Read this chapter to satisfy your general curiosity about what the Internet is and what it can be used for. The answers include these:
It's a network.
It's a loose organization.
It's a coffee house.
It's a mailbox.
It's a business tool.
It's a library.
It's a software shop.
It's a newspaper.
It's a living thing.
For starters, though, here's the basic answer: The Internet is a loose organization of thousands of computers all over the world that can communicate with one another to exchange messages and share information. The Internet offers roughly 20 million
people—from nearly every country and from many different walks of life—a way to correspond with one another, do research, learn stuff, and fool around. Physicians use it to heal, journalists use it to report, activists use it to activate, and
everyday folks use it to do everyday things.
The computers that constitute the Internet come in just about every size, shape, and type in use. They're spread all over the world—in every continent, including Antarctica. According to the Internet Society, a volunteer organization, the number
of computers on the Internet is almost doubling every year. A million new computers got hooked into the Internet in the first half of 1994 alone!
Table 1.1 shows the number of Internet-connected computers in different types of U.S. organizations and in other countries. Note that the table shows the number of computers, not the number of users. Many of the computers on the Internet are large
types that may each support dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of users.
Table 1.1. The breadth of the Internet, July 1994.
Country/Type of Organization
Host Computers
Percent of Total
U.S.-educational (higher)
856,234
27
U.S.-commercial
774,735
24
U.S.-government
169,248
5
U.S.-defense
130,176
4
U.S.-non-profit organization
66,459
2
U.S.-network operator
30,993
1
U.S.-local
16,556
1
Total U.S.
2,044,401
63
United Kingdom
155,706
5
Germany
149,193
5
Canada
127,516
4
Australia
127,514
4
Japan
72,409
2
France
71,899
2
Netherlands
59,729
2
Sweden
53,294
2
Finland
49,598
2
Switzerland
47,401
1
Norway
38,759
1
Italy
23,616
1
Spain
21,147
1
Austria
20,130
1
South Africa
15,595
<1
New Zealand
14,830
<1
Korea
12,109
<1
Denmark
12,107
<1
Belgium
12,107
<1
Taiwan
10,314
<1
Hong Kong
9,141
<1
Italy
8,464
<1
Poland
7,392
<1
Brazil
5,896
<1
Czech Rep
5,639
<1
Hungary
5,390
<1
Mexico
5,164
<1
Portugal
4,518
<1
Singapore
4,014
<1
Chile
3,703
<1
Ireland
3,308
<1
Iceland
3,268
<1
Russian Fed. (SU)
3,145
<1
Greece
2,958
<1
Czech&Slovak (CS)
1,869
<1
Malaysia
1,322
<1
Turkey
1,204
<1
Thailand
1,197
<1
Slovakia
868
<1
Croatia
838
<1
Estonia
659
<1
Slovenia
574
<1
Costa Rica
544
<1
Romania
453
<1
Luxembourg
420
<1
Venezuela
399
<1
Ukraine
339
<1
China
325
<1
Russian Fed. (RU)
322
<1
India
316
<1
International organizations
315
<1
Kuwait
297
<1
Ecuador
256
<1
Argentina
248
<1
Latvia
180
<1
Colombia
144
<1
Uruguay
101
<1
Bulgaria
79
<1
Peru
75
<1
Philippines
65
<1
Indonesia
54
<1
Lithuania
53
<1
Egypt
52
<1
Tunesia
46
<1
Peru
42
<1
Cyprus
38
<1
Liechtenstein
27
<1
Panama
24
<1
Nicaragua
23
<1
Macau
12
<1
Algeria
7
<1
Fiji
5
<1
Iran
4
<1
Antarctica
4
<1
Moldova
2
<1
Saudi Arabia
1
<1
Total International:
1,180,77
37
Source: The Internet Society
Most of the computers on the Internet don't exist simply to be part of the Internet. They're actually the computers used every day by governments and their agencies, universities, research organizations, corporations, libraries, and individuals.
Because each computer is on the Internet, however, its users can take advantage of some of the information that's stored on many of the other computers. Each computer's users can also exchange messages with the users of the other computers.
