985). Internet Protocols and a Partial Implementation of CCITT X.75 (Thesis). p. 2. OCLC663449435, 1091194379. Two main approaches to internetworking have come into existence based upon the virtual circuit and the datagram services. The vast majority of the work on interconnecting networks falls into one of these two approaches: The CCITT X.75 Recommendation; The DoD Internet Protocol (IP).
^Unsoy, Mehmet S.; Shanahan, Theresa A. (1981). "X.75 internetworking of Datapac and Telenet". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 11 (4): 232–239. doi:10.1145/1013879.802679.
^Council, National Research; Sciences, Division on Engineering and Physical; Board, Computer Science and Telecommunications; Applications, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and; Committee, NII 2000 Steering (February 5, 1998). The Unpredictable Certainty: White Papers. National Academies Press. ISBN978-0-309-17414-5.cite book: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^McKenzie, Alexander (2011). "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33 (1): 66–71. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.9. S2CID206443072.
^Cerf, V.; Kahn, R. (May 1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
^"The internet's fifth man". Economist. December 13, 2013. Retrieved September 11, 2017. In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet.
^Vint Cerf; Yogen Dalal; Carl Sunshine (December 1974). Specification of Internet Transmission Control Protocol. RFC675.
^Panzaris, Georgios (2008). Machines and romances: the technical and narrative construction of networked computing as a general-purpose platform, 1960–1995. Stanford University. p. 128. Despite the misgivings of Xerox Corporation (which intended to make PUP the basis of a proprietary commercial networking product), researchers at Xerox PARC, including ARPANET pioneers Robert Metcalfe and Yogen Dalal, shared the basic contours of their research with colleagues at TCP and Internet working group meetings in 1976 and 1977, suggesting the possible benefits of separating TCPs routing and transmission control functions into two discrete layers.
^ abPelkey, James L. (2007). "Yogen Dalal". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications, 1968–1988. Archived from the original on September 5, 2019. Retrieved September 5, 2019.
^Internet Traffic Exchange (Report). OECD Digital Economy Papers. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). April 1, 1998. doi:10.1787/236767263531.
^Cvijetic, M.; Djordjevic, I. (2013). Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks. Artech House applied photonics series. Artech House. ISBN978-1-60807-555-3.
^Garwin, Laura; Lincoln, Tim, eds. (2010). "The first laser: Charles H. Townes". A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. University of Chicago Press. p. 105. ISBN978-0-226-28416-3.
^Bertolotti, Mario (2015). Masers and Lasers: An Historical Approach (2nd ed.). Chicago: CRC Press. p. 151.
^"FLAGSHIP". Central Computing Department Newsletter (12). January 1991. Archived from the original on February 13, 2020. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
^"FLAGSHIP". Central Computing Department Newsletter (16). September 1991. Archived from the original on February 13, 2020. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
^Russell, A.L. (July 2006). "'Rough Consensus and Running Code' and the Internet-OSI Standards War". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 28 (3): 48–61. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2006.42. S2CID206442834.
^"Internet History in Asia". 16th APAN Meetings/Advanced Network Conference in Busan. Archived from the original on February 1, 2006. Retrieved December 25, 2005.
^Even after the appropriations act was amended in 1992 to give NSF more flexibility with regard to commercial traffic, NSF never felt that it could entirely do away with its Acceptable Use Policy and its restrictions on commercial traffic, see the response to Recommendation 5 in NSF's response to the Inspector General's review (an April 19, 1993 memo from Frederick Bernthal, Acting Director, to Linda Sundro, Inspector General, that is included at the end of Review of NSFNET, Office of the Inspector General, National Science Foundation, March 23, 1993)
^Management of NSFNET, a transcript of the March 12, 1992 hearing before the Subcommittee on Science of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, Second Session, Hon. Rick Boucher, subcommittee chairman, presiding
^NSF Solicitation 93-52Archived March 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine – Network Access Point Manager, Routing Arbiter, Regional Network Providers, and Very High Speed Backbone Network Services Provider for NSFNET and the NREN(SM) Program, May 6, 1993
^Jurgenson, Nathan; Ritzer, George (February 2, 2012), Ritzer, George (ed.), "The Internet, Web 2.0, and Beyond", The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 626–648, doi:10.1002/9781444347388.ch33, ISBN978-1-4443-4738-8
^William THOMAS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC., and National Science Foundation Defendants. Civ. No. 97-2412 (TFH), Sec. I.A., 2 F.Supp.2d 22 (D.D.C. April 6, 1998), archived from the original.
