The Internet: What Is It? Who Uses It and Why?

by Brad Ryder

What is the Internet? This is not an easy question to answer, for what the Internet is depends on how you look at it. It could be just a bunch of computers connected together, or it could be part of the fifth most important event in the history of the world. It is a component of the Information Age, which began in 20th century America and is changing the way we live more dramatically than the first four events (mastery of fire, invention of agriculture, development of Greek sculpture, the invention of capitalism) combined [Draper, 1995].

Or the perspective can lie somewhere in the middle. The Internet is nothing more than a "high-tech candy dispenser" for the eyes, ears, and mind. There's a lot out there, such as fuzzy weather maps, canned audio, and access to thousands of documents and journals, but none of it will really make a difference in our lives [O'Malley, 1995].

First let's look at it from a hardware standpoint. The Internet is many "host" computers, including 18,000 with World Wide Web capability. The Web, as it's called, provides a graphical interface and is perhaps the most user-friendly part of the Internet. An estimated 3.5 million documents are available on the Web, with 6,000 being added daily [O'Malley, 1995]. Although nobody knows precisely, it has been estimated that 40 million people are now connected to the Internet, and another 60 million will be there within the next three years [Draper, 1995]. This is potentially 100 million computers that could provide information to Internet users.

Users access the Internet with fast computers, most with more computing power than existed in the entire country in 1969, when we sent a man to the moon [Draper, 1996]. They use modems, preferably at 14.4 or 28.8 bits per second, which connect through phone lines to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is in turn connected to the Internet through dedicated wide bandwidth lines. In fact, this is one of the paradoxes of the Internet, that it should be so fast yet the "PC proletariat" are still linked by modems and regular phone lines [O'Malley, 1995]. This will change. ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is already available in many areas and allows a user to connect at a much faster rate [Hahn, 1996]. In time we'll all be online this way.

Historically, the Internet was conceived and created by the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their project, ARPANET, was an intricate network of computers that was designed to continue to function under "adverse conditions" ... that is, a nuclear event. It began in 1968, and soon tens of thousands of computers were connected reliably and economically [Hahn, 1996]. This is the basis of what we know as the Internet.

As far as who uses the Internet, everybody. It's now the trendy thing to do. If you want to hold up your end of a conversation, you need to know about the 'Net [O'Malley, 1995]. But beyond just a social event, the Internet may be the next economic event. The effect is going to be to create millions of home-based entrepreneurs. The opportunity is there for any business, large or small, to reach new untapped global markets and to increase productivity [Draper, 1995].

Of course this could lead to a glut. One wag recently said that everybody who can type brackets will soon be marketing their services as an HTML code expert. How many are needed? It could be that one HTML coder in your town is one too many, or that a thousand is not enough.

In this course I'm hoping to learn much more about the Internet, and I've already done that. One thing I've learned is that it's impossible to predict what lies ahead for the Internet and its growing number of users. A few decades ago, people were amazed that men could fly in airplanes, but many thought it far too complicated and unreliable to ever catch on. The same could be said for the Internet. But "only a fool judges the commercial future of a technological advance by his own limited vision of the present" [Brandt, 1995].

References

Draper, M. [1995]. Beyond cyberspace, Vital Speeches of the Day, 61, 23, pp. 726-733.

O'Malley, C. [1995]. Drowning in the Net, Popular Science, 246, 6, pp. 78-87.

Brandt, J. [1995.] Naysayers need a history lesson, Industry Week, 244, 11, p. 6.

Hahn, H. [1996.] The Internet, Complete Reference, Second Edition. Berkeley, Calif.: Osborne McGraw-Hill.