Appendix 1: What Exactly Is the Internet?
A Network of Networks
The Internet is simply a big network of computers scattered all round the world, but linked to each other. Actually it's a network of networks - hence "the Internet".
A person in Morrinsville, say, using a computer with an Internet connection, can log on (connect to the Internet) and look at files stored on another Internet-connected computer anywhere in the world. Our hypothetical Morrinsville user can download files from other computers, that is, they can create a copy to use on their own computer without having to connect up through the Internet every time they want to use it.
The Morrinsville user can also interact with the files on other Internet-connected computers, by sending information back to them. That's what's happening when they are browsing the books catalogue on the Amazon.com site, and decide to place an order and send their credit card details to pay for it.
The Morrinsville user can create their own Web site. In broad terms a Web site is just a collection of files that they make available to other Internet users, by arranging for it to be "hosted" that is, made available to other users on an Internet-connected computer 24-hours a day.
Today there are over 80 Internet Service Providers in New Zealand, and the huge growth in Internet traffic, together with the growth in telecommunications generally, has been a major reason for the building of the new Southern Cross Cable to Australia and the United States. The Southern Cross Cable will significantly increase New Zealand's international connectivity.
In 2000, there are estimated to be 360 million Internet users, and they can be found all around the world.
Many Applications
From its beginnings in 1969 the Internet was designed as a network over which you could run many different applications at the same time using a variety of different telecommunications links.
In contrast, the phone system was designed for a single application, that is, communication by voice. (Although today you can use the phone system for other purposes, such as sending a fax, or indeed connecting to the Internet, the phone system wasn't designed for those purposes, which is why dial-up connections to the Internet are so slow.) The most common applications that are run on the Internet are:
- electronic mail, which allows you to send and receive electronic messages
- the World Wide Web, which facilitates easy "point and click" navigation of text and graphics from millions of computers worldwide.
The Internet, however, is a true multimedia environment. As well as e-mail and the Web, it can be used for broadcasting both radio and video, for real-time chat both text-based and by audio, and for any number of business applications. In fact, the free availability of music on the Internet via what are known as MP3 files is causing major ructions in the multi-billion dollar music industry, because of copyright and other implications.
The World Wide Web
The "World Wide Web" is the most popular application of the Internet. The Web was born in 1991, developed at the CERN Physics Laboratory in Switzerland by Tim Berners-Lee. However, it took the launch in 1993 of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser for Windows, for the Web to really take off.
A Web server is a computer with special software that stores Web pages and allows then to be accessed by other computers. In June 1993 there were 130 Web servers in the world. By July 2000 there were 17 million Web servers, serving up an estimated 2.1 billion unique Web pages. (See Hobbe's Internet Timeline: info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html and www.cyveillance.com) In fact, experts are divided about how many pages there are now - but we know it's a pretty big number, and growing rapidly.
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