^Anderson, Nate (September 30, 2009). "ICANN cuts cord to US government, gets broader oversight". Ars Technica. ICANN, which oversees the Internet's domain name system, is a private nonprofit that reports to the US Department of Commerce. Under a new agreement, that relationship will change, and ICANN's accountability goes global
^DeNardis, Laura (March 12, 2013). "The Emerging Field of Internet Governance". In Dutton, William H. (ed.). Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199589074.013.0026.
^Hillebrand, Friedhelm (2002). Hillebrand, Friedhelm (ed.). GSM and UMTS, The Creation of Global Mobile Communications. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN978-0-470-84322-2.
^Mauldin, Alan (September 7, 2021). "Global Internet Traffic and Capacity Return to Regularly Scheduled Programming". TeleGeography.
^Classen, Christoph; Kinnebrock, Susanne; Löblich, Maria (2012). "Towards Web History: Sources, Methods, and Challenges in the Digital Age. An Introduction". Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung. 37 (4 (142)). GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Center for Historical Social Research: 97–101. JSTOR41756476.
^"A Flaw in the Design". The Washington Post. May 30, 2015. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved February 20, 2020. The Internet was born of a big idea: Messages could be chopped into chunks, sent through a network in a series of transmissions, then reassembled by destination computers quickly and efficiently... The most important institutional force ... was the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ... as ARPA began work on a groundbreaking computer network, the agency recruited scientists affiliated with the nation's top universities.
^Campbell-Kelly, Martin; Garcia-Swartz, Daniel D (2013). "The History of the Internet: The Missing Narratives". Journal of Information Technology. 28 (1): 18–33. doi:10.1057/jit.2013.4. S2CID41013. SSRN867087.
Rosenzweig, Roy (December 1998). "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet". The American Historical Review. 103 (5): 1530–1552. doi:10.2307/2649970. JSTOR2649970.
Russell, Andrew L. (2014). Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-139-91661-5.
Ryan, Johnny (2010). A history of the Internet and the digital future. London, England: Reaktion Books. ISBN978-1-86189-777-0.
This article is about the worldwide computer network. For the global system of pages accessed through URLs via the Internet, see World Wide Web. For other uses, see Internet (disambiguation).
The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching in the 1960s and the design of computer networks for data communication.[2][3] The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France.[4][5][6] The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite.[7] The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web,[8] marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet,[9] and generated sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobilecomputers were connected to the internetwork. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.
The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies.[10] The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.[11] In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders.[12]
The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven.[13] The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual,[14] and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork.[15] Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks.[16]
When it came into common use, most publications treated the word Internet as a capitalized proper noun; this has become less common.[16] This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar.[16][17] The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case.[16][17] In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases.[18]
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services,[19] a collection of documents (web pages) and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[20]
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 facilitated 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.[41] The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89.[42][43][44][45] Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks 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.[46] The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.[47]
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.[48] 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.[49]
Later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee began writing WorldWideWeb, 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,[50] the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server,[51] and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994.[52] In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe.[53] By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.[54]
As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of MOS transistors, exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance.[57]
Since 1995, the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web[58] with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever-greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking services.[59] During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.[60] This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.[61] As of 31 March 2011[update], the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30% of world population).[62] It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet.[63]
ICANN headquarters in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States
The Internet is a global network that comprises many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. To maintain interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. ICANN coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including domain names, IP addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces are essential for maintaining the global reach of the Internet. This role of ICANN distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body for the global Internet.[64]
2007 map showing submarine fiberoptic telecommunication cables around the world
The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. As with any computer network, the Internet physically consists of routers, media (such as cabling and radio links), repeaters, modems etc. However, as an example of internetworking, many of the network nodes are not necessarily Internet equipment per se. The internet packets are carried by other full-fledged networking protocols with the Internet acting as a homogeneous networking standard, running across heterogeneous hardware, with the packets guided to their destinations by IP routers.
