What Is the Internet, and How Did It Start?

What Is the Internet?

The simplest way to explain the internet is to call it a “network of networks”. It is, so to speak, computer networks all over the world connected into a single thing. Not one big computer, but a great many computer networks tied to each other.

When you connect from home to your internet service provider, what you are really doing is putting your computer on a network. If you are on a campus, you connect through your school’s network, and that network in turn reaches the wider internet through the research networks that link educational institutions and libraries together. The “backbone” of all those connections, the thing you may hear called the “information superhighway”, is the internet.

How the Internet Was Born

The internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. In the sixties computers were large and immobile, and to make use of anything stored on one you either had to travel to where the computer was or send magnetic computer tapes through the ordinary postal system.

The other catalyst behind the internet was the Cold War heating up. The Soviet Union launching Sputnik pushed the US Department of Defense to think about how information could still spread after a nuclear attack. That eventually led to ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network we know today as the internet. ARPANET was a great success, but membership was limited to certain academic and research institutions holding contracts with the Department of Defense. In response, other networks were built so that information could be shared more widely.

January 1, 1983 is taken as the internet’s official birthday. Before that, the various computer networks had no standard way of talking to each other. A new communication protocol was created, Transfer Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). It let different kinds of computer on different networks “talk” to one another. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network formally moved to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, and with that the internet was born. Now every network could connect through one universal language.

The picture above is a scale model of the UNIVAC I (the name stood for Universal Automatic Computer), delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. Weighing around 16,000 pounds, this computer used 5,000 vacuum tubes and could carry out roughly 1,000 calculations a second. Besides being the first American commercial computer, it was the first designed for business use. (Business computers such as the UNIVAC processed data more slowly than the IAS type machines, but they were built for fast input and output.) The first few sales went to government agencies, to the A.C. Nielsen Company and to the Prudential Insurance Company. The first UNIVAC for business applications was installed in 1954 to run payroll at the General Electric Appliance Division. By 1957 Remington-Rand, which had bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950, had sold forty six machines.

There Is More to the Internet Than the World Wide Web

When we think about the internet, usually only the World Wide Web comes to mind. The web is one of several ways of getting information off the internet. These different kinds of internet connection are known as protocols. You could use a separate software application to reach the internet through each of them, though you probably will not need to. Most web browsers let users reach files through most of the protocols. Below are three categories of internet service and examples of the kinds of service in each.

File Retrieval Protocols

This kind of service was one of the oldest ways of getting information from computers connected to the internet. You could see the names of the files stored on the serving computer, but you had no graphics of any kind, and sometimes no description of what a file contained. You needed to know in advance which files held the information you were after.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

This is one of the first internet services ever built, and it lets users move files from one computer to another. Using an FTP program, a user can log in to a remote computer, browse its files and download or upload them (if the remote computer allows it). These can be files of any type, but the user is only allowed to see the file name; there is no description of the contents. You may run into FTP if you try to download any software application from the World Wide Web. Many sites offering downloadable applications use the FTP protocol.

Gopher

Gopher offers downloadable files with some description of the contents, which makes finding the file you need easier. The files are arranged hierarchically on the remote computer, in the same way the files on your own hard drive are. The protocol is no longer in wide use, though you can still find a few gopher sites running.

Telnet

Using the Telnet protocol you can connect to a program on a remote computer and use it. Usually you telnet into a particular application sitting on a serving computer, and it lets you use that application as though it were on your own machine. Again, using this protocol takes dedicated software.

Communication Protocols

email, newsgroups and chat

These are messaging protocols that let users communicate both asynchronously (sender and receiver do not both have to be online at the same time, as with email) and synchronously (as in “real time” chat).

Email Groups

This method of internet communication has become the standard. A host computer acts as a “post office”, sending and receiving mail for the people who hold accounts on it. That mail can be picked up through any number of email applications (MS Outlook, Eudora and so on) or through web based email accounts (Yahoo, Hotmail). Email is an example of asynchronous internet communication.

Email also gives you access to mailing lists. You can subscribe to a list covering any number of subjects or interests, and you receive the messages other subscribers send. Email communities grow out of the interaction between subscribers who share an interest, or an obsession.

Usenet

Usenet is something like a bulletin board or a mailing list without the subscription. Anybody can post a message to a Usenet newsgroup or browse through one. Usenet messages are held on the serving computer only for a set period and then deleted automatically, whereas mailing list messages stay on the serving computer until the account holder downloads them. Many email applications and web browsers let you set up Usenet newsgroup accounts.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

This protocol allows synchronous communication: users on different computers anywhere in the world can talk in “real time”. You can see the answers several people give to a message you typed the moment they give them. The protocol takes a dedicated software application, usually free to download from the web.

The Multimedia Information Protocol

Hypertext transfer protocol, otherwise known as “the web”

The World Wide Web is the new kid on the block, developed at the end of the 1980s by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The public took to this internet protocol quickly and it became the most popular way of both providing and getting information on the internet. The web does not only give you access to files to download, it also offers a way of hopping from site to site through a series of hyperlinks.

