Category: Science & Tech
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- CORE - Internet and E-Mail (Jan. 05, 2024)
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Top Questions
What is the Internet?
The Internet is a vast network that connects computers all over the world. Through the Internet, people can share information and communicate from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Who invented the Internet?
The Internet consists of technologies developed by different individuals and organizations. Important figures include Robert W. Taylor, who led the development of the ARPANET (an early prototype of the Internet), and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who developed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) technologies.
How does the Internet work?
The Internet works through a series of networks that connect devices around the world through telephone lines. Users are provided access to the Internet by Internet service providers. The widespread use of mobile broadband and Wi-Fi in the 21st century has allowed this connection to be wireless.
Is the Internet dangerous?
The advent of the Internet has brought into existence new forms of exploitation, such as spam e-mail and malware, and harmful social behaviour, such as cyberbullying and doxxing. Many companies collect extensive information from users, which some deem a violation of privacy.
What is the Dark Web?
The Dark Web refers to a series of Web sites that require special decryption and configuration tools to access. It is most commonly used for purposes that require strict anonymity, including illegal sales (e.g., of weapons and drugs), political dissent in countries with heavy censorship, and whistleblowing.
Who controls the Internet?
While the Internet is theoretically decentralized and thus controlled by no single entity, many argue that tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google represent a small concentration of organizations that have unprecedented influence over the information and money on the Internet. In some countries, certain parts of the Internet are blocked via censorship.
Is the Internet “making us stupid”?
Whether the Internet is "making us stupid" is widely debated. Some argue the Internet is reprogramming our brains for the worse, as seen by diminishing IQ scores, and that new technologies and platforms like the Internet are harming attention spams, the ability to concentrate, and perform simple tasks. Others argue that virtually all new technologies throughout history have been initially feared, that the Internet gives voice to diverse populations and equal access to information for the benefit of social advancement, and that changing how the brain works and how we access and process information is not necessarily bad. For more on the debate about whether the Internet is "making us stupid," visit ProCon.org.
Is cancel culture (or “callout culture”) good for society?
Whether cancel culture is good for society is widely debated. Some argue it allows the public and marginalized people to seek accountability in their leaders, gives a voice to disenfranchised or less powerful people, and is simply a new form of boycott. Others see cancel culture as a dangerous form of bullying, a suppression of free speech, and a form of intolerance that harms democratic societies by excluding and ostracizing anyone with contrary views. For more on the cancel culture debate, visit ProCon.org.
Internet, a system architecture that has revolutionized mass communication, mass media, and commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. Sometimes referred to as a “network of networks,” the Internet emerged in the United States in the 1970s but did not become visible to the general public until the early 1990s. By 2020, approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population, were estimated to have access to the Internet. And that number is growing, largely due to the prevalence of “smart” technology and the "Internet of Things," where computer-like devices connect with the Internet or interact via wireless networks. These “things” include smartphones, appliances, thermostats, lighting systems, irrigation systems, security cameras. vehicles, even cities.
The Internet provides a capability so powerful and general that it can be used for almost any purpose that depends on information, and it is accessible by every individual who connects to one of its constituent networks. It supports human communication via social media, electronic mail (e-mail), “chat rooms,” newsgroups, and audio and video transmission and allows people to work collaboratively at many different locations. It supports access to digital information by many applications, including the World Wide Web. The Internet has proved to be a spawning ground for a large and growing number of “e-businesses” (including subsidiaries of traditional “brick-and-mortar” companies) that carry out most of their sales and services over the Internet. (See electronic commerce.)
Origin and development
Early networks
The first computer networks were dedicated special-purpose systems such as SABRE (an airline reservation system) and AUTODIN I (a defense command-and-control system), both designed and implemented in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the early 1960s computer manufacturers had begun to use semiconductor technology in commercial products, and both conventional batch-processing and time-sharing systems were in place in many large, technologically advanced companies. Time-sharing systems allowed a computer’s resources to be shared in rapid succession with multiple users, cycling through the queue of users so quickly that the computer appeared dedicated to each user’s tasks despite the existence of many others accessing the system “simultaneously.” This led to the notion of sharing computer resources (called host computers or simply hosts) over an entire network. Host-to-host interactions were envisioned, along with access to specialized resources (such as supercomputers and mass storage systems) and interactive access by remote users to the computational powers of time-sharing systems located elsewhere. These ideas were first realized in ARPANET, which established the first host-to-host network connection on October 29, 1969. It was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. ARPANET was one of the first general-purpose computer networks. It connected time-sharing computers at government-supported research sites, principally universities in the United States, and it soon became a critical piece of infrastructure for the computer science research community in the United States. Tools and applications—such as the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP, commonly referred to as e-mail), for sending short messages, and the file transfer protocol (FTP), for longer transmissions—quickly emerged. In order to achieve cost-effective interactive communications between computers, which typically communicate in short bursts of data, ARPANET employed the new technology of packet switching. Packet switching takes large messages (or chunks of computer data) and breaks them into smaller, manageable pieces (known as packets) that can travel independently over any available circuit to the target destination, where the pieces are reassembled. Thus, unlike traditional voice communications, packet switching does not require a single dedicated circuit between each pair of users.
Commercial packet networks were introduced in the 1970s, but these were designed principally to provide efficient access to remote computers by dedicated terminals. Briefly, they replaced long-distance modem connections by less-expensive “virtual” circuits over packet networks. In the United States, Telenet and Tymnet were two such packet networks. Neither supported host-to-host communications; in the 1970s this was still the province of the research networks, and it would remain so for many years.
Britannica Quiz
What Do You Actually Know About the Internet?
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; formerly ARPA) supported initiatives for ground-based and satellite-based packet networks. The ground-based packet radio system provided mobile access to computing resources, while the packet satellite network connected the United States with several European countries and enabled connections with widely dispersed and remote regions. With the introduction of packet radio, connecting a mobile terminal to a computer network became feasible. However, time-sharing systems were then still too large, unwieldy, and costly to be mobile or even to exist outside a climate-controlled computing environment. A strong motivation thus existed to connect the packet radio network to ARPANET in order to allow mobile users with simple terminals to access the time-sharing systems for which they had authorization. Similarly, the packet satellite network was used by DARPA to link the United States with satellite terminals serving the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, and Italy. These terminals, however, had to be connected to other networks in European countries in order to reach the end users. Thus arose the need to connect the packet satellite net, as well as the packet radio net, with other networks.