Packet routing across the Internet involves several tiers of Internet service providers.
Internet service providers (ISPs) establish the worldwide connectivity between individual networks at various levels of scope. End-users who only access the Internet when needed to perform a function or obtain information, represent the bottom of the routing hierarchy. At the top of the routing hierarchy are the tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies that exchange traffic directly with each other via very high speed fiber-optic cables and governed by peering agreements. Tier 2 and lower-level networks buy Internet transit from other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in peering. An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.
Common methods of Internet access by users include dial-up with a computer modem via telephone circuits, broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics or copper wires, Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone technology (e.g. 3G, 4G). The Internet may often be accessed from computers in libraries and Internet cafés. Internet access points exist in many public places such as airport halls and coffee shops. Various terms are used, such as public Internet kiosk, public access terminal, and Web payphone. Many hotels also have public terminals that are usually fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for various usages, such as ticket booking, bank deposit, or online payment. Wi-Fi provides wireless access to the Internet via local computer networks. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi cafés, where users need to bring their own wireless devices, such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based.
Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services that cover large areas are available in many cities, such as New York, London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, where the Internet can then be accessed from places such as a park bench.[77] Experiments have also been conducted with proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular networks, and fixed wireless services. Modern smartphones can also access the Internet through the cellular carrier network. For Web browsing, these devices provide applications such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and a wide variety of other Internet software may be installed from app stores. Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016.[78]
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that, by the end of 2017, 48% of individual users regularly connect to the Internet, up from 34% in 2012.[79]Mobile Internet connectivity has played an important role in expanding access in recent years, especially in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa.[80] The number of unique mobile cellular subscriptions increased from 3.9 billion in 2012 to 4.8 billion in 2016, two-thirds of the world's population, with more than half of subscriptions located in Asia and the Pacific. The number of subscriptions was predicted to rise to 5.7 billion users in 2020.[81] As of 2018[update], 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network.[81] The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most.[80]
Zero-rating, the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost, has offered opportunities to surmount economic hurdles but has also been accused by its critics as creating a two-tiered Internet. To address the issues with zero-rating, an alternative model has emerged in the concept of 'equal rating' and is being tested in experiments by Mozilla and Orange in Africa. Equal rating prevents prioritization of one type of content and zero-rates all content up to a specified data cap. In a study published by Chatham House, 15 out of 19 countries researched in Latin America had some kind of hybrid or zero-rated product offered. Some countries in the region had a handful of plans to choose from (across all mobile network operators) while others, such as Colombia, offered as many as 30 pre-paid and 34 post-paid plans.[82]
A study of eight countries in the Global South found that zero-rated data plans exist in every country, although there is a great range in the frequency with which they are offered and actually used in each.[83] The study looked at the top three to five carriers by market share in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru and Philippines. Across the 181 plans examined, 13 percent were offering zero-rated services. Another study, covering Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, found Facebook's Free Basics and Wikipedia Zero to be the most commonly zero-rated content.[84]
The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on the first two components.) This is a suite of protocols that are ordered into a set of four conceptional layers by the scope of their operation, originally documented in
RFC1123. At the top is the application layer, where communication is described in terms of the objects or data structures most appropriate for each application. For example, a web browser operates in a client–server application model and exchanges information with the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and an application-germane data structure, such as the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
Below this top layer, the transport layer connects applications on different hosts with a logical channel through the network. It provides this service with a variety of possible characteristics, such as ordered, reliable delivery (TCP), and an unreliable datagram service (UDP).
