Once a small and simple collection of computers run by the Defence Department, i s now a massive world wide network

of computers, what we call the 'Internet'. T he word "Internet" literally means "network of networks." In itself, the Intern et is composed of thousands of smaller local networks scattered throughout the g lobe. It connects roughly 15 million users in more than 50 countries a day. Th e World Wide Web (WWW) is mostly used on the Internet. The Web refers to a body of information, while the Internet refers to the physical side of the global ne twork containing a large amount of cables and computers. The Internet is a 'packet-switching' computer network. When a person sends a me ssage over the Internet, it is broken into tiny pieces, called 'packets'. These packets travel over many different routes between the computer that it is being sent from to the computer to which it is being sent to. Phone lines, either fi bre-optics or copper wires ones, carry most of the data packets. Internet compu ters along the path switch each packet that will take it to its destination, but no two packets need to follow the same path. The Internet is designed so that packets always take the best available route at the time they are travelling. ' Routers' which are boxes of circuit boards and microchips, which do the essentia l task of directing and redirecting packets along the network. Much smaller bo xes of circuit boards and microchips called 'modems' do the task of interpreting between the phone lines and the computer. The packets are all switched into a destination and reassembled by the destination computer. Today's Internet conta ins enough repetitious and interconnected circuits simply to reroute the data if any portion of the network goes down or gets overloaded. The packet-switching nature of the Internet gives it sufficient speed and flexib ility to support real-time communication, such as sending messages to other peop le in a chat environment (IRC). Every packet is written in a particular protoco l language, called TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Intern etworking Protocol. This protocol is the common language of the Internet, and i t supports two major programs called File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Telenet. FTP lets the transfer files from one Internet computer to another. Telnet lets a person to log into a remote computer. They have combined these two tools in c omplex ways to create the Internet tools such as Gopher, the World Wide Web and IRC. Some collections of phone lines and routers are larger and more powerful than ot hers. Spirit and MCI both have each built collections of phone lines and router s that crisscross the United States and can carry large amounts of data. There are six companies in the US with large, nationwide networks of high-speed phone lines and routers. These companies include, MCI, Sprint, AGIS, UUNet/AlterNet, ANS, and PSI. They make up what they often call the 'Internet Backbone'. Data packets travelling on a 'backbone' network stay within that network for muc h of their journey. The reason is that there is only a handful of places where the backbone networks meet. For example, 1a packet travelling on a Sprint circu it to a Sprint router, can only transfer to an MCI circuit at certain places. T his is just like how certain city streets often run parrel to each other for man y miles before reaching an intersection. These intersections that they call 'Ne twork Access Points' (NAP) are very crucial to the transmission of data on the I nternet. A Web is a program running on a computer who's only purpose is to serve document s to other computers when asked. A Web client is a program that interfaces (tal ks) with the user and requests documents from a server as the user requests them . The server only operates when a request for a document is made. The process of how this work is very simple, one example is; Running a Web browser, the user selects a piece of hypertext connected to another text -"Planes." The Web client connects to a computer specified by a network address somewhere o n the Internet and asks that computer's Web server for "Planes." The server res ponses by sending the text and any other media within the text (this includes pi ctures, sounds, movies) to the users screen. The World Wide Web does thousands of these transactions per hour throughout the wold, creating a web of informatio

n. They call the language that the Web client and servers use to talk with each oth er the 'Hypertext Transmission Protocol' (HTTP). All Web clients and servers mu st be able to speak HTTP to send and receive hypermedia documents. The standard language the Web uses for creating and recognizing hypermedia docum ents is the 'Hypertext Markup Language' (HTML). Another formatting language use d for Web documents is 'Standard Generalized Markup Language' (SGML). HTML is widely liked because of its ease of use. Web documents are usually written in H TML and are usually named with the suffix '. html'. HTML documents are nothing more than standard 7-bit ASCII files with formatting codes that contain informat ion about the layout (text styles, document titles, paragraphs, lists and hyperl inks). Hyperlinks are links in the document to go to other documents or another Web sight. HTML uses what they call 'Uniform Resource Locators' (URL) to repre sent hypermedia links and links to network services within documents. The first part of the URL (before the two slashes) specifies the method of access. The s econd is typically the address of the computer where the data or service is foun d. Further parts may specify the name of files, the port to connect to, or the text to search for in a database. Most Web browsers allow the user to specify a URL and connect to that document o r service. When selecting hypertext in an HTML document, the user is actually s ending a request to open a URL. In this way, they can make hyperlinks not only to other texts and media, but also to other network services. The powerful, sophisticated access that the Internet provides is truly amazing. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, and fax machines. The amount of p eople connecting to the Internet is growing at a rapid rate, along with the numb er of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP\IP. The main reason that th e Internet is flourishing so rapidly is because of the freedom, there is no one who actually owns the Internet and no rules for users. As the Internet grows, m any new activities are joining in, like 'Internet Radio', which will support rea l-time call-in shows and music to be sent over the Internet. As the Internet is expanding into another decade, it will become even more interesting and complex . FOOTNOTES: 1.John Quarterman, The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldw ide (Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1990), 42.