What is the Internet?

The Internet or "information superhighway" is perhaps one of the most important developments in the history of information systems. No one knows for sure how many people actually use the Internet. Some people use it daily. But what is it?

Internet stands for Interconnected Networks. It is a set of thousands of networks linked together all around the world. You may use a network where you work. The Internet is simply your network connected to the network in the building next to yours, connected to the network in the building next to them, connected to the network in the building next to them,... Eventually you have networks all over the world connected together. So when you are looking at a web site, you're going through a whole lot of computer networks to get there, and you may never go the same route twice.

The Internet began in 1969 as an experimental project. The US Department of Defense wanted to develop a network that could withstand outages, such as those caused by nuclear attack. They wanted a system that could send messages along alternate paths in the event part of the network was disabled. That's the "may never go the same route twice" part. To speed the process the DOD enlisted researchers in colleges and universities to assist with the project.

At its start and throughout most of its history, the Internet was called ARPANET (ar-pa-nette). It was named for the group that sponsored its development -- the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the DOD.But the DOD got more than it bargained for. With the highly controversial Vietnam War in full swing, ARPANET's e-mail facility began to handle not only legitimate research discussions, but also heated debates about US involvement in Southeast Asia. As students began to access ARPANET, computer games found their way into the roster of applications -- along with online messaging methods to share game strategies. Such unintended uses led to the development of bulletin boards and discussion groups devoted to other special interests. By the mid 1980s, it had expanded from four to almost 1000 computers.

When the bugs had pretty much been worked out of ARPANET, MILNET (Military Network) was implemented and extended to Europe. It was connected to ARPANET, but the traffic between the two was tightly controlled to ensure MILNET security. Since many user organizations connected their own local area networks to ARPANET and MILNET, the resulting ARPA internet included thousands of interconnected computing devices and a total of about 100,000 users by 1985. After 1985, ARPA continued to support MILNET, but began phasing out support of the ARPANET.

In the early 1980s, the importance of the ARPANET for sharing resources and information among academic researchers had become obvious. Unfortunately, ARPANET was funded by the DOD, and its use was therefore restricted to academic departments with DOD research contracts. As the DOD began phasing out its support for ARPANET after 1985, the NSF (National Science Foundation) began funding a number of network initiatives to ensure that university researchers could continue to communicate with each other and have convenient access to the national supercomputer centers established to help support NSF funded research. The network that emerged from these initiatives is known as NSFNET. By March 1992, 4071 LANs at universities and research laboratories in each of the 50 states were interconnected.

BITNET (Because It's Time Network) was started in 1981 by City University of New York and Yale University. Its goal was to create an inexpensive mechanism for university departments to communicate with their peers at other institutions through electronic mail and file transfer. In 1985, the Canadian government completed its leg of BITNET. In 1990, BITNET connected about 3000 nodes at universities located in the US, Europe, Central and South America, Canada, the Middle East, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Originally, commercial traffic was forbidden on the Internet (and other individual country networks), because key portions of these networks were funded by the various national governments and research organizations. In the early 1990s, commercial networks began connecting into these networks, opening it to commercial traffic. New commercial online services began offering access to anyone willing to pay, and a connection into the worldwide Internet became an important marketing issue. The growth in the commercial portion of the Internet was so rapid that it quickly overshadowed university and research use.

Because it is a collection of networks (and because it was developed in the 70s when organized anything was bad), the Internet has no central administration. Each network has its own administrative structure, and most networks have their own acceptable use policies that define what behavior is permitted, although most policies are virtually identical from network to network. The Internet was intentionally designed to be very decentralized, and very amenable to new ideas because many of its creators and initial users openly distrusted any central authority. However, this decentralization has led to anarchy in many ways.

So, what is the Internet? It is a collection of individual computer networks connected together so that data can easily flow from one computer to the next. What sort of data that flows is another story.

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