Investors and Developers

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a vast global system of networks connecting more than 100 million computers in more than 100 countries via the TCP/IP protocol, enabling people to communicate; access and share information and multimedia; advertise and sell products online. and so on.

For students, key workers and military personnel the Internet is the perfect partner for work, study and leisure and allows them to keep in touch more easily with family and friends.

Most of us use the Internet without really thinking about it. But how did it come about and how does it work?

Encyclopedia Britannica explains the Internet phenomenon as follows:

"a publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah."

In 1971, the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982-83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet.

In 1984, the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988, real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols. In 1990, ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available.

In 1991, the World Wide Web was released to the public via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995, the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers.

By 1997, there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network."