san antonio college
One of the Alamo Community Colleges

Library

INTRODUCTION

As a response to the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower organized the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Department of Defense to serve as a focal point for American efforts to match the Soviet satellite technology. Over the years, the focus was shifted to research on computer networking and telecommunications. In 1969 the ARPANET, the first experimental computer network, was established. Linking military installations, research centers, and major universities, it became the "proving ground" for testing computer networking theories and software.

By 1973, the renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began studying the interlinking of computer networks or "Internetting." To facilitate the use of ARPANET, the National Science Foundation devised a system of five "super computing" centers . These centers were designed to receive, process, and redistribute the 'super computing tasks' of various researchers. The vision of an information system that would interconnect computers on a global scale had been created. Given the success of and demand on the ARPANET, other computer networks were built including TELENET in 1974, USENET in 1979, BITNET in 1981, and NSFNET in 1986. Researchers were exploring ways to improve the Internet's usability and expand its access to an expanding user base.

Continuing his initial 1980's research at CERN - the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Tim Berners-Lee devised hypertext transfer protocol and the World Wide Web was born in 1991. By integrating this new hypertext authoring system with the telecommunications capability of the existing Internet structure, he created a method for accessing video and audio input through the net. This technological breakthrough enabled users to author and use multimedia databases containing pictures, photographs, illustrations, sounds, audio clips, etc.

As Tim Berners-Lee notes in The World Wide Web: A very short personal history... "The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. "

The Internet today consists of some 162 million host computer systems with 36.1 million domains. It is accessed by 650 million users in 205 countries across the globe. Prepared by the Internet Society, the map below shows the Internet's worldwide coverage.

INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIVITY MAP