The Internet or the World Wide Web is indeed a wonderful and amazing addition in our lives. The Internet can be known as a kind of global meeting place where people from all parts of the world can come together. It is a service available on the computer, through which everything under the sun is now at the fingertips of anyone who has access to the Internet.
What is the Internet?
The Internet is a global network of computers. Every computer that is connected to the Internet is considered a part of that network. This means even your home computer. It's all a matter of degrees, you connect to your ISP's network, then your ISP connects to a larger network and so on. At the top of the tree is the high-capacity backbones, all of these interconnect at 'Network Access Points' 'NAPs' at important regions around the world. The entire Internet is based on agreements between these backbone providers who set in place all the fibre optics lines and other technical aspects of the Internet. The first high speed backbone was created by the 'National Science Foundation' in 1987.
The Internet was first created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1960's, and was first known as the ARPANet. At this stage the Internet's first computers were at academic and government institutions. They were mainly used for accessing files and to send email. From 1983 onwards the Internet as we know it today started to form with the introduction of the communication protocol TCP/IP to ARPANet.
Since 1983 the Internet has accommodated alot of changes and continues to keep developing. The last two decades has seen the Internet accommodate such things as network LANs and ATM and frame switched services. The Internet continues to evolve with it becoming available on mobile phones and pagers and possibly on televisions in the future.
What's on the Internet besides the Web ?
Send and receive e-mail messages
Join in a Usenet newsgroup.
Transfer documents and programs between your computer and FTP, or file transfer protocol, sites.
Use programs such as Goher to locate information on other sites
Just a few of the other things it allows people to do,
send email,
view web sites,
download files such as mp3 and images,
chat with people live online,
post messages on newsgroups and forums.
play mulitplayer games online
watch movies and tv porgrams
chat and view on webcams
