Jacqueline Roberts takes a trip down the Information Superhighway |
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| Over the past ten years the Internet has become the buzzword on the tip of everybody's tongues and across a wide sector of today's society people are learning more and more about what the Net can do for them and / or their business. The  opportunities that have become available to both individuals and businesses alike are endless and never before has society had access to such an incredible amount of information in such short a time. But where did it all start?
In the early sixties, computers were large immobile things requiring one to travel to the computer itself and the machines themselves were incapable of communicating with each other. The idea of a "network" - the linking of computers by a mesh of phone lines - was designed during the height of the cold war by the US military and in 1963 J.C.R. Licklider at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) first articulated a vision of something resembling an Internet system.
By 1966, a fortunate minority within ARPA were communicating with each other enabling key resources to be shared between long distances through their computers. One of these few was Bob Taylor, a psychologist who asked the all important question; "Why couldn't one central terminal do it all?". The seeds of the Internet were planted and just before the dawn of the next decade ARPANET was born. Surprisingly e-mail among the connected computers of ARPANET was not one of the initial offerings, "We didn't know that e-mail was important," said one official later. It wasn't until a year or so into the ARPANET's operation that the first e-mail was sent. E-mail has subsequently become without a doubt the most used (and abused) function of the Information Superhighway. By 1972, ARPANET had expanded to thirty-seven nodes but membership wasn't cheap, at the time a site on the Net cost around a quarter of a million dollars per year.
In the mid-seventies the American Defense Department's Defense Communications Agency (DCA) took control of ARPANET and connections were only available to those doing work that fell within the ARPANET's charter guidelines. Though many universities, government agencies and some computer vendors qualified, many others did not. Left in the cold, they decided to form computer networks of their own.
CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) and BITNET ("Because it's Time" or "Because it's There") formed by education and research sites became the two most notable new networks. Linking users with common interests had a social as well as a technical impact and the first "virtual communities" were formed. Despite it's phenomenal growth amongst certain sectors of society, the Internet remained relatively unknown to the public until October 1988, when a rogue program or "worm" wreaked a special kind of havoc. Thousands of computers either overloaded or were deliberately crashed and for the first time the Internet made the six 'o' clock news.
In 1990, ARPANET was uninstalled after 21 years of operation. Many other networks were by then in operation and ARPANET had simply outlived its usefulness. As the number of users and sites grew, the Internet came to resemble an overgrown information jungle and in the early 1990's tools were created to locate and index resources. These guideposts helped others in the Net community find their way and transformed the Internet into a user-friendly global landscape. The first was Archie, followed by Gopher and then VERONICA (Very Easy Rodent Oriented New-wide Index) which by 1993 held over one million entries from Gopher menus.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee devised a way to organise the Internet-based information and resources he needed for his physics research. A tool was needed to enable collaboration between physicists and other researchers in the high energy physics community and Berners-Lee dubbed his system the World Wide Web. His system allowed owners to embed Internet addresses into their web documents. By clicking on a "hypertext" link users tell their computer to "get the address associated with this link and go there". Hyperlinks in Web documents are a very common feature and are actually URL's (Universal Resource Locators) and can point to things anywhere on the Internet.
Although developed for his own use, the World Wide Web soon became a popular medium for other Internet communities. Using a modem and a browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, users like you and I can navigate the Web by simply selecting links. The browser follows the links, retrieves the specified files and displays them as documents, graphics, sounds, video and other information. The Internet has thus become an inviting multimedia tapestry of full colour information available to every sector of the community.
Most visibly perhaps, the Internet has become a new venue for business. Companies have been quick to realise the potential of the World Wide Web and a dot.com generation of new businesses has evolved. Not all of the dot.com newcomers have flourished however and some have fallen by the Information Superhigh Wayside. For most businesses the Internet has been nothing short of a spectacular step forward though, allowing fast communication not just within one organisation but also with others from the global business community.
Not only has the Internet grown beyond all recognition, thankfully, hardware, software and telecommunications have also evolved. Smaller PC's with faster processors, more programs performing more functions and better than ever mobile and terrestrial telecommunications means that literally wherever you are, so long as you have access to a phone line and a computer - you have access to the Internet. You can work from home and be in constant contact with your office and your business associates. You could quite happily be sat on your terrace in Marbella can be in touch with your office in London, your family in New York, play backgammon with someone in New Delhi and buy your next flight ticket to Paris, all at the touch of a button. As a recent arrival from London commented; "It used to take me three hours to commute from my office in the City of London to my home in the Cotswolds. Now it takes me four and a half hours door to door from my office in London to my villa in Marbella. My laptop and mobile phone are always with me which means that the office is never further away than my desk. More importantly my family has a better quality of life and I much prefer living and working in Marbella to the West of England. Thank God for the Internet!"
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