Underlying these layers are the networking technologies that interconnect networks at their borders and exchange traffic across them. The Internet layer implements the Internet Protocol (IP) which enables computers to identify and locate each other by IP address and route their traffic via intermediate (transit) networks.[85] The Internet Protocol layer code is independent of the type of network that it is physically running over.
At the bottom of the architecture is the link layer, which connects nodes on the same physical link, and contains protocols that do not require routers for traversal to other links. The protocol suite does not explicitly specify hardware methods to transfer bits, or protocols to manage such hardware, but assumes that appropriate technology is available. Examples of that technology include Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and DSL.
As user data is processed through the protocol stack, each abstraction layer adds encapsulation information at the sending host. Data is transmitted over the wire at the link level between hosts and routers. Encapsulation is removed by the receiving host. Intermediate relays update link encapsulation at each hop, and inspect the IP layer for routing purposes.
Conceptual data flow in a simple network topology of two hosts (A and B) connected by a link between their respective routers. The application on each host executes read and write operations as if the processes were directly connected to each other by some kind of data pipe. After the establishment of this pipe, most details of the communication are hidden from each process, as the underlying principles of communication are implemented in the lower protocol layers. In analogy, at the transport layer the communication appears as host-to-host, without knowledge of the application data structures and the connecting routers, while at the internetworking layer, individual network boundaries are traversed at each router.
The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP enables internetworking and, in essence, establishes the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPv4 and IPv6.
A DNS resolver consults three name servers to resolve the domain name user-visible "www.wikipedia.org" to determine the IPv4 Address 207.142.131.234.
For locating individual computers on the network, the Internet provides IP addresses. IP addresses are used by the Internet infrastructure to direct internet packets to their destinations. They consist of fixed-length numbers, which are found within the packet. IP addresses are generally assigned to equipment either automatically via DHCP, or are configured.
However, the network also supports other addressing systems. Users generally enter domain names (e.g. "en.wikipedia.org") instead of IP addresses because they are easier to remember; they are converted by the Domain Name System (DNS) into IP addresses which are more efficient for routing purposes.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number.[85] IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed in 1981 to address up to ≈4.3 billion (109) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011,[86] when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted.
Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998.[87][88][89]IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s and is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.[90]
IPv6 is not directly interoperable by design with IPv4. In essence, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities must exist for internetworking or nodes must have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer operating systems support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development. Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts, e.g., peering agreements, and by technical specifications or protocols that describe the exchange of data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its interconnections and routing policies.
A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network.[91]: 1, 16  The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting. Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.
The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 296 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.
For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask for the prefix 198.51.100.0/24.
Traffic is exchanged between subnetworks through routers when the routing prefixes of the source address and the destination address differ. A router serves as a logical or physical boundary between the subnets.
The benefits of subnetting an existing network vary with each deployment scenario. In the address allocation architecture of the Internet using CIDR and in large organizations, it is necessary to allocate address space efficiently. Subnetting may also enhance routing efficiency or have advantages in network management when subnetworks are administratively controlled by different entities in a larger organization. Subnets may be arranged logically in a hierarchical architecture, partitioning an organization's network address space into a tree-like routing structure.
Computers and routers use routing tables in their operating system to direct IP packets to reach a node on a different subnetwork. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or automatically by routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global Internet. The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet.[92][93]
While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).[94] The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices (BCP) when implementing Internet technologies.
The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system of named references. URIs symbolically identify services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.[95]
World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page. Client-side software can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.
The Web has enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial cost and many cost-free services are available. However, publishing and maintaining large, professional websites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and expensive proposition. Many individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily being able to update online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information and be attracted to the corporation as a result.
Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce, which is the sale of products and services directly via the Web, continues to grow. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television.[96]: 19  Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation.
When the Web developed in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a web server, formatted in HTML, ready for transmission to a web browser in response to a request. Over time, the process of creating and serving web pages has become dynamic, creating a flexible design, layout, and content. Websites are often created using content management software with, initially, very little content. Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of an organization or the public, fill underlying databases with content using editing pages designed for that purpose while casual visitors view and read this content in HTML form. There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.
Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet.[97][98] Pictures, documents, and other files are sent as email attachments. Email messages can be cc-ed to multiple email addresses.
Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The idea began in the early 1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. VoIP systems now dominate many markets and are as easy to use and as convenient as a traditional telephone. The benefit has been substantial cost savings over traditional telephone calls, especially over long distances. Cable, ADSL, and mobile data networks provide Internet access in customer premises[99] and inexpensive VoIP network adapters provide the connection for traditional analog telephone sets. The voice quality of VoIP often exceeds that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for VoIP include the situation that emergency services may not be universally available and that devices rely on a local power supply, while older traditional phones are powered from the local loop, and typically operate during a power failure.
File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access online media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is much wider, from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services. Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide. Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example, standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for 1080p.[100]
Webcams are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the picture either is usually small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat rooms and video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users.[101] It uses an HTML5 based web player by default to stream and show video files.[102] Registered users may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily.
The Internet has enabled new forms of social interaction, activities, and social associations. This phenomenon has given rise to the scholarly study of the sociology of the Internet. The early Internet left an impact on some writers who used symbolism to write about it, such as describing the Internet as a "means to connect individuals in a vast invisible net over all the earth."[103]
Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 390 million to 1.9 billion.[107] By 2010, 22% of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube.[108] In 2014 the world's Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 44 percent of world population, but two-thirds came from the richest countries, with 78 percent of Europeans using the Internet, followed by 57 percent of the Americas.[109] However, by 2018, Asia alone accounted for 51% of all Internet users, with 2.2 billion out of the 4.3 billion Internet users in the world. China's Internet users surpassed a major milestone in 2018, when the country's Internet regulatory authority, China Internet Network Information Centre, announced that China had 802 million users.[110] China was followed by India, with some 700 million users, with the United States third with 275 million users. However, in terms of penetration, in 2022 China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 60% and the United States's 90%.[111] In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania.[112] In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access.[113] As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population.[114]
The prevalent language for communication via the Internet has always been English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as the language's role as a lingua franca and as a world language. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%).[115] The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.
In a US study in 2005, the percentage of men using the Internet was very slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although this difference reversed in those under 30. Men logged on more often, spent more time online, and were more likely to be broadband users, whereas women tended to make more use of opportunities to communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use the Internet for shopping and banking.[116] In 2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking services, such as Facebook and Myspace, although the ratios varied with age.[117] Women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more.[118] Men were more likely to blog. Among those who blog, men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were more likely to have a personal blog.[119]
Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in "citizen of the net")[120] refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech,[121][122]Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet,[123][124]digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.[125]
The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.
Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides and virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of Google Scholar. For distance education, help with homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both formal and informal education. Further, the Internet allows researchers (especially those from the social and behavioral sciences) to conduct research remotely via virtual laboratories, with profound changes in reach and generalizability of findings as well as in communication between scientists and in the publication of results.[129]
The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills have made collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative software. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example of this is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (later forked into LibreOffice). Internet chat, whether using an IRC chat room, an instant messaging system, or a social networking service, allows colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way while working at their computers during the day. Messages can be exchanged even more quickly and conveniently than via email. These systems may allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team members.
Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work. Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access and computer literacy spread.
The Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and information stores easily from any access point. Access may be with computer security; i.e., authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of remote work, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data using cloud computing, or open a remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications, while away from the office. It has been referred to among system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare,[130] because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes. By the late 2010s the Internet had been described as "the main source of scientific information "for the majority of the global North population".[131]: 111 
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to pursue their personal 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 services such as Facebook have created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, pursue common interests, and connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flickr specialize in users' videos and photographs. Social networking services are also widely used by businesses and other organizations to promote their brands, to market to their customers and to encourage posts to "go viral". "Black hat" social media techniques are also employed by some organizations, such as spam accounts and astroturfing.