The computers on the Internet can talk to one another because they are networked; they are connected in some way so that they can exchange information with one another electronically. On the Internet, the connections take many different forms. Some
computers are directly connected to others with wire or fiber-optic cables. Some are connected through local and long-distance telephone lines, and some even use wireless satellite communications—the same types used today for some long-distance phone
services and cellular phones—to communicate with other computers on the Internet.
Curious About the Word?
A network is made up of two or more computers that are connected so that they can exchange messages and share information.
An internetwork is two or more networks that are connected so that they can exchange messages and share information.
The Internet is the world's largest internetwork. It includes computers hooked together in networks, those networks hooked together in internetworks, and those internetworks hooked together in still bigger internetworks. There are at least 18,000
networks within the Internet today.
Because the Internet is an internetwork, each computer is not necessarily directly connected to every other computer (see Figure 1.1). In other words, any computer on the Internet can talk to any other, but the message may have to travel through
several other computers on its way there.
Think of it like air travel. From Indianapolis, you can fly anywhere in the world. For some destinations, however, you can't get a non-stop flight. You have to fly to Chicago or Cincinnati first, then from there to your destination. Information makes
its way around the Internet similarly.
Although most people talk about the Internet as if it were some giant company or club, it really isn't. No single entity or organization controls it. The computers on it are controlled by their owners—MIT controls its computers, the Library of
Congress controls its, the University of Pisa controls its, and so on.
Did You Know...
Many discrete organizations on the Internet have their own rules for which types of activities are allowed on their computers and which aren't. These rules are called Acceptable Use Policies, and usually they're not very carefully enforced. There
isn't a single set of Acceptable Use Policies that covers the whole Internet.
Nobody controls the Internet—people simply join up and participate. It's like a neighborhood where people communicate because they're able to, but they haven't established a formal organization with rights, rules, and leaders.
Just as each computer on the Internet is under its owner's control, some networks that make up a large part of the Internet are controlled by their owners. For example, the Internet today arose, in part, from a project called NFSnet, a network of
researchers and universities created by the National Science Foundation and therefore funded by Uncle Sam. The NFSnet and other federally funded networks that are part of the Internet set their own Acceptable Use Policies. But again, although government
and industry control pieces of the Internet, nobody controls the whole, nor is anybody likely to do so soon.
Really Curious?
The Internet as a whole is unlikely to be brought under any single point of control—if such a thing were even possible, considering the number and variety of different people and organizations who use it. Because of the lack of central control,
different resources on the Internet require different steps and skills—which is what makes using the Internet difficult.
People are working on better software to make the Internet (or parts of the Internet, anyway) appear as one smooth system to its users. (You'll learn more about that in later chapters.)
Also, efforts are underway to smooth out the wrinkles between the many networks run by federal agencies and to hook them together with the entire academic and research community, forming one, high-speed network. This early step in the creation of the
Information Superhighway will effectively put much of the policymaking power for a big slice of the Internet under U.S. government control. For more about this issue, see Chapter 9.
Looseness is the Internet's blessing, but also its curse. Because it's been so open and so free, it has evolved on its own into a giant resource that probably never could have come about if the U.S. government, IBM, Kraft Foods, or Walt Disney
Productions were holding the reins. Unfortunately, because nobody's in charge, the Internet is inconsistent and sometimes difficult to use. As people use it to access different computers and services, they find that not everything operates the same way on
the Internet. There are some general rules that people follow—a sort of traditional Internet etiquette. These rules are very general and are loosely followed, at that.
The Internet is, in effect, a democratic, egalitarian, and consensus-driven thing. It doesn't work as efficiently as a top-down, totalitarian machine—but who wants that?
Did You Know...
Although no single group really controls the Internet, there are groups that influence it.
Two volunteer groups—a council called the Internet Architecture Board and a technical advisory team called the Internet Engineering Task Force—work together to enforce minor rules to keep the whole thing working, such as deciding which kinds
of communications languages should be supported by the network. Although the Internet includes many different types of computers and networks, it can't work unless everybody observes a few basic rules in their underlying communications technologies. These
volunteer groups develop those rules to keep the Internet running smoothly.
