How and why did it all begin and was it a fluke? Well, not really. The Department of Defense created the ARPANET in the early 1960’s. The military’s influence on the Internet today, created one of the main reasons it is so simple to have instant access to people across the globe. Did the creation of electronic mail and the World Wide Web set the trend for our lives now? Observe as the history of the Internet takes you through the good the bad and the success.

The Internet has become one of the most powerful tools in our world. It is our big business, our major investments; it’s an influx of capital into an ever changing need for new products and ideas.

In the late 1980’s, Eric Thomas and BITNET corporation developed an automatic mailing list known as LISTSERV. When an e-mail is addressed to a LISTSERV address, it automatically sends (BROADCASTS) to all on the mailing list. The theory is similar to a newsgroup but only those on the mailing list will receive the e-mail.

Gopher is a server that lists its files in a top-level menu based structure. The beauty of this type of system is that you need not know where the information you want is, you can navigate through menus and by entering different selections, obtain the information you need. Libraries often use this type of system as a card catalog. Veronica and Jughead are programs that run with Gopher software. Veronica helps locate documents while Jughead locates directory titles only. Veronica uses a spider (a program that “crawls” all over the Web to find Web pages). The Veronica system can search all of the Gopher sites at the same time. The Jughead system has fewer options than the Veronica system.

un-welcomed by us. We have prowlers that lurk on the Internet looking to hurt our children. While most services try and educate and provide us with blocks and places to report there are still dangers out there.

When the Internet was first perceived it had an immediate need and use. The government saw the need to protect its resources and began to build a computer vehicle to fulfill that need. As the years went by, the needs and demands and uses of the Internet have grown and changed with the economic and technological growth of the world. The ability to communicate in a moments time, without error and at a minimal or at no cost has become vital to our existence. As our need expand so will the uses of the Internet. With virtual reality and three dimensional graphics, the future is looking bright. We are becoming a wireless society and the Internet is falling into order. The problems we encounter by means of internet accessing are fixable. The problems we would face without the evolvement of future growth in the Internet might be worse. We have built ourselves a computer Internet world that is second to none.

Packet switching is the breaking down of data into data grams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator. (Kristula 1)

In the late 1990’s a scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW (World Wide Web). The idea behind the “Web”, was to be able to share scientific information between universities all over the world. In the early 1990’s a www system was made available to the energy physics institutes through the CERN library. CERN did not have enough resources to further develop this system so they asked for help via the Internet. In 1993, at the University of Illinois, software was developed that made the Web easier to use and availed itself to more of the common population. This software was named “Mosaic”. The Web had become a friendly tool to more than forty million users. The Web allows the user via a browser ( a software application used to display web pages). In the years that followed, corporations realized the potential to be made. One of the companies that invested in this software production was Netscape. Netscape was founded by James Clark and Marc Andreessen in 1994. The free software Netscape gave away, Navigator, was the most popular PC application in less than two years. Microsoft, founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates developed its own version, Internet Explorer and was common on desktop PC’s. Both Netscape and Micro

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