Basic Facts about the Internet

The Internet was first spoken of, as a concept, by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT who proposed a global network of interconnected-networked-computers in 1962. After that Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later of UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. In 1969 the ARPANET (United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency ARPA) connected four universities (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah) and exchanged the first information over the new computer network. (The system crashed several times). The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians, for the exchange of information, between networked computers.. Since then many things changed and the internet as we know it has come to life. The development of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen in 1993, allowed for the transmission of images and not just text-based information, and the internet, as we know it, was truly born.. In 1995 commercial services like AOL and CompuServe began offering internet access to the masses and the new internet, the World Wide Web, became what it is today, the world's largest global communication and information network. This is just a very brief history of the internet. A detailed internet history and timeline is available on the website of the Internet Society.

What is the Internet?

The Internet does not consist of a physical network. It is a loose system of connections between different computers, located all over the world . These computers use Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as their communication language.

• When you view a website, you are basically looking at a document from another computer.
• The internet is a description of the network that connects these computers from all over the world.