Internet

The Internet (or internet)[a] is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (IP)[b] to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching in the 1960s and the design of computer networks for data communication.[2][3] The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France.[4][5][6] The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite.[7] The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web,[8] marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet,[9] and generated sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspapers, books, and other print publishing have adapted to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies.[10] The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols 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.[11] In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders.[12]


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  1. ^ Amogh Dhamdhere. "Internet Traffic Characterization". Retrieved 6 May 2022.
  2. ^ "A Flaw in the Design". The Washington Post. 30 May 2015. Archived from the original on 8 November 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2020. The Internet was born of a big idea: Messages could be chopped into chunks, sent through a network in a series of transmissions, then reassembled by destination computers quickly and efficiently. Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran. ... The most important institutional force ... was the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ... as ARPA began work on a groundbreaking computer network, the agency recruited scientists affiliated with the nation's top universities.
  3. ^ Yates, David M. (1997). Turing's Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945-1995. National Museum of Science and Industry. pp. 132–4. ISBN 978-0-901805-94-2. Davies's invention of packet switching and design of computer communication networks ... were a cornerstone of the development which led to the Internet
  4. ^ Abbate 1999, p. 3 "The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States"
  5. ^ "The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today's Internet". SRI International. 27 October 2009. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019. Retrieved 25 September 2017. But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early 1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking.
  6. ^ by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). "How the Internet Came to Be". Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2017. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.
  7. ^ Stewart, Bill (January 2000). "Internet History – One Page Summary". The Living Internet. Archived from the original on 2 July 2014.
  8. ^ Wright, Edmund, ed. (2006). The Desk Encyclopedia of World History. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 312. ISBN 978-0-7394-7809-7.
  9. ^ "#3 1982: the ARPANET community grows" in 40 maps that explain the internet Archived 6 March 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Timothy B. Lee, Vox Conversations, 2 June 2014. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
  10. ^ Strickland, Jonathan (3 March 2008). "How Stuff Works: Who owns the Internet?". Archived from the original on 19 June 2014. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
  11. ^ Hoffman, P.; Harris, S. (September 2006). The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC4677. RFC 4677.
  12. ^ "New Seven Wonders panel". USA Today. 27 October 2006. Archived from the original on 15 July 2010. Retrieved 31 July 2010.

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