What Is 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 and optical
networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and
services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web
(WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Most traditional communications media, such as telephone and television services, are
reshaped or redefined using the technologies of the Internet, giving rise to services such as
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper publishing has been reshaped
into Web sites, blogging, and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the
creation of new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums,
and social networking sites.

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research
projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer
networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the
National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new
networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in
the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in
virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's
population uses 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.
History Of Internet

1.  In the beginning was the Cable(1858)

The Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications

across the ocean for the first time. Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a
landmark event in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few
days.

Subsequent cables laid in 1866 were completely successful and compare to events like
the moon landing of a century later the cable remained in use for almost 100 years.

Number of miles of undersea telephone cables: 186,000

2. 1957 ( October 4th )

The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower saw the need for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the
Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik.

3. 1958 ( February 7th)

In response to the launch of Sputnik, the US Department of Defense issues directive

5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

The organization united some of America's most brilliant people, who developed the
United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to
focus on computer networking and communications technology.

4. 1962

In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's research in improving the
military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make
the government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand technology,
Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to universities
and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET.

The Atlantic cable of 1858 and Sputnik of 1957 were two basic  milestone of the
Internet prehistory. You might want also to take a look on  the Telecommunications and
Computers preHistory
 The Internet as a  tool to create "critical mass" of  intellectual resources .To appreciate
the import ante the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider
the dynamics of "critical mass," as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take
any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute
effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual
partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these
people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the
most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top
positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separate
ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the
role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at
meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication
stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings
so that it may take a year to do a week’s communicating. There has to be some way of
facilitating communicantion among people wit bout bringing them together in one
place.

5. 1969: The first LOGs: UCLA (Stanford)

Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message Processor (IMP) to
UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they turned it on, it just
started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in
the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara
(UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at

UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford
computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if
the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.
6. 1972: First public demonstration of  ARPANET

In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to
get things going. In October 1972 there was to be an International Conference on
Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public
demonstration of the ARPANET.

It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of
applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would install a packet switch and a
Terminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel,
and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over
the U.S ....

The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were
skeptical about whether it would work.

Below is a picture of history Internet :

Uses of internet

World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is not a physical place, not a set of files, nor even a
network of computers. The heart of the WEB lies in the protocols (common communication rules
and languages) that define its use. The WWW uses hypertext transfer protocols (http) to
transport files from one place to another.

"By using standardized software, today users can navigate through most features of the Internet,
including text data such as email, photo-image files, and video and audio clips. HTML
(HyperTextMarkup Language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a language
that all computers can read, so computers with varying operating systems (such as Windows and
Macintosh) can communicate easily. JAVA, a HTML compatible language developed by Sun
Microsystems in the mid 1990s, is also universally readable by computers and allows small
interactive programs to run on Web pages, creating moving graphic elements such as three-
dimensional animations and menus....."

Uses of the World Wide Web include: Research, Personal web sites , On line shopping ,
Shareware

 Global Audience
Content published on the World Wide Web is immediately available to a global audience of
users. This makes the World Wide Web a very cost-effective medium to publish
information. Reaching more than 190 countries.

 Information.
There is a huge amount of information available on the internet for just about every subject
known to man, ranging from government law and services, trade fairs and conferences,
market information, new ideas and technical support.

 Services.
Many services are now provided on the internet such as online banking, job seeking and
applications, and hotel reservations. Often these services are not available off-line or cost
more.

 Buy or sell products.

The internet is a very effective way to buy and sell products all over the world.

 Communities.
Communities of all types have sprung up on the internet. Its a great way to meet up with
people of similar interest and discuss common issues
 Online Chat: There are many ‘chat rooms’ on the web that can be accessed to meet new
people, make new friends, as well as to stay in touch with old friends.

 Downloading Software: This is one of the most happening and fun things to do via the
Internet. You can download innumerable, games, music, videos, movies, and a host of other
entertainment software from the Internet, most of which are free.

Application of internet

 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

- A.K.A Internet Telephony

- Make phone calls over the Internet

- Latest IM applications can be used to initiate VoIP call

- Required devices:

- (Client|Computer) equipped with microphone and speaker OR

- Traditional telephone with special adapter OR

- VoIP Phone

- Call charges: free OR less than normal phone call charges

- Can be used by individuals or business organizations

 E-Commerce A.K.A E-Business

- Buying and selling of (products|services) on the Internet

 - The amount of trade increased dramatically

- Category 1: Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

- Direct online sale between supplier and individual customer

- Example: Dell sells (desktop|notebook) to consumer, Amazon.com

- Category 2: Business-to-Business (B2B)

- Online transactions between businesses

- Example: Advertising companies sell services to business organizations

- Category 3: Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) A.K.A P2P

- Exchanges (between|among) consumers

- Example: eBay.com, mudah.com.my, etc.

 E-Commerce A.K.A E-Business

- Category 4: Consumer-to-Business (C2B)

- Individuals offer (products|services) to companies and the companies pay

them

- Example: Freelance web designers sell services to companies

 Online Banking A.K.A Internet Banking

- Part of E-Commerce applications

- Allow customers to conduct financial transaction on a secure website and

connection

- Advantage: customers do not need to be at the bank physically

- Disadvantage: vulnerable to risks (fraud, unauthorized access, identity theft, virus

attacks)

- What you can do on Online Banking?

- Access your bank account

- Money transfer
 - Bills payment

- OB in Malaysia

- maybank2u, CIMB Clicks, Bank Islam Internet Banking

 Email

- The most popular service

- Take few (seconds|minutes) to be delivered

- Normally can be enclosed with attachment

 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

- Common application to download file from Internet to user’s computer OR

upload files to server

 Instant Messaging

- The most popular Internet application

- Real-time conversation

- Example: Yahoo! Messenger, GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, IRC, etc.

 Plug-ins

- Programs that extend capability of web browser

- Example: Apple QuickTime, RealPlayer, Shockwave Player, Windows Media

Player, etc.

 Discussion Forums

- A place where people discuss things or common interest

- Example: Anime, Sports, TV Series, etc

- Type 1: Newsgroups A.K.A Usenet

- Wide range of subjects

- Disseminate to computers around the world that run news server

- Available worldwide

- Type 2: Mailing List

 - Based on email subscription

- Forum discussions will come straight to your email inbox

Conclusion
Future trend

Virtual reality. The future of the Internet technological revolution will continue to be made in
man's image. Experiments with wide area voice and video communications on the Internet
began to be held in the early 1990's. Voice over IP (VOIP) began to be used regularly for
long distance voice communications in 2002. Internet video phones won't be far behind.
With the continued doubling of computer capability every couple of years, the ability of
technology to process the complex analog environment that humans live in -- "reality" --
will continue to increase, and will be increasingly integrated with the Internet.

Three dimensional graphics will become more sophisticated, and virtual reality interfaces
such as viewers and tactile feedback systems will become more realistic. The technology will
be applied to innovative ways to navigate the Internet's information universe, for hyper-
realistic gaming, and for group communications. There will come a day when you will be
able to have dinner with a group of friends each in a different city, almost as though you
were in the same room, although you will all have to bring your own food.

Virtual reality applications will not only better and better reflect the natural world, they will
also have the fluidity, flexibility, and speed of the digital world, layered on the Internet, and
so will be used to create apparently magical environments of types we can only now begin
to imagine. These increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences will continue to change how
we understand the nature of reality, experience, art, and human relations.