Internet This article is about the worldwide computer network. For other uses, see Internet (disambiguation). Not to be confused with the World Wide Web. TheInternetis a global system of interconnected computer networksthat use the standard Internet protocol suite(TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is an internationalnetwork of networksthat consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government packet switchednetworks, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertextdocuments and applicationsof the World Wide Web(WWW), the infrastructureto support email, and peer-to-peernetworks for file sharingand telephony. The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States governmentin the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. [ 1 ]While this work, together with work in the United Kingdom and France, led to important precursor networks, they were not the Internet. There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable. [ 2 ]From that point, the network experienced decades of sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobilecomputers were connected to it. The funding of a new U.S. backboneby the National Science Foundationin the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. [ 3 ]Though the Internet has been widely used by academiasince the 1980s, the commercializationof what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people—over a third of the worlds human population—have used the services of the Internet; approximately 100 times more people than were using it in 1995. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s to early 2000s and from the late 1990s to present in the developing world. In 1994 only 3% of American classrooms had access to the Internet while by 2002 92% did. [ 6 ] Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as voice over Internet Protocol(VoIP) and Internet Protocol television(IPTV). Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to websitetechnology, or are reshaped into bloggingand web feeds. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shoppinghas boomed both for major retail outlets and small artisansand traders. Business-to-businessand financial serviceson the Internet affect supply chainsacross entire industries. The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. [ 7 ]Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spacesin the Internet, the Internet Protocol addressspace and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols ( IPv4and 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.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 04:54:47 +0000
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