A risk for both individuals' and organizations' writing posts (especially public posts) on social networking services is that especially foolish or controversial posts occasionally lead to an unexpected and possibly large-scale backlash on social media from other Internet users. This is also a risk in relation to controversial offline behavior, if it is widely made known. The nature of this backlash can range widely from counter-arguments and public mockery, through insults and hate speech, to, in extreme cases, rape and death threats. The online disinhibition effect describes the tendency of many individuals to behave more stridently or offensively online than they would in person. A significant number of feminist women have been the target of various forms of harassment in response to posts they have made on social media, and Twitter in particular has been criticized in the past for not doing enough to aid victims of online abuse.[132]
For organizations, such a backlash can cause overall brand damage, especially if reported by the media. However, this is not always the case, as any brand damage in the eyes of people with an opposing opinion to that presented by the organization could sometimes be outweighed by strengthening the brand in the eyes of others. Furthermore, if an organization or individual gives in to demands that others perceive as wrong-headed, that can then provoke a counter-backlash.
Some websites, such as Reddit, have rules forbidding the posting of personal information of individuals (also known as doxxing), due to concerns about such postings leading to mobs of large numbers of Internet users directing harassment at the specific individuals thereby identified. In particular, the Reddit rule forbidding the posting of personal information is widely understood to imply that all identifying photos and names must be censored in Facebook screenshots posted to Reddit. However, the interpretation of this rule in relation to public Twitter posts is less clear, and in any case, like-minded people online have many other ways they can use to direct each other's attention to public social media posts they disagree with.
Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and approaches by sexual predators, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Children may also encounter material that they may find upsetting, or material that their parents consider to be not age-appropriate. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from inappropriate material on the Internet. The most popular social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter, commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies are typically trivial to circumvent by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites anyway. Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist.[133]
The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic.[134] Many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos.[134] The Internet pornography and online gambling industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web. Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general, this has failed to stop their widespread popularity.[135]
Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming.[136] This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer.[137] Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game play or certain games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than others.
Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness.[138] Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread. A 2017 book claimed that the Internet consolidates most aspects of human endeavor into singular arenas of which all of humanity are potential members and competitors, with fundamentally negative impacts on mental health as a result. While successes in each field of activity are pervasively visible and trumpeted, they are reserved for an extremely thin sliver of the world's most exceptional, leaving everyone else behind. Whereas, before the Internet, expectations of success in any field were supported by reasonable probabilities of achievement at the village, suburb, city or even state level, the same expectations in the Internet world are virtually certain to bring disappointment today: there is always someone else, somewhere on the planet, who can do better and take the now one-and-only top spot.[139]
Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form that involves, "highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards."[140] In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called "Islamic State", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.
Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web while at work, according to a 2003 study by Peninsula Business Services.[141]Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.[142]
Electronic business (e-business) encompasses business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, supply chain management, marketing, sales, customer service, and business relationship. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners. According to International Data Corporation, the size of worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are combined, equate to $16 trillion for 2013. A report by Oxford Economics added those two together to estimate the total size of the digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales.[143]
Author Andrew Keen, a long-time critic of the social transformations caused by the Internet, has focused on the economic effects of consolidation from Internet businesses. Keen cites a 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report saying brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people.[148]
Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, and VoIP so that work may be performed from any location, most conveniently the worker's home. It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. More workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal communication networks.
Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries.[149] In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.[150] The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park.[151] The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web[152] and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic.[153]
Banner in Bangkok during the 2014 Thai coup d'état, informing the Thai public that 'like' or 'share' activities on social media could result in imprisonment (observed 30 June 2014)
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing for carrying out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism.[154][155]The New York Times suggested that social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt, by helping activists organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.[156]
Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies.[157][158]
E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government[159] and for government provision of services directly to citizens.[160]
The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice. A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. Kiva raises funds for local intermediary microfinance organizations that post stories and updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to loans of their choice and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders themselves.[161][162]
Internet resources, hardware, and software components are the target of criminal or malicious attempts to gain unauthorized control to cause interruptions, commit fraud, engage in blackmail or access private information.[163]
Malware is malicious software used and distributed via the Internet. It includes computer viruses which are copied with the help of humans, computer worms which copy themselves automatically, software for denial of service attacks, ransomware, botnets, and spyware that reports on the activity and typing of users. Usually, these activities constitute cybercrime. Defense theorists have also speculated about the possibilities of hackers using cyber warfare using similar methods on a large scale.[164]
Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet.[165][166] According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016.[167]Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year.[168] Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network.[169][170] Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.[171][172][173]
The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet.[174] In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies.[175][176][177]Packet capture is the monitoring of data traffic on a computer network. Computers communicate over the Internet by breaking up messages (emails, images, videos, web pages, files, etc.) into small chunks called "packets", which are routed through a network of computers, until they reach their destination, where they are assembled back into a complete "message" again. Packet Capture Appliance intercepts these packets as they are traveling through the network, in order to examine their contents using other programs. A packet capture is an information gathering tool, but not an analysis tool. That is it gathers "messages" but it does not analyze them and figure out what they mean. Other programs are needed to perform traffic analysis and sift through intercepted data looking for important/useful information. Under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act all U.S. telecommunications providers are required to install packet sniffing technology to allow Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intercept all of their customers' broadband Internet and VoIP traffic.[178]
The large amount of data gathered from packet capture requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access to certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties.[179] Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data.[180] Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia.[181]
In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret.[187] Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive websites on individual computers or networks in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.
As the Internet is a heterogeneous network, its physical characteristics, including, for example the data transfer rates of connections, vary widely. It exhibits emergent phenomena that depend on its large-scale organization.[188]
The volume of Internet traffic is difficult to measure because no single point of measurement exists in the multi-tiered, non-hierarchical topology. Traffic data may be estimated from the aggregate volume through the peering points of the Tier 1 network providers, but traffic that stays local in large provider networks may not be accounted for.
An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to the small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia.[189] Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93%[190] of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.[191]
Estimates of the Internet's electricity usage have been the subject of controversy, according to a 2014 peer-reviewed research paper that found claims differing by a factor of 20,000 published in the literature during the preceding decade, ranging from 0.0064 kilowatt hours per gigabyte transferred (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB.[192] The researchers attributed these discrepancies mainly to the year of reference (i.e. whether efficiency gains over time had been taken into account) and to whether "end devices such as personal computers and servers are included" in the analysis.[192]
In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall energy used by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 GW, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, cell towers, optical switches, Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic.[193][194] According to a non-peer-reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure.[195] The study also said that online video streaming alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new "digital sobriety" regulations restricting the use and size of video files.[196]
^Despite the name, TCP/IP also includes UDP traffic, which is significant.[1]
^Due to legal concerns the OpenNet Initiative does not check for filtering of child pornography and because their classifications focus on technical filtering, they do not include other types of censorship.
^ ab"A Flaw in the Design". The Washington Post. 30 May 2015. Archived from the original on 8 November 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2020. The Internet was born of a big idea: Messages could be chopped into chunks, sent through a network in a series of transmissions, then reassembled by destination computers quickly and efficiently. Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran. ... The most important institutional force ... was the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ... as ARPA began work on a groundbreaking computer network, the agency recruited scientists affiliated with the nation's top universities.
^Abbate 1999, p. 3 "The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States"
^by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). "How the Internet Came to Be". Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2017. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.
^"HTML 4.01 Specification". World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 6 October 2008. Retrieved 13 August 2008. [T]he link (or hyperlink, or Web link) [is] the basic hypertext construct. A link is a connection from one Web resource to another. Although a simple concept, the link has been one of the primary forces driving the success of the Web.
^F. J. Corbató, et al., The Compatible Time-Sharing System A Programmer's Guide (MIT Press, 1963) ISBN978-0-262-03008-3. "To establish the context of the present work, it is informative to trace the development of time-sharing at MIT. Shortly after the first paper on time-shared computers by C. Strachey at the June 1959 UNESCO Information Processing conference, H.M. Teager and J. McCarthy delivered an unpublished paper "Time-Shared Program Testing" at the August 1959 ACM Meeting."