People who want to use the Internet, but can't access it through computers at their company or school, often have to pay a commercial dial-in service for access to the Internet. (Dial-in and other types of Internet connections are explained in Chapter
5.) The Internet itself is free and open to all (although lately some fee-based services have appeared on the Internet), but some people have to pay a service provider to open the door. You'll learn more about that in Chapter 5.
Well, maybe it's not a coffee house. Maybe it's a tavern, a barber shop, or a city park. The point is that several of the most important Internet resources enable users to exchange information in an open, public way. These resources provide a forum
where users can write and post messages for other users and where they can read messages posted by others. In that sense, these resources play the open-air-exchange-site role played by a coffee house or other public meeting place. The coffee-house-type of
resources actually come in several different types, each of which is used differently. (You'll learn more about the specific types—such as newsgroups, mailing lists, and bulletin boards—later in this chapter and in Chapters 6 and 7.)
Each coffee-house-type resource typically handles a specific topic or area of interest. Some are for professional specialists, some are for hobbyists, some are for fans, some are for the generally curious. Because these resources are divided by
subject, users can easily find messages related to their interests and can post messages where the messages will be read by people who share the user's interests. For example, a user interested in the Central Intelligence Agency can read messages about the
CIA in the resource that covers it. He or she can also respond to or comment on those messages or write messages for other CIA buffs to see.
There are hundreds of these resources, but the following list may give you a feel for the range of topics.
Ceramics
Computers
Disabilities
Film and TV
Folk Music
The Grateful Dead
Star Trek
The Simpsons
Holistic Medicine
Nutrition
Law
Beer
SCUBA Diving
Erotica
Sign Language
Mystery Fiction
Astrology
Pet Birds
Middle Eastern Politics
Architecture
Employment
Religion
Biomechanics
AIDS
Gun Control
Hockey
Even though they're divided by subject, the coffee-house resources can become overcrowded; they can pile up hundreds of messages, which makes keeping up with them or finding any particular message difficult. Often, people who use these resources have
access to a special computer program that helps them find messages on a particular topic. They can instruct the program to sort through the messages and show only the messages that match a very specific interest. This helps people find what they're looking
for quickly, without having to wade through an overwhelming pile of messages. Users can also browse through messages, looking for something of interest.
Really Curious?
There are different types of Internet resources that fill the coffee-house role, and each type is used a little differently—that's just one of the inconsistencies that bug Internet users.
Fortunately, though, many such resources fall into one of two major types: newsgroups and mailing lists.
Newsgroups (sometimes called Usenet newsgroups or Network News) are more sophisticated (and more difficult to use) in the ways they enable their users to work with messages. There are newsgroups available for a huge range of topics—the
professional, the personal, and the plain weird.
Mailing lists (also known as discussion lists) are simpler and usually based around professional topics. Mailing lists send all messages related to a particular topic directly to the user by electronic mail (see "It's a Mailbox" later in
this chapter). Subscribers to a mailing list can also send in their own messages, which are then sent out to everyone else on the list.
Many of the rest of the Internet resources that serve the coffee-house role are grouped under the name bulletin boards. Although they all share a category name, each bulletin board works a little differently. You'll learn more about them in Chapter 7.
You can learn more about newsgroups and mailing lists in Chapter 7.
These resources offer Internet users a way to get the answers to questions when they don't know whom to ask. Home beer brewers, for example, can post questions about brewing techniques on an Internet resource for home brewers. Other brewers will read
the message, and those with an answer or a tip will post replies. There are more serious applications, of course. Scientists and scholars use this capability to exchange news and information about important topics, from fusion to fat cells.
Without question, the most-used Internet facility is electronic mail, also known as e-mail.
Curious About the Word?
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is the practice of writing messages—memos, letters, and so forth—on a computer, then transmitting them to another computer so that the addressee can read them on a computer screen. E-mail skips the whole process
of printing messages on paper and hand-carrying them to the addressee—which saves paper, time, and energy.
