"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
What's the Internet?"The Internet is transitory, ever changing, reshaping and remolding itself."
The Internet is a worldwide network of thousands of linked computers compared to "a giant international plumbing system" (University of California, Berkeley, 1997). Remember that the Internet is not just one gigantic computer with all of the information; rather there are many computer centers, and we are connected to this "plumbing system" somewhere along the line.
There are million of users connected to the Internet, and this figure grows daily.
How did the Internet get Started? 
A long story, but for the purposes of this entry, I'd like you to remember a couple of things: Back in the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense (in an agency called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) came up with the idea of creating of a network of computers as a means of communication in case of some national emergency such as a nuclear war. Thus, if one of these centers was destroyed, the others would still function. This first computer network was called DARPANET, but later was changed to just ARPANET.
This idea was a real success, and researchers and educators saw the possibilities of using such networks in their own fields, and created NSFNET (the National Science Foundation NETwork) in the mid-1980s, which linked five supercomputer centers. Today, the ever-growing network of computers around the world is now called the Internet. |
