How did it begin?

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 412.

What is cyberspace?

What exactly is the Internet?

Unit 1

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The best way to think of the Internet, or Net as it is often called, is as a vast global network of networks connecting computers across the world. These networks range from government departments and industrial and educational communication systems down to the personal online service providers such as CompuServe, Delphi, etc.

At present, more than 33 million people use the Internet and over three million com­puters worldwide are linked in. They use the Net for transferring data, playing games, socializing with other computer users, and sending e-mail (electronic mail).

Cyberspace is the term we give to this entire electronic domain. Whenever you are using one of the online services such as e-mail or the World Wide Web, you are in cyberspace.

Despite the confusing techno-jargon that surrounds it, the Internet is simple: comput­ers talk to one another through a network that uses phone lines, cable, and fibre-optic lines.

The Net was dreamt up in the late 1960s by the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency which decided that, in the event of a nuclear attack, it needed a means by which messages could be sent and received even if phone lines were inoperative. In 1969, there was a net­work of just four mainframe computers. By 1972, the number had risen to 40. About this time the idea of the electronic mailbox was born, as users looked for a way of talking to each other electronically. By 1984 when the resources of the network were made avail­able to academics, the Internet began to develop into the form we know it today.

The Internet can be divided into five broad areas.