User:Craig3410/nethistory

What is the internet?
[http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=126985&title=headlines-internet&byDate=true Let's let Ted Stevens explain it! ]

History of the Internet
The internet first started out as ARPANET, a connection of military computers.

The earliest ideas of a computer network intended to allow general communication between users of various computers were formulated by J.C.R. Licklider of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in August 1962, in a series of memos discussing his "Intergalactic Computer Network" concept. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today.

In the late-1990s, cable internet became affordable for home users, and it brought with it much faster speeds; up to 6 megabytes (6000KB) per second, as opposed to dialup's 56K per second.

Google
Google, the main search engine (among other things) of the Internet, started out as a thesis project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PH.D students from Stanford. What made them different and more efficient was that they calculated a page's importance by the number of times it is linked to in the internet.

What the Internet offers
Obviously, the Internet takes its cues from historical methods of communication; not only does it allow for the written word, like newspapers, it also offers sound [[Media:Messiah Hallelujah Chorus 1916.ogg]] and pictures

What makes it different from the other forms of communication is that the Internet is "on-demand", in other words, if you're looking for relevant information on a topic when it's not being discussed on TV or on radio, you're out of luck and must wait for the publishers to provide information when they feel like it. With the internet, however, you can simply look it up and get the information whenever you want to.

Internet problems
However, it can be argued that the Internet does its job too well; even information we'd like not to become public, can, thanks to the internet.