Traditionally, all you could include in an e-mail message was words, and that's still true today for most Internet e-mailing. With the increased use of graphical computing environments such as Windows and the Macintosh, however, people are beginning
to include pictures (and sometimes even video clips or sound) in e-mail messages.
Everyone who uses the Internet has a unique Internet name, called—quite accurately—an address. Like any address, an Internet address is made up of several words or partial words, and it typically includes the person's name and location.
Increasingly, people are listing their Internet addresses on their business cards and stationery. (You can see a sample Internet address in Chapter 5.)
No two Internet users have the same address, so to send a message to an Internet user, anywhere in the world, all the sender has to know is the address of the recipient. The sender types up a message in his or her favorite word processing or e-mail
software program, hops onto the Internet, types in the address, and sends the message on its way.
In theory, the message should arrive at the recipient's computer almost instantly—after all, it's traveling through wire at nearly the speed of light. Remember, though, that there isn't always a straight line between any two computers on the
Internet. The message may have to pass through a gaggle of networks and computers before it reaches its destination, and it could get held up, temporarily, anywhere along the way. In a little while though, the message is delivered to the addressee's
computer.
Really Curious?
To send an e-mail message, the sender must know the address of the recipient. It would be great if there was one big directory of all the addresses on the Internet—but there isn't. There are, however, tools that help people find one another on
the Internet.
For more about e-mail and how it's used, see Chapter 6.
The great thing about e-mail is the way in which it enables users to work with the messages. They can instantly send a reply to a message they've received. They can forward a message to someone else (perhaps a person who can answer a question the
message asks). They can even print the message. Senders also have e-mail options. They can send the same message to several recipients at once or post the message for anyone to send.
Senders can also send messages to people who aren't on the Internet by routing messages through commercial e-mail services such as CompuServe or MCI Mail. They can even send to people who don't have computers by routing the e-mail message to the
recipient's fax machine!
Did You Know...
Using e-mail on the Internet, people have...
Romanced one another.
Smuggled news bulletins out of countries in crisis.
Taken college courses.
Ordered pizza.
Complained to manufacturers.
Sent letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers.
Submitted articles and manuscripts for publication.
Or is it? This is one of the big debates raging across (and beyond) the Internet. No doubt, given the increasingly global business climate and the great extent to which big companies rely on computers, the Internet looks like a great vehicle for
national and international business communication. It is certainly cheaper and more flexible than building a private, global computer network from scratch.
There are, however, reasons why business use of the Internet has been heavily restricted through the years. Much of what is now the Internet began as an experimental research network for the defense department, evolved into a project of the federally
funded National Science Foundation (NSF), and is now evolving into a new federally sponsored network of government agencies and academia, dubbed NREN. (See Chapter 9.)
What that boils down to is that the U.S. government has sunk a lot of money into the domestic parts of the Internet, and is sinking still more. Taxpayers are generally agreeable about money spent "in support of research or education," which
is what the NREN portion of the Internet is chartered to do (after all, that stuff makes our kids smarter and cures diseases). But ugly arguments sometimes ensue when the likes of Wal-Mart and PepsiCo are permitted to use a tax-subsidized network for the
benefit of their own bottom line.
Beyond that political issue is a philosophical one. Although it's always had business users of a sort (after all, many of the principal users of the Internet in its formative years were defense contractors), some users have come to think of the
Internet as a big co-op, the world's largest community garden and pitch-in lunch. They believe that the lack of central control of the Internet and the exclusion of mercenary corporate interests is what kept the network healthy, growing, and—for lack
of a better word—pure. They want the Internet preserved as a forum for scientific and social inquiry and global exchange—a vehicle for the public good, not private profit.
There are still more problems in doing business on the Internet, including the fact that the precise laws and policies regarding copyrights, monetary transactions, international currency conversion, taxes and exchange, privacy, and security have yet to
be ironed out to everyone's satisfaction.
