What Exactly Is The Internet?

If you read newspapers and magazines or watch television, youll probably agree that the Internet is one of

the hottest topics to come down the pike in a long time. Businesses are especially urged to get on the

Internet. But what exactly IS the Internet?

First, hares what the Internet is NOT. The Internet is not an online service, like America Online or

CompuServe. The Internet is not a big computer you can call up with your computer and modem. The

Internet isn't even really a computer network, in the truest sense of the word.

The Internet's backbone is an interconnected series of wide-area networks (WANs). These are large

computers linked together over a long distance via phone or wireless communication. These huge WANs

link tens of thousands of smaller WANs and local-area networks (LANs, computers linked together in a

central location, such as a business or government organization) around the world. In this sense, the

Internet IS a network of computers. It just isnt a directly connected network; its more roundabout, more of

a simulation of a network.

When you access the Internet, you can send email to anyone else in any part of the world, provided they

have an Internet connection. You can download (receive) and upload (send) files and programs to and

from any computer that's connected to the Internet. You can chat with other people who are currently

connected to the Internet (you type what you want to say, they'll see it on their screen, and vice versa). It's

just like you're on a network of computers in a single office, for example, but the computers are spread

apart worldwide.

You aren't accessing the other computers directly; you only access the single computer you're dialing into

for Internet access. That computer processes your request (say, an email message you're sending), looks

up the "address" of the computer you're sending it to, then "routes" your message through the necessary

series of other computers out there in the network, until your email gets to its destination.

A common question is: where did the Internet come from? Most people had never heard of the Internet

before that last year or two. The Internet, though, has been around for quite some time, just not in the

general usage we see today.

Today's Internet that is linking people from different cultures worldwide ironically got its start as a

defense project. In the late 1960's, the U.S. Department of Defense began researching defense

communications via computer. One of the projects that grew out of this research was called ARPANET

(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of today's Internet.

The overall idea was to have a communications network that could be maintained, even if part of it was

destroyed in an attack. If a communications network was housed in one location, and that location was

destroyed, communications would cease. However, if a huge network with no central control center could

be constructed, a destroyed location could be "routed" around through another location, and

communications would continue. This is how the Internet works.

By the early 1980's, all U.S. military sites were connected to the ARPANET. Computer scientists at major

universities and large businesses had also connected in, using the network as a means for sharing

information. This was thanks to the CSNET (Computer Science Network) project conducted by the

National Science Foundation (NSF).

The NSF saw the great strides that were being made in computer science due to CSNET, and began

constructing a high-capacity, high-speed WAN. Completed in 1988, the NSFNET was so successful that

the number of computers accessing it quadrupled to around 80,000 in less than a year. This number

increased to almost 300,000 by 1990, creating the need for the final "backbone" network, which exists

today, with over 2,000,000 computers connected.

So, now you may have an understanding as to why the concept of "what is the Internet" is such a hard

thing to explain. It's a computer network, but it's not. You dial in to the Internet, but you really don't.

And no one really owns it or controls it, except for the supercomputers that form the "backbone." One thing's

for sure, though: the Internet will change, and, to some extent, has already changed, the way we

communicate with each other.