The Internet:
What Everyone Should Know

(Survival Basics)

by Rob B. Marqusee

Introduction

We cannot escape present culture's fixation on the Internet: every newspaper, magazine and television show exalts the virtues of this modern communications medium with reverential awe. Although most people vaguely understand that the Internet involves computers and information, even computer literate users do not really know what the Internet actually is, how it effects us today and how it will impact us tomorrow. The Information Age is upon us.

Every person should be armed with the contents of this series of articles, The Internet: What Everyone Should Know; think of it as our basic survival guide. The series of articles addresses the following topics:

Part I:
What is the Internet?
What it physically is, where it is, how it began, and it differs from "On-Line Services" such as CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy.

Part II:

What can be done with the Internet and why do we want to do it?
Worldwide shopping, education, videophones, television, mail, business, romance and major trends for tomorrow.

Part III:

How are moneyed corporate interests trying to capture your dollar?
The new "frontier" and the Internet gold-rush: the marketplace economy in the new age.

Part IV: Coming soon!

How are personal freedoms, and the nation's future, effected by the Internet?
Legal, constitutional, social and political challenges are not for the faint of heart.

Whether or not you are personally involved with the Internet, it will affect your life, either directly or indirectly.

Part I: What is the Internet?

In its physical form, the Internet is just a bunch of wires, routers, and communication hookups with physical locations throughout the world and in space. In many respects it is similar to today’s telephone system; however, the Internet as a whole does not 'belong' to a telephone company. No one literally 'owns' the Internet.

The Internet may be more fully described as a "network of networks" or, better yet, a global collective of computer sustained networks with which users can communicate, view and manipulate all present forms of information media (text, graphics, audio and video) through the use of a common computer 'grammar'.

A short history of the Internet holds the key to our understanding of the enterprise, its possibilities and limitations for commercial control, and of the challenges to our freedoms.

In the 1960's, a government agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - DARPA, designed a military communications network between the military and university scientists to withstand the potential atomic blasts of a World War III; whatever the catastrophe, the essential communication lines would remain open through numerous routing options. High speed transmission cables were buried underground. The National Science Foundation took charge of the project and added more cable and connections. The "backbone" of the Internet was formed and it continued to grow much like a living organism. The matured communications system became known as the "Internet" in January, 1983. It was just this last April, 1995 that the government turned over the Internet processes to the public sector; primarily because there were now so many connections to the system that it could no longer be used for national security purposes. In large part, the public purse was used in the origination and building the Internet.

Independently owned "servers", high capacity computers, were linked with multiple routing capabilities to the expanded "backbone" of the Internet. If one of the servers were destroyed, other servers would be able to communicate with each other by rerouting through another connection.

A server located at a University may contain scientific information, another server located across the country may be owned by a corporation and contain product information, while yet another server may be privately owned and contain information related to unlimited topics.

The number of such networks, and additional linkups, continue to grow at a staggering rate much like a living organism. The organism exists independently of any one organization, has a life of its own, and cannot be destroyed.

On-line Services are Not the Internet

Many may be familiar with traditional "on-line" services such as American Online, Compuserve and Prodigy. Although these services now provide access, or a "gateway" to the internet, these services are not the Internet.

On-line services are "closed systems" consisting of its own server or own network of servers. A user dials "into the service"; the service acts as a database depository of information it receives from any number of sources. Therefore, if the closed server/servers were destroyed, so would be the fate of the service.

On-line services now have gateways to the Internet so that a subscriber can access the Internet through the on-line service.

The Basic Connections

The Internet is just a phone call away with the use of a computer and a modem. Presently, there is significant activity in the cable and satellite communication industries to provide a similar Internet connections. The computer not only initiates the connection and permits the viewing of data, it can also provide the necessary tools to manipulate and store the information for the user's own purposes.

Therefore, "getting the connection" is the only burden placed on the typical computer user. The user will call an "access provider" for the Internet connection at a minimal access charge. An access provider can be a telephone company subsidiary, or any other organization which has incurred the expense of purchasing a server and creating the connections which "tap" into the Internet. Traditional on-line services can also act as an access provider; however, these services are generally more expensive due to overhead associated with the additional services that they provide.

The user initiates a computer phone call to the access provider who, in turn, is connected to the Internet backbone. The speed and efficiency of the data transmission will depend on the type of user modem and the connection that the access provider has with the backbone of the Internet. The speed of data transmission can be explained: a funnel with a small hole will transfer water (data) through the small hole slowly, whereas a funnel with a large hole will transfer water through the hole much faster.

The Internet is a very large holed funnel ("broadband") of information with varying degrees of high speed connections to access providers. Access provider’s connection to the end user is now typically done through telephone wire which has limited band efficiency. Therefore, there is a lot of movement in the communications industry to provide home users with either coaxial cable or fiber optic cable (a highly efficient broadband means of transmission) to increase the speed of data transmission. The need for this speed will be explained further in Part II of this series.

Where to Now?

With this basic information behind us, we will next turn to the question of what we can do with the Internet and why we want to do it. If we stopped with a pure physical explanation of the Internet, it would have very little meaning indeed; the excitement comes when we understand all the things we can do as an individual and as a world connected society.



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