Chances are you use the Internet every day. Even if you do not "surf the web", your email is likely transmitted over the Internet. If so, you know that the Net is a dynamic fast changing world. It responds to world events as more and more people turn to the Net first, for example when a news story breaks.

Although we can't know how many people and computers are on the Net, estimates say there are more than 15,000 networks connecting 5 million computers and more than 35 million. And the numbers are going up faster and faster.

How Today's Internet works: Like a SuperHiway-Hiway-Road-Street system

The worldwide Net is complex web of smaller interconnected regional networks. It can be thought of as a road system, with superhighways connecting major cities. The major cities link to the smaller towns through their own sets of smaller road systems. Finally the residents of the small towns move about on slower, more narrow streets.

There are many ways to get from one place to another, and just because one road is closed or full of traffic it doesn't all stop. Rerouting traffic, detours and the multiple pathways allow the rest of the complex to keep moving.

The border-less community of the Net

The Net is more than just a technological marvel. It is human community alive and dynamic much like a giant party or convention. What you find here will make you laugh, cry and shake your head with wonder. You will meet new people all the time, some will become friends and some you will wish you never met. But most of all, what you find on the Net will make you think.

And this all happens in a global community that that transcends national borders and state lines.

But the Internet did not start out as a system planned for the public masses. It started as a government - military - research project.

1960's - The Birth of the origins of the Internet- ARPA

In the 1960s, from the U.S Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded research using a new technology called packet switching to link computers.

Packet switching uses a method by which information to be sent between computers is broken into small pieces called "packets". Each packet includes the computer "address" of its destination. When all of the small packets have been received at the destination, they are reassembled into the full message. If any piece is lost or garbled along the way it is resent.

That way, if there are communication errors during the transmission, rather than needing to resend the entire message, the network only resends the packet or packets that were lost or arrived in error.

Packet switching showed promise of letting several users communicate on a single communications circuit and provided for the theoretical design of networks that could be set up to automatically route data around nonfunctioning circuits or computers. To ARPA, this looked like the best data network that could survive a nuclear attack, which was a main goal of the research.

Before Packet Switching

Up until then, virtually all computer networking had required a direct line between each computer on the network just like a one-track train route.

By the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPA network and the budding Internet was off and running.

1970's: Rules, rules, rules: Internet Protocols and the birth of e-mail

In the 1970s, ARPA helped support the development of rules, or protocols, for transferring data between different types of computer networks. These protocols established the rules by which different types of computers and computer networks could talk to each other electronically.

One of the first of these new protocols was Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). By now, ARPA had established connections with other networks around the world and virtually any type of computer system in the world could write an interface to comply to the NCP communications protocol and join the world wide internet.

Email and Newsgroups first to blossom

Electronic messaging, or e-mail was a revolutionary part of this new computer network known as ARPANET.

One of the earliest innovations on the ARPANET was made college students and one in high school developed a way to use the network to conduct online conferences. The original purpose was to conduct scientific discussions between researchers spread across the U.S.

But the "newsgroups", as these discussion lists came to be called, soon expanded to contain discussion "forums" for virtually every interest area, some very far from scientific pursuits.

1980's - rapid expansion

In the 1980s, this network of networks, which became known collectively as the Internet, expanded at a phenomenal rate led by government agencies, universities and other research organizations.

Widespread development of LANS, PCs and workstations in the 1980s made the technology accessible to virtually any size organization and helped the Internet to flourish.

The ARPANET NCP protocol was superceded by a new set of rules that could handle distant computers on of virtually any type of network: the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).

TCP/IP was included in the new UNIX operating system and that paved the way for the rapid expansion among universities who were making UNIX their operating system of choice.

With years of planning, on a single day, New Year's Day 1983, all "Internet" host computers made the shift from NCP to TCP/IP. It went amazingly smoothly and many system administrators of the day wore their 'I survived the switch to TCP/IP" buttons proudly.

Other developments of this decade included the creation of more advanced releases of communications protocols as well as other Internet based technologies like FTP (File transfer Program), The WAIS (Wide Area Information Server, pronounced "wayz"), and the now ubiquitous World Wide Web.

1990's: the Commercialization of the Internet and the explosion of WWW

The Internet, which started as a government experiment is now largely a private enterprise. Organizations such as the Internet Society and the various task forces - all voluntary - have fostered an Internet of freedom almost to the level of anarchy. As long as the protocols are followed anything is fair game.

The inevitable commercialization of the Internet came about providing business and individuals access to the wired world.

By virtue of the Internet becoming available for commercial enterprises, governments were encouraged to invest in establishing and upgrading the telecommunications infrastructure to support the new Internet. The "backbones" or high speed communications equipment that links countries and major cities have been upgraded nearly worldwide.

And the World Wide Web, to many what the Internet is really all about, is now nearly a part of everyday lives for millions of people around the globe.

No One Owns the Internet

Unlike with commercial networks such as AOL or Prodigy, there is no one central computer or set of computers running the Internet. The Net's resources exist distributed among the thousands of individual networks and computers that are connected together.

This feature of the Net - interconnected cooperating but independent networks makes it virtually impossible for the entire Net to crash at once. Even if some large Net based computers shut down other parts of the Net hum along.

You Cannot Break the Internet

As we said above, a computer network on the Net cannot cause the whole Net to crash. So relax a bit: You cannot break the Net! Even if your PC system freezes, or your corporate LAN crashes while using the Net, you will not disable the rest of the world. That should give you a bit more courage to stay with it.

And please do stay with it. The Net gains its value from it's participating citizens, or "netizens" as they are sometimes called. Get on the Net, use it, contribute and we'll all be glad you did.

Where to learn more:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990, is a non-profit and non-partisan organization which does great works in the public interest to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression, in the arena of computers and the Internet. The EFF publishes many free guides including EFF's Guide to the Internet, v. 3.20 (formerly The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet) which can be found at: http://www.eff.org /pub/EFF/netguide.eff.

This free document is written for people with little or no networking experience. It is very extensive and fun to read.

Would you like to see some particular topic addresses in our Computer Basics series? Send in your suggestions via email to basics@y2kegypt.com.