History and Uses of the Internet

The Internet has also become a popular symbol of the age of computerized communications and has become almost synonymous among the public and the mass media with the idea of an "automated information superhighway." This Internet-as-symbol is based upon and related to the actual Internet, but they are not the same thing, and one of the purposes of the following discussion will be to clarify the differences between the popular perception and the actual Internet system.

This study will proceed by first outlining the Internet's history, organization, and relationship to other computer networks. It will then go on to survey the ranges of uses to which the Internet has been or can be put to use, its characteristics from the point of view of users, its possible future developments, and some of its broader social implications. The Internet was established in 1969 by the Advance Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, and its original name was ARPANET (Kantrowitz

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" This address could be read as "User 1 at Globenet.com." Within this address, "user1" is an address within an Internet site, or subscribing member, called Globenet. The "@," by convention, separates this individual computer from the sub-network by which it accesses the Internet, and "globenet.com" identifies the sub-network and shows that it is a commercial provider. A university network might be identified as "stateuniv.edu," the "edu" being the standard identification of an educational institution. When electronic mail (e-mail) is sent from one Internet user to another, sender and recipient are identified by addresses of this sort. This indirect electronic addressing system provides a high degree of anonymity to Internet users and has recently become a source of intense controversy regarding the Internet and its operations. Quite a different type of addressing is used to identify the Usenet newsgroups--public bulletin boards which more or less anyone on the Internet can read or add messages to. (Individual sites control their own internal access; users of one site cannot necessarily access all other parts of the Internet, and users from other parts of the Internet may not be able to access everything on that site). A n
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2123
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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