The most distinctive thing about the web is the way text is formatted. A set of “tags” is used to encode and format text, graphics, animation, sound and other file types. Those tags are called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). The HTML files appear on your screen as the tags in the encoding determine. You can see the “source” HTML of any web page by choosing “View Source” from your browser’s menu bar.

Most browsers allow access through FTP, Gopher, telnet and email as well as through hypertext transfer protocol, though helper applications may need to be installed. These are programs that work alongside the browser and allow access to various protocols and file types.

Browsers and Navigation

The rise of the World Wide Web

A browser is the application you use to view files on the World Wide Web. There are text or terminal based browsers (Lynx, for instance) that let you see only the text of a file on the web. Most browsers today are graphical browsers, which can be used to display text, graphics and other multimedia information.

There are many kinds of web browser, but the most widely used are MS Internet Explorer and Netscape. Each claims to be better and faster than the other, though which one you use usually comes down to personal choice. Because some web pages are built for particular browsers, which browser you use can matter. Web pages can look different depending on which browser reaches them.

Browsers

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer held the lion’s share of browser use for a period, and that despite entering the game later than its main rival. Microsoft eventually retired it and Edge took its place.

Microsoft faced a great deal of criticism over Internet Explorer in later years for the claim that IE was an integral and necessary part of the Windows operating system. Competitors complained that Microsoft was trying to keep them out of the market by making IE the only web browser the Windows system could really use.

Netscape

Netscape was one of the first commercial browsers on the scene and it dominated the browser market until Microsoft got serious about Internet Explorer. Some internet users are fiercely loyal to Netscape, and there are sites on the web best viewed in it.

In either of these browsers, if you want to save a website you found useful and want to come back to, try the Favorites (MS Internet Explorer) or Bookmarks (Netscape) function on the menu bars at the top of the browser window.

Google Chrome

The most used browser in the world, released by the Google search engine, is Google Chrome.

Navigation

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

The Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, is the “address” of a computer connected to the internet. As you move around the web, you will notice an address or location box at the top of your browser. That is where the address of a single site is displayed. The address lets you find the site again if you forget to bookmark it. Type the URL into the address box, press Enter on your keyboard, and you go back to the site at that address.

The general form of a web address is this:

http://www.example.com/

The http in the address stands for “hypertext transfer protocol”, the protocol of the World Wide Web, and it tells your browser to look for a site on the web. A URL can also look like this:

ftp://12.456.789

or
example://example.com.

The first part of a URL, before the colon, tells the browser what kind of protocol to use. The colon and the two forward slashes are standard for every URL. Usually the letters WWW (World Wide Web) appear after the two slashes in many web addresses, though other letters are used too.

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After the first dot or dots in the URL comes the name of a particular computer, then another dot and what is known as the domain (.com, .edu, .gov and so on). The domain shows what kind of group or organization is using the address. Every university institution, for example, has a URL ending in the .edu domain.

Internet Search Services

Organizing the Web

You may want to look at our piece on the history of search engines and SEO as well. The work of becoming more visible in search engines is called search engine optimization.

The sheer amount of information on the internet can make your head spin. Some authorities estimate the number of documents on the internet at around 800 million. Others say the number cannot be known. Fortunately there are tools for sifting through that pile: search engines and search directories.

Search engines gather information from websites and then pour it, more or less, into a database. There is more information to pick from in a search engine, but getting at the relevant material is harder.

Search directories try to bring some order to what they collect, and you are more likely to find information relevant to your subject, though they do not offer the huge volume you would find in a search engine. The sites collected are looked at by people who decide which subject categories they fit into.

Search Engines

Search engines are really enormous databases storing information from internet documents. The information in those databases is gathered using a computer program (called a “spider” or a “robot”) that crawls the internet and collects information about individual documents. These programs run automatically to find documents, or the creator of a website asks them to visit the site so it can be included in a database.

When you search on a search engine, the order the results are listed in also varies between engines. Many search engines list results using a relevance ranking. Factors like these

how often your search terms appear on the web page;
where on the page they sit; and,
how many other web pages link to the page
...affect how high a page lands on the hit list. Many search engines allow websites to pay for their pages to be listed higher in the results.

There are hundreds of these search engines on the web, and each works in its own way to gather and arrange what it finds. Information from websites can be taken from every word on a site, from only the first few sentences in the body, or from just the title or the meta tags (hidden descriptions of a site’s content). Different search engines gather different information, which is why the same search gives you different results on different engines.

Search Directories

Directories are best used when you are after information that can be classified easily, something like “engineering faculties in Istanbul”. You can find what you need without typing a search at all, by browsing the directory: you start from a very broad subject category (Education) and work your way down until you reach the individual faculty listings. You can run an ordinary search too, but directories do not collect the variety of sites a search engine does, so you miss out on the wealth of information an engine can give you.

