sumers.
The lack of a central command on the Internet is a function of its origin. The Internet system was set up in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defense. Designing the system with a central control point would have made it more vulnerable to nuclear attack. Instead, the Department of Defense and several research universities linked numerous computers, allowing access for communication and research. The resulting network, Arpanet, quickly became a popular means of sending individual and shared messages through electronic mail. Electronic bulletin boards and mailing lists soon emerged. The Arpanet developed into the Internet through advanced computing via the National Science Foundation (Jones, 1995, p. 4).
The number of Internet users is expected to grow in leaps and bounds over the next decade. Between 1993 and 1994, the Internet more than doubled in size and now an estimated 20 million people have access (Tetzeli, 1994, p. 86). About three-quarters of this growth came from commercial networks--approximately 63 percent businesses or research labs and 10 percent university labs (Tetzeli, 1994, p. 86).
One of the factors in the surge of business interest is that establishing an Internet presence is relatively inexpensive. With a computer and modem, a user can access the Internet via on line services such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy. These services cost about $30 a month. Appendix A describes the kind of communication software and hardware required to connect to an on-line service.
One of the commercial networks on the Internet is the World Wide Web. The Web is a hypermedia, or multimedia, storage system linking resources around the world. More than 100,000 businesses and individuals have Web sites, or homepages. Approximately 6.64 million computers are hooked up to Web. The number of Web sites doubles every 2 1/2 months (Sussman, 1995, p. 72). Popular Web directories list over 370 Intern...