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Top 10 ways to pose as a jaded Net vet:
- 10.When referring to browsers, use the preferred spelling Netscrape and Internet Exploder. (You, of course, use Lynx.)
- 9.Youre male? Call yourself d00d. Female? Grrl.
- 8.Refer to online services only when you absolutely have to, and when you do, use these preferred spellings: America OnHold, Plodigy, Compu$erve, and Microsoft Notwork.
- 7.If you use the term digerati, make it clear you are being ironic.
- 6.Change your sig to read, I have Neiman-Marcus cookie recipes
- 5.Change your alternative sig to read: Of course, Mondo 2000 did it first.
- 4. Want to change your sig? Never use one youve seen somewhere else.
- 3. Spell the cool k-e-w-l.
- 2. Spell the word kewl k-0-0-l with two zeroes.
- 1. Avoid discussions about the relative merits of the MacOS, Windows and OS/2. Just mention casually that if it doesnt grep, its not a real computer.
c|net (http://cnet.com)
Author's Note: For explanations of http and .com, read this chapter. For explanations of Lynx, digerati, and grep, refer to the end of this chapter. If you thoroughly understand all of these terms, you may skip this chapter.
The Internet has captured the imagination of the U.S, and of the world! From its early beginnings as DARPANET, linking a select few military and R&D facilities, it has grown to comprise thousands of networks and millions of users in more than a hundred countries. The Internet is the kudzu of networks, growing like the uncontrollable weed of Southern infamy.
The Internet truly was the Information Superhighway, long before the term was coined. While it was actually more of a private road, it was characterized by a sense of freedom that was truly unparalleled. That early network stood apart by virtue of its providing free and open access to informationthat characteristic remains today as the hallmark of the Internet. The Internet is a network of networks, and has become a Global Village, much as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan. In some sense, at least, The Internet is The Information Superhighway!
The Internet is a global network of networks currently linking over 60,000 networks and spanning over 150 countries. According to Network Wizards the number of connected hosts nearly doubled in 1996, to almost 9.5 million (Table 13.1). There are well over 35 million users, with a growth rate that exceeds 15% per month, according to some estimates. Figure 1.1 provides a graphic view of the growth of the Internet (there were only four hosts in 1969). E-mail, the most popular application, is estimate to account for well over one billion messages and over one trillion bytes (1TB) of data per month.
Network Class | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Date | Hosts | Domains | Replied to Ping* | A (Large) | B (Medium) | C (Small) |
Jan 96 | 9,472,000 | 240,000 | 1,682,000 | 92 | 5,655 | 87,924 |
Jul 95 | 6,642,000 | 120,000 | 1,149,000 | 91 | 5,390 | 56,057 |
Jan 95 | 4,852,000 | 71,000 | 970,000 | 91 | 4,979 | 34,340 |
Oct 94 | 3,864,000 | 56,000 | 1,024,000 | 93 | 4,831 | 32,098 |
Jul 94 | 3,212,000 | 46,000 | 707,000 | 89 | 4,493 | 20,628 |
Jan 94 | 2,217,000 | 30,000 | 576,000 | 74 | 4,043 | 16,422 |
Oct 93 | 2,056,000 | 28,000 | 69 | 3,849 | 12,615 | |
Jul 93 | 1,776,000 | 26,000 | 464,000 | 67 | 3,728 | 9,972 |
Apr 93 | 1,486,000 | 22,000 | 421,000 | 58 | 3,409 | 6,255 |
Jan 93 | 1,313,000 | 21,000 | 54 | 3,206 | 4,998 | |
*Estimated by pinging 1% of all hosts
Figure 13.1 Growth in Internet hosts.(Sources: Network Wizards (http://www.nw.com) and Mark Gibbs, Gibbs & Co.).
The Internet is grounded in the U.S. Department of Defense ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork), which began in 1969 as a means of linking personnel and systems involved in various computer science and military research projects. ARPANET, and its successor DARPANET (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork) were developed to be totally fail-safe. The distribution of computing power and the redundancy of the data switches and computer links were all intended to provide a meshed computer network that could withstand a nuclear strike
In the early 1970s, work began at Stanford University on a set of internetworking protocols designed to prove connectivity among the ARPANET computers. In May 1974, Vinton G. Cerf (Stanford University) and Robert E. Kahn (Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Department of Defense) published A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication in the IEEE Transactions on Communications [13-1]. That concept became known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Development work on the protocols was completed in 1980, and in 1983 the Office of the Secretary of Defense mandated that ARPANET users accept the new set of computer protocols, which became the standard for ARPANET. In order to encourage colleges and universities to transition to TCP/IP, DARPA eased the implementation process for Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD UNIX or Berkeley UNIX, a version of the UNIX operating system which they mostly ran at the time. Toward that end, DARPA funded Bolt Baranek and Newman (BBN) to implement the TCP/IP protocols with Berkeley UNIX; this approach filled an internetworking protocol void and formed the foundation for the Internet [13-2].
In late 1983, ARPANET was split into two unclassified networks, DARPANET (Defense ARPANET) and MILNET (MILitary NETwork). Although ARPANET was officially retired in June, 1990, the Internet has survived. TCP/IP has been enhanced recently and currently enjoys wide popularity in education, research and development, and commercial applications.
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