Meta Search Engines

This kind of search service offers a sort of “one stop shopping” on the internet. You build one search, and a meta search service sends it to several other search engines and directories at once, so you get the results from all of them in one place. The only problem is that you get only the first few results from each list. If the site you are after sits 10th on one service’s result list and the meta engine takes only the top 5 from that list, you will not find the site you needed. If all you are trying to do is get a general sense of what is out there on the web, a meta search engine is a good place to start.

General Facts About the Internet

“dot com”, “dot gov”: suffixes and country codes

Any information you use to support your ideas and arguments in a research paper should be examined carefully. Printed material collected in a library has been through an evaluation process, chosen by librarians for inclusion in the collection. Websites in search directories such as Yahoo! have been evaluated too, at least to the extent of being classified and placed into a categorization scheme. Sites gathered by the “spiders” or “robots” of a search engine, though, go through no evaluation at all.

To publish information on the web there is no real restriction and no editorial process, beyond some basic knowledge of building a web page and access to a hosting computer. Anybody can publish opinion, satire, a hoax or plainly false information. To be sure the websites you use as sources are acceptable for research, you have to ask questions about them. Below are some of the things to look at before you decide to use a website as a research source:

The Domain Suffix

The term “dot.com” has become a phrase you hear everywhere in English. “dot.com” really refers to a website’s domain. Sites on the web are grouped by their URL according to the kind of organization providing the information on the site. Any commercial body or company with a website, for instance, will carry the .com domain suffix, meaning it is a commercial operation.

The domain suffix gives you a clue about a website’s purpose or its audience. It can also hint at where a site comes from geographically. Many sites in Turkey carry the .tr suffix.

Below is a list of the most common domain suffixes and the kinds of organization that might use them.

.com

A commercial site. Information provided by commercial interests will usually cast the product it is promoting in a positive light. That does not make the information false, but you may be seeing only part of the picture. Remember, behind every commercial site giving you information there is a monetary incentive, whether that is good public relations or selling you a product directly.

.edu

An educational institution. Sites using this domain are schools of every kind, from kindergarten to higher education. If you look at your school’s URL you will notice it ends in the .edu domain. Information from sites in this domain should be examined very carefully. If it comes from a department or a research center inside an educational institution, it can usually be treated as reliable. Students’ personal websites, though, are usually not monitored by the school, even when they sit on the school’s server and use the .edu domain.

.gov

Government. If you come across a site with this domain, you are looking at a federal government site. Every branch of the United States federal government uses it. Information such as census statistics, sessions of Congress and Supreme Court decisions sits on sites with this domain. The information is taken to come from a reliable source.

.org

Traditionally a nonprofit organization. Bodies such as the American Red Cross or PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) use this suffix. Information on sites like these is usually reliable and impartial, though there are organizations that argue strongly for particular points of view over others, the National Right to Life Committee and Planned Parenthood among them. You probably want to look at this domain more closely these days. Commercial interests can be the ultimate sponsors of a site carrying this suffix.

.mil

Military. This domain suffix is used by the various branches of the United States Armed Forces.

.net

Network. You can find every kind of site under this suffix. It acts as a catch all for sites that do not fit any of the earlier domain suffixes. Information from these sites should be examined carefully.

Country domain suffixes
.au Australia
.br Brazil
.it Italy
.ca Canada
.mx Mexico
.fr France
.tr Turkey
.il Israel
.uk United Kingdom

Authority

Does the site you are evaluating name an author? If no responsible author is listed, is there any sign of sponsorship? When you are trying to judge how reliable information is in any medium, you want some idea of the author’s credentials. Are they experts on what they are writing about? What is their educational background? Remember, anybody can publish on the web. They do not have to know what they are talking about.

You also want to check whether there is a list of sources given for the information on a site, the way you would have to provide a bibliography for a paper you wrote.

How current it is

Information that has gone out of date can be wrong or incomplete. A well kept website will usually tell you at the bottom of the first screen when it was last updated, and perhaps even when it was first built and made available on the web.

Links

An informational website where all the hyperlinks are broken may not be a very reliable source. Broken links are not rare, given how constantly the web changes, but if a website carries a lot of them it can be a sign that the site is not maintained regularly.

URL

The site address can give you clues about who ultimately sponsors a site. If you cannot work out who wrote the site or who or what sponsors it, try shortening the URL back to its root address. That will tell you where the site is hosted. Take the page below, for example:

What is SEO?

Shorten the URL back to the root address, https://www.turksem.com, and you discover that this is a site providing SEO agency services.

Another clue about the kind of site you are looking at is whether there is a ~ (tilde) symbol in the URL. That symbol usually means the site is a personal web page and the information needs examining carefully.

Comparison

Always compare what you find on a website with other sources of information. Usually you would not want to use websites alone as support for a research paper, so you would look at other kinds of source too, books, journal articles and so on. How does information found in various formats compare?

Sources

https://groups.google.com/?pli=1
https://www.aol.com/
http://www.internetarsivi.metu.edu/tarihce.php
https://www.academia.edu/43323311/INTERNET
http://www.internetarsivi.metu.edu/10yil.php
https://internet2.edu/