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The Internet is made up of millions of computers linked together around the world in such a way that information can be sent from any computer to any other 24 hours a day. These computers can be in homes, schools, universities, government departments, or businesses small and large. They can be any type of computer and be single personal computers or workstations on a school or a company network. The Internet is often described as "a network of networks" because all the smaller networks of organizations are linked together into the one giant network called the Internet.

Why use the Internet?

There are so many things you can do and participate in once connected to the Internet. They include using a range of services to communicate and share information and things quickly and inexpensively with tens of millions of people, both young and old and from diverse cultures around the world. For example:

• You'll be able to keep in touch and send things to friends using electronic mail, Internet telephone, keyboard chat and video conferencing.
• You can also tap into thousands of databases, libraries and newsgroups around the world to gather information on any topic. The information can be in the form of text, pictures or even video material.
• This means you can stay up to date with news, sports, weather and any current affairs around the world with information updated daily, hourly or instantly.
• You can also locate and download computer software and other products that are available in cyberspace.
• You can listen to sounds and music, and watch digital movies.
• There are also a growing number of interactive multimedia games and educational tools.

And as well as using the Internet for receiving things you will be able to publish information about your school, hobbies or interests.

A Brief History of the Internet

Although it may seem like a new idea, the net has actually been around for over 40 years. It all began in the US during the Cold War, as a university experiment in military communications. By linking lots of computers together in a network, rather than serially (in a straight line), the Pentagon thought that in the event of a nuclear attack on the US it was unlikely that the entire network would be damaged, and therefore they would still be able to send and receive intelligence.

At first each computer was physically linked by cable to the next computer, but this approach has obvious limitations, which led to the development of networks utilizing the telephone system. Predictably, people found that nuclear strike or not, they could talk to each other using this computer network, and some university students started using this network to do their homework together.

It seems a natural human characteristic to want to communicate, and once people realized that they could talk to other people via this computer network they began to demand access, although initially the users were only from the university and government sectors. But more and more people could see the potential of computer networks, and various community groups developed networks separate from the official networks for the use of their local communities.

The sum of all these various local, regional and national networks is the Internet as we experience it today, an ever expanding network of people, computers and information coming together in ways the Pentagon never dreamed of 40 years ago. So what began as an exercise in military paranoia has become a method of global communication.

"Cyberspace" is a term coined by William Gibson in his fantasy novel Neuromancer to describe the "world" of computers, and the society that gathers around them. Gibson's fantasy of a world of connected computers has moved into a present reality in the form of the Internet. In cyberspace people "exist" in the ether; you meet them electronically, in a disembodied, faceless form.

The Internet & the World Wide Web

Sometimes people use the words Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) synonymously but they are different. The WWW is a component of the Internet that presents information in a graphical interface. You can think of the WWW as the illustrated version of the Internet. It began in the late 1980's when physicist Dr. Berners-Lee wrote a small computer program for his own personal use. This program allowed pages, within his computer, to be linked together using keywords. It soon became possible to link documents in different computers, as long as they were connected to the Internet. The document formatting language used to link documents is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language.)

The Web remained primarily text based until 1992. Two events occurred that year that forever changed the way the Web looked. Marc Andreesen developed a new computer program called the NCSA Mosaic and gave it away! The NCSA Mosaic was the first Web browser.

The browser made it easier to access the different Web sites that had started to appear. Soon Web sites contained more than just text, they also had sound and video files. The development of the WWW has been the catalyst for the popularity of the Internet and is also the easiest part of the Internet to use. We now have Internet Chat, Discussion Groups, Internet Phone capabilities, Video conferencing, News Groups, Interactive Multimedia, Games and so much more.