Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard
Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks
that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of
local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical
networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services,
such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the
infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are
reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper, book and other print publishing are adapting to Web site
technology, or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated
new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social
networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small artisans and
traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across
entire industries.

The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United
States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-
tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the
National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial
backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies,
and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an
international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect
of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population used the services of
the Internet.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for
access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching
definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space
and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and
standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that
anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

Terminology
Internet is a short form of the technical term internetwork,[1] the result of interconnecting
computer networks with special gateways or routers. The Internet is also often referred to as the
Net.

The term the Internet, when referring to the entire global system of IP networks, has been treated
as a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter. In the media and popular culture a trend
has also developed to regard it as a generic term or common noun and thus write it as "the
internet", without capitalization. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized as a
noun but not capitalized as an adjective.

Depiction of the Internet as a cloud in network diagrams

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much
distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The
Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that
provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services
communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other
resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[2]

In many technical illustrations when the precise location or interrelation of Internet resources is
not important, extended networks such as the Internet are often depicted as a cloud.[3] The verbal
image has been formalized in the newer concept of cloud computing.

History
Main article: History of the Internet

The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) in February 1958 to regain a technological lead.[4][5]
ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further the research of
the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which had networked country-wide
radar systems together for the first time. The IPTO's purpose was to find ways to address the US
military's concern about survivability of their communications networks, and as a first step
interconnect their computers at the Pentagon, Cheyenne Mountain, and Strategic Air Command
headquarters (SAC). J. C. R. Licklider, a promoter of universal networking, was selected to head
the IPTO. Licklider moved from the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University to MIT
in 1950, after becoming interested in information technology. At MIT, he served on a committee
that established Lincoln Laboratory and worked on the SAGE project. In 1957 he became a Vice
President at BBN, where he bought the first production PDP-1 computer and conducted the first
public demonstration of time-sharing.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock with the first ARPANET Interface

Message Processors at UCLA

At the IPTO, Licklider's successor Ivan Sutherland in 1965 got

Lawrence Roberts to start a project to make a network, and Roberts
based the technology on the work of Paul Baran,[6] who had written
an exhaustive study for the United States Air Force that
recommended packet switching (opposed to circuit switching) to
achieve better network robustness and disaster survivability.
Roberts had worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory originally
established to work on the design of the SAGE system. UCLA
professor Leonard Kleinrock had provided the theoretical foundations for packet networks in
1962, and later, in the 1970s, for hierarchical routing, concepts which have been the
underpinning of the development towards today's Internet.

Sutherland's successor Robert Taylor convinced Roberts to build on his early packet switching
successes and come and be the IPTO Chief Scientist. Once there, Roberts prepared a report
called Resource Sharing Computer Networks which was approved by Taylor in June 1968 and
laid the foundation for the launch of the working ARPANET the following year.

After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected
between Kleinrock's Network Measurement Center at the UCLA's School of Engineering and
Applied Science and Douglas Engelbart's NLS system at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park,
California, on 29 October 1969. The third site on the ARPANET was the Culler-Fried Interactive
Mathematics center at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth was the
University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, there were already
fifteen sites connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971.