The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks and the people that use them. Current statistics show that there are now more than 500 million people actually using the Internet worldwide. These figures are growing at a rate of around one million new users a month ! This means that if the Internet is big now, it'll be massive next year, and who can predict the year after. Sooner or later, nearly all of us will be involved. It's just a case of when, and how we go upon getting started...whether we first join an on-line commercial service and then move on to the Internet, or we just jump in and get on the Internet now.

More than 500 million people use the Internet worldwide - and the figures are growing at the rate of one million new users per month.

Now you may ask: What are all these people actually doing ? The answer, as you might expect, is just about everything...something new, just about everyday. There's electronic mail (e-mail), file transfer (FTP), information browsing and retrieval (WWW), social communication (chat), news gathering (new groups) - just to name some of the most popular uses of the Internet, and most recently a large amount of marketing and business is taking place right on the Internet. It is not only computer or Internet literate individuals that are getting involved. Universities and colleges, government departments, Large corporations, small businesses, commercial on-line services, political parties, students of all ages, domestic engineers, entrepreneur, mothers and fathers and children are all connected, and use the Internet on a daily basis. It's an incredibly useful tool - and lots of fun too ! The World Wide Web is in a category of its own...here it is easy to down load information, sounds, colorful photos and graphical artwork, short videos, watch animation, even order pizza or flowers.

How was the Internet created???

So where did this Internet thing come from, you're probably asking... Well, a lot of it's just sort of 'evolved' from a system set up in 1969. Then, an American defense department agency - the defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to be precise - They developed an easy way to exchange military information between scientists and researchers based at different geographical locations. A simple network of four computers, known as DARPANET, therefore was established.

The system caught on, although the name didn't. It was soon changed to ARPANET (not much better, admittedly, but an improvement all the same), and by 1972 had grown to include 37 computers. At the same time, the way in which the network was being used was changing. As well as just using the system to exchange important, but boring, military information, ARPANET users started to send e-mail - sometimes trivial, sometimes important - to each other by means of private mail boxes. They might not have realized it at the time, but this quickly growing group of US defense workers had started something big here.

And so things continued. By 1983 ARPNET had grown to such an extent that it was felt that the military research component should be moved to a separate network, called MILNET. In 1984 the National Science Foundation, yet another US government agency, established the NSFNET. This was a solution to the problem of linking together five supercomputer centers and making the information held on them accessible to any educational facility that needed it. (ARPANET had meant to do this originally, but a reel of red tape put paid to that idea, so NSFNET was created instead.)

The Internet evolved from a system of four computers, called DARPANET, set up in 1969 by an American defense department agency.

Utilizing a piggy-back connection method to ensure that everyone connected had a route to at least one of the supercomputer centers, the system proved remarkably successful. Indeed, by 1987 there were so many people using NSFNET, and so many sites connected to it, that a massive overhaul of the infrastructure was required just to keep up. At the same time, the system was opened up to any educational facility, academic researcher, government employee or international research organization who wanted to use it - providing they were from a country that was allied with the USA, of course! By 1990 the Internet as we know it had begun. Since then the growth of the Net - now available to anyone who has the means to connect to it - has been simply phenomenal, the number of users having grown from around 5,000 people to over 500 million in just over ten years; that's a staggering increase of over 6,000+%! Ask anyone who knows, though, and they'll tell you that this is 'just the beginning'. Who can say where it will take us... but it sure is fun...and truly AMAZING !!! Kind of cool, actually.

All right...enough of that, but how does it work?

Every one of the thousands of sites that go to make up the Internet network are in fact networks themselves - everything from small local area networks (LANs) to massive wide area networks (WANs). All such sites are connected to the Internet, and thus to each other, by any means available, be it a telephone line, dedicated leased line, or even a microwave link. Because these networks are pretty diverse - not only geographically, but also in terms of operating systems and computer platforms - standard communications protocols are required to fully ensure compatibility between set-ups. In the case of the Internet, the protocols used are known as Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, although you'll often hear them referred to as TCP and IP.

You can easily hook up to the Internet, no matter what kind of computer you've got.

The networks that comprise the Internet are connected by computers, known as routers, which need to be able to decide how to transmit data most efficiently across different parts of the network. The Internet Protocol (IP) makes sure that the routers know where to send the data by addressing it in small data packets. These packets of data are tiny, and can easily get damaged or lost in transit, so the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) breaks them down and effectively places them inside a secure 'envelope.' What it all means to you, the user, is that it makes no difference whether the computer you're using is a humble Amiga 500 or a mighty Pentium PC - you'll be able to connect to the Internet and participate fully in its applications no matter what machine you use.

And who's in charge of all this?

Nobody, really. It's such a huge and diverse creature, everybody just `borrows' pieces of it rather than one ruling power or one individual owner. The Internet is very much a global resource, which grows and develops almost organically. That said, however, it's not completely unregulated.

If you had to pinpoint one organization that has more clout than any other it would have to be the National Science Foundation, or NSF. If you remember, it was one of the groups which was instrumental in the creation of the Internet in the first place, and has continued to exert a great deal of influence in the network's development. Also important is an American organization called Advanced Network and Services, which has provided much of the Net's infrastructure and is backed by three major US corporations - Merit (the Michigan Education and Research Infrastructure Triad), IBM and the telecommunications giant MCI. The ANS corporation was created by the NSF, and operates the NSFnet backbone, one of the major Net networks. The NSF also suggests an `acceptable use policy' - one of the few sets of rules on the Internet (and then only for use of the NSFnet backbone).

The NSF suggests an 'acceptable use policy'
-it's one of the few sets of rules on the network.

Perhaps a more direct form of control comes from such groups as the Internet Society in the USA and the Resaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeene (RARE) in Europe. These two bodies rely on voluntary cooperation, rather than commercial sponsorship, and are set-ups that seem to work well with the Net.

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