Thus, the rule for the parts of the Internet subsidized by government has long been "no commercial traffic," as described by the NSF's Acceptable Use Policy for its NSFnet, which by itself comprises a big chunk of the Internet. Many smaller
government and academic networks have similar policies, and even beyond these networks there has been a traditional discouragement of commercial activity. Business users, like anyone else, have always been welcome to use the Internet for research. But when
they begin to use it to send their purchase orders from sales offices to headquarters, or as an e-mail system for the overseas marketing staff, or as a junk-mail delivery system, Internet purists cry foul.
Yet, the commercialization of the Internet has been growing rapidly for the last several years. The policies restricting business activity have been little enforced, despite the grumbling of some purists. In 1991, some of the government restrictions on
commercial use were lifted. That opened the door for a dozen networking companies to set up their own major sections of the Internet to support commercial traffic while working around the NFSnet and its no-business policy. The "anything goes"
commercial networks set up by this group are called the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX). CIX supports a wide range of business activities, with more to come.
A few examples? In addition to the obvious examples of on-screen advertising and e-mail, businesses already use the Internet to
Sell real estate, books, concert tickets, handmade dolls, and flowers.
Provide credit reports, legal services, consulting services, and customer support.
Publish newspapers, newsletters, and magazines that can be read on the computer screen and are paid for by reader subscriptions, advertising, or both.
Most Internet watchers agree that commercial use of the Internet will continue to expand, and will do so far more rapidly than will the research uses. Already, more than half of all Internet users are in commercial enterprises. As you may have noticed
in Table 1.1, the number of U.S. business computers on the Internet is second only to the number in educational institutions, and it is expected to exceed the number of educational computers within a few years.
Really Curious?
For more on the controversy regarding business use of the Internet, see Chapter 4. For more on where business use is headed, see Chapter 9. For a detailed examination of the Internet's business uses, consult "The Internet Business Guide" in
Chapter 10.
Well, in fact, it's several libraries—at least 500 of them—all over the world.
Among the earliest and most avid users of the Internet were colleges and universities. Many have their whole computer network tied into the Internet—including the computerized card catalog for the university library.
These schools use the Internet to operate interlibrary loan programs. When a student or professor requests a book that's not in the stacks, the library can locate the book at a branch campus, another university, or even at a public library or private
research collection, and can have it sent from there. Of course, the university pays for that privilege by making its own collection available to all the other libraries it borrows from.
All this interlibrary networking leaves many public, private, government, and academic catalogs accessible to any Internet user. Curious readers can plumb the collections of the great universities to find exactly the material they're looking for. The
choices include public and private libraries, and specialized libraries for medicine, law, and other subject areas.
There are hundreds of libraries on the Internet, including many public libraries. Here's a sampling:
The U.S. Library of Congress
The Environmental Protection Agency Library
The U.S. Food & Drug Administration Library
The Law Library at Columbia University
Yale University
Harvard University
University of Massachusetts
University of Minnesota
Dartmouth College
Cleveland Public Library System
Detroit Public Library System
New York Public Library System
Seattle Public Library System
Now, of course, whether or not an Internet user can actually borrow anything is another story. Different libraries enforce different policies about who can borrow and who can't. Some libraries do allow people to order a title right over the Internet,
to be delivered by mail. For those that don't, Internet users can usually go to their own local university or public library and ask a librarian to make the request. (Libraries are pretty friendly about loaning to other libraries; they stick together that
way.)
No matter how they finally get their hands on the book, the value of the Internet is that it lets users find the book—almost no matter where it's stacked. To help, there are bibliographic indexing services on the Internet that list where materials
on certain subjects can be found.
In the information age, there is, however, another kind of library. The text of reports, papers, and even whole books can be (and usually is) stored in computer files. Here is where the library resources on the Internet shine. There are literally
millions of files of information out on the Internet that savvy users can locate and then copy—right over the Internet—from the distant computer to their own, where they can read the information on their computer screens or print it on a printer.