^ abCerf, V.; Kahn, R. (1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication"(PDF). IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. ISSN1558-0857. Archived(PDF) from the original on 13 September 2006. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
^"The internet's fifth man". The Economist. 30 November 2013. ISSN0013-0613. Archived from the original on 19 April 2020. Retrieved 22 April 2020. In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet.
^Schatt, Stan (1991). Linking LANs: A Micro Manager's Guide. McGraw-Hill. p. 200. ISBN0-8306-3755-9.
^"Internet History in Asia". 16th APAN Meetings/Advanced Network Conference in Busan. Archived from the original on 1 February 2006. Retrieved 25 December 2005.
^Ward, Mark (3 August 2006). "How the web went world wide". Technology Correspondent. BBC News. Archived from the original on 21 November 2011. Retrieved 24 January 2011.
^Galpaya, Helani (12 April 2019). "Zero-rating in Emerging Economies"(PDF). Global Commission on Internet Governance. Archived(PDF) from the original on 12 April 2019. Retrieved 28 November 2020.
^Gillwald, Alison; Chair, Chenai; Futter, Ariel; Koranteng, Kweku; Odufuwa, Fola; Walubengo, John (12 September 2016). "Much Ado About Nothing? Zero Rating in the African Context"(PDF). Researchictafrica. Archived(PDF) from the original on 16 December 2020. Retrieved 28 November 2020.
^Leiner, B M.; Cerf, V G.; Clark, D D.; Kahn, R E.; Kleinrock, L; Lynch, D C.; Postel, J; Roberts, L G.; Wolff, S (10 December 2003). "A Brief History of the Internet". the Internet Society. Archived from the original on 4 June 2007.
^"internaut". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on 13 June 2015. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
^Mossberger, Karen; Tolbert, Caroline J.; McNeal, Ramona S. (2011). Digital Citizenship – The Internet, Society and Participation. SPIE Press. ISBN978-0-8194-5606-9.
^Barker, Eric (2017). Barking Up the Wrong Tree. HarperCollins. pp. 235–236. ISBN978-0-06-241604-9.
^Thornton, Patricia M. (2003). "The New Cybersects: Resistance and Repression in the Reform era". In Perry, Elizabeth; Selden, Mark (eds.). Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (2 ed.). London and New York: Routledge. pp. 149–150. ISBN978-0-415-56074-0.
CompTIA (Computing Technology Industry Association) – offers 12 professional IT Certifications, validating foundation-level IT knowledge and skills.
European Computer Driving License-Foundation – sponsors the European Computer Driving License (also called International Computer Driving License) (ICDL)
NACSE (National Association of Communication Systems Engineers) sponsors 36 Vendor Neutral, knowledge specific, Certifications covering the 5 major IT Disciplines which are: Data Networking, Telecomm, Web Design & Development, Programming & Business Skills for IT Professionals.
The Open Group – sponsors TOGAF certification and the IT Architect Certification (ITAC) and IT Specialist Certification (ITSC) skills and experience based IT certifications.
General certification of software practitioners has struggled. The ACM had a professional certification program in the early 1980s, which was discontinued due to lack of interest. Today, the IEEE is certifying software professionals, but only about 500 people have passed the exam by March 2005[update].
Surveillance, Transparency and Democracy: Public Administration in the Information Age. p. 35-57. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.
ISBN978-0-8173-1877-2
^Haque, Akhlaque (2015). Surveillance, Transparency and Democracy: Public Administration in the Information Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. pp. 35–57. ISBN978-0-8173-1877-2.
IT providers enable remote work by setting up secure access to company systems, deploying VPNs, cloud apps, and communication tools. They also ensure devices are protected and provide remote support when employees face technical issues at home.
IT consulting helps you make informed decisions about technology strategies, software implementation, cybersecurity, and infrastructure planning. Consultants assess your current setup, recommend improvements, and guide digital transformation to align IT systems with your business goals.
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