HISTORY BOOKS WILL UNDOUBTEDLY SHOW THE INTERNET TO BE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT IN COMMUNICATION SINCE GUTENBERG DEVELOPED THE PRINTING PRESS IN 1450.

Abacus is often regarded as the first computer. It takes no electricity, doesn’t have to be booted up, requires no maintenance, and never crashes. Beads and rings are flipped back and forth to represent the placement of numbers in a sequence. The abacus dates back hundreds of years and is still the preferred calculator for a few people in some countries. Today’s electronic computers do the same thing – computer numbers, albeit a few billion times faster than an abacus.

All of today’s sophisticated software – word processors, games, editing systems, e-mail, and even the page you are viewing – can be reduced to a string of 0 and 1 number that a computer computes. Even CD music and DVD movies consist of nothing more than combinations of these two numbers that are computed and then presented to our eyes and ears.

Although it has been assumed that the Internet was invented in the United States, there is evidence that the concept actually originated in Geneva, Switzerland. Even before US scientists started using the technology in the United States, scientists in research laboratories in Geneva had linked computers in different departments together to share their findings with each other. Even so, it was scientists of the United States who subsequently developed and popularized the concept.

It is also widely assumed that the world’s first computer was the American ENIAC. Actually Alan Turing, a British Postal employee developed the first computer in England during World War II. Turing’s computer, the Colossus, contained 1,000 vacuum tubes and was a major (although until recently very secret) factor in the outcome of World War II. The Colossus was developed to decode critical German encrypted messages – messages that provided information so critical that some historians say that Turing’s computer shortened the war by at least two years. One historian feels that one million lives may have been saved as a result of this invention. Although Turing was by some accounts the most important hero of the war, when it was discovered that he was gay, he was so persecuted that he ended up taking his own life.

The first computers filled entire rooms and required thousands of vacuum tubes. When the transistor was invented, the size of computers suddenly shrunk to a fraction of their original size – and this development set the stage for personal computers. The personal computer was introduced in 1975. It was the Altair, the device that Bill Gates of Microsoft, now reputed to be the world’s richest man, took an immediate interest in. and the rest, as they say, is history. The Internet and the World Wide Web are based on computers, of course. And, love them or hate them, some very basic things are important to understand. But don’t worry, we’re not going into a long, technical explanation on how computers work – just what’s necessary to understand and effectively get around the Internet.

Although the terms Internet and the World Wide Web are commonly used interchangeably, the World Wide Web is actually only a part of the Internet. The latter includes Telnet, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and other communication languages and approaches. However, when most people speak of the Internet today they are just focusing on the World Wide Web – the part of the Internet that displays web pages.

Today there are two major computer platforms: Windows (Microsoft) and Mac (Apple Computer). Linux, an operating system that is gaining popularity because of cost and security, runs on most machines. However, the downside is that there is scarcity of programs designed for Linux and it is not considered as user-friendly as the Windows or Mac operating systems (OS). The various Windows operating systems – primarily Windows, Windows Xp and Windows Vista – run on well over 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers. However, when it comes to workstations used in professional agencies, the race is much closer.

• 1973 – 1983 – The Internet – A network made up of smaller networks linked together. Data is transmitted in packets of information that are sent using TCP/IP. The packets can take different routes getting to their destination.

• 1992 – Mbone – Multicast Backbone – A networked system with a major increase in bandwidth that allows things such as movies to be sent in real time. Unlike the Internet where data is sent to a single recipient, MBone allows numerous people to receive the transmission at the same time.

• 1996 – Internet 2 – A high-performance network linking more than 200 universities by fiber optic links. Using this system an entire movie can be transmitted in about 35 seconds.

• 1996 – The Grid – A supercomputer network linking a collection of public and private research centers.

• 2000 – Abone Active Network Backbone – A high-speed network stripped of nearly all file-handling intelligence. The data packets being sent incorporate their own software and delivery instructions.

• 2002 – PlanetLab – A much smarter technical approach to the Internet where the software can protect itself against worms and viruses, and reliever bottlenecks automatically.

Despite some increases in speed, and despite the many technological improvements, the basic Internet structure and protocol has remained about the same for decades. This is primarily because about 50% of the people are still using telephone lines to access the Internet – something, incidentally, that telephone circuits were never designed for. Almost half of the Internet users now have some form of high-speed access – DSL (Digital Subscribers Link), satellite-to-home, etc.