Next to e-mail, this may be the most often used and most valuable resource on the Internet. It allows researchers (or the merely curious) to acquire the latest and most detailed information about every topic imaginable. In fact, much of the information
available this way may not be published in any book—the Internet offers people access to information that's unavailable to them in any other way.
Did You Know...
As more and more computers today acquire multimedia capabilities—the capability to show pictures and play video and sound clips from computer files—more stuff has appeared on the Internet to serve those machines. Although most of the
computer files on the Internet contain just words (which users can read by opening the files in their word processing programs), a growing group holds pictures, video, and sound.
You can, in fact, find entire books in computer files on the Internet, in many different places. Perhaps the best known source is Project Gutenberg, a volunteer project to transfer important reference works and works of literature to computer files and
make them widely available. Already through Project Gutenberg, people can copy from the Internet the following:
Anything from Shakespeare
Roget's Thesaurus
Moby Dick
The Book of Mormon
The CIA World Fact Book
Much more is available now, and still more is on the way. There are other electronic book providers on the Internet, such as the Online Book Initiative (OBI).
Of course, the same Internet power that enables users to retrieve Paradise Lost also enables them to copy beer recipes from the American Homebrewer's Association's computer. To each his own.
Really Curious?
You'll find more about looking up books and files on the Internet in Chapter 7.
Also, if you think you may want to try your hand at Internet research, you'll find good beginner's instructions in two books from Sams Publishing, Teach Yourself the Internet and Navigating the Internet. These books are described in Chapter 10 of this
book.
If computer files containing books can be copied across the Internet, so can files containing anything else—including, of course, computer software.
Curious About the Word?
Software most commonly describes a computer program—a word processor, a personal finance program, a game, and so on. Keep in mind, though, that there are other types of software. Most importantly, there are software files that contain images,
video, music, or other types of information that can be viewed or played through a computer program that knows how to work with them. This other type of software is available on the Internet, just as programs are.
You can learn more about the general types of computer files in Chapter 7.
People find software several different ways on the Internet. When they find it, they can copy it to their computers and use it there, just as if they'd bought it at a software store. People often post on the Internet software they've written—much
as they would post a message for others to read. That software can be copied and used by others. Some software companies also make their products available on the Internet to paying customers.
Curious About the Word?
Software available through the Internet comes in three basic types.
Freeware software is absolutely free of charge and available to all.
Shareware is offered on a "try before you buy" plan. Users can copy the software and try it out for free, but they are instructed to send a nominal fee (usually $10 to $50) to the programmer if they intend to use the software regularly.
Commercial software is like the packaged software sold in stores (but without the box) and is offered by the same commercial software companies. Commercial software requires payment up front; typically, the user must supply a credit card number before
copying the software files.
There's software available on the Internet for almost any type of computer and for almost any purpose—business programs, personal programs, games, and so on. Among the most popular programs found on the Internet are tools that help people use the
Internet more easily or effectively. Often available as freeware, programs such as Mosaic help people use the inconsistent, difficult-to-navigate Internet as if it were a much smoother system.
Really Curious?
To learn more about the tools that make using the Internet easier, see Chapter 5.
To learn more about how people actually copy software from the Internet, see Chapter 7.
To learn more about software on the Internet with no purpose other than a good time, see Chapter 8.
Just as the coffee-house-type resources on the Internet can keep users informed about the Grateful Dead, Michael Bolton, or Star Trek, they can also serve up hard news about specific topics.
There are resources that keep Internet users abreast of the latest events in every country from Afghanistan to Zaire. Sometimes, these services are the best (or only) way to get current and complete information about a particular region. It's often
told that, during the Soviet coup attempt in 1991, a small electronic mail company in Russia was about the only way to get news into and out of the region. Through e-mail, that company served news through the Internet to the likes of CNN and the Associated
Press and, of course, to others on the Internet.
Internet users can tap into resources that supply up-to-date news and discussion on every imaginable topic. In addition to the various country- and region-specific resources, there are others that supply news about environmental events, sports, global
and U.S. politics, party politics (separate groups for Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and the like), civil rights, the economy, and much more.
In addition to what the coffee-house resources offer, there are actual newspapers, magazines, and newsletters that users can access through the Internet and read through their computer screens. Some are scholarly or scientific journals, but a growing
number are general interest, consumer publications. Some were created just for the Internet, but some are special electronic versions of publications that are also available in print, like the magazine shown in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2. Veteran counterculture magazine Mother Jones, now available on the Internet.
Finally, there are even general-purpose national and world news services on the Internet. Among others, Cable News Network (CNN) publishes the text of the stories it broadcasts as CNN Headline News (see Figure 1.3). These are updated several times a
day.
Using these resources, Internet users can acquire more timely, more detailed news about their areas of interest than they could ever find in the national broadcast or print media. Perhaps more importantly, in many cases they can respond to the news,
add to it, or ask questions about it. It's that kind of power and immediacy that's getting people hooked on the Internet.
To appreciate where the Internet is going, you have to understand where it's been. The Internet that exists today began in 1969 as an experiment of an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. The agency hooked various defense department computers,
defense contractors, and universities doing defense research into a classified network that accomplished two things. First, it enabled users to share expensive computing resources, which saved money, and second, it gave the defense department a network
upon which to test various methods for keeping military networks operational in times of war.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, that network grew, and portions of it were declassified. During the same period, other, separate networks were established to hook together university researchers and scientists.
In 1986, the National Science Foundation established its network, NFSnet, to allow researchers across the country to share access to a few expensive supercomputers (the fastest and most powerful type of computer for scientific applications). Quickly
thereafter, the various, separate research networks began hooking to NFSnet, and therefore, in effect, to each other. In 1990, the original defense department network was retired, its work having been taken over by NFSnet. Eventually, the resulting
internetwork got hooked into the various internetworks abroad, and Voila! The global Internet we know today had congealed from a lot of separate parts.
So, although you may hear much praise for the value and potential of the Internet, you must remember that the whole thing is an unplanned, disorganized, rattletrap contraption—an information-age afterthought, a mutant strain, a casserole made from
leftovers. It has no real purpose or mission, except perhaps the somewhat fuzzy goal of enabling communication. It's really more a patchwork of links between lots of separate networks and organizations that—despite their participation in the
Internet—still have their own way of doing things and don't feel particularly pressured to conform what anybody else on the Internet is doing. "Wanna use our computer?" they say. "Fine, go ahead. Just do it our way."
As the Internet has grown like crazy, that hasn't changed. As of this writing, estimates say that the Internet picks up 1,000 new users a day, and it is nearly doubling the number of users every year. Nobody really knows for sure; in fact, nobody even
knows exactly how many people are on the Internet. Recent guesses say about 20 million and counting.
The Internet is a living thing, growing its own way, at its own pace, perhaps according to a divine design, but not according to any earthly plan. Anything that big, involving that many people, and behaving that unpredictably is very threatening to
some folks. In the coming years, you'll hear increasing concern over the global economic, political, and cultural implications of the Internet.
Really Curious?
For more on the implications of the growing Internet, see Chapters 3 and 4.
The Internet is a network, or more accurately, an inter- network, a vast collection of different types of computers all over the world that can share messages and information with one another.
Each computer on the network is controlled by its owner, and large parts of the network are overseen by the U.S. government or its agencies. The Internet as a whole, however, is under the direct authority of no one—which makes the Internet open
and free, but also complex and inconsistent.
Using the Internet, people are able to perform a range of activities for work, pleasure or even simple curiosity. These include
Posting and reading public messages to exchange news and information about certain topics or areas of interest.
Sending messages to, and receiving messages from, other Internet users through electronic mail (e-mail).
Conducting research by reading or copying information stored on other computers.
Receiving news updates about specific events or topics.
Finding books and other resources stored in libraries all over the world.
Reading newspapers, newsletters, and magazines.
Copying computer software.
You also know that the Internet can be used for academic or government research, personal pleasure, or business—and that the latter two uses are newer and evolving quickly. In fact, it is the business and personal aspects that will have the major
role in shaping the Internet into the 21st century.
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