How the Internet Sends Messages The purpose of the Internet is to send messages billions and billions of them Some are simple text messages Others are encyclopedic amounts of information on every topic imaginable Some are photographs videos or movies Others are maps blueprints financial information or military codes All of this information must be broken down into digital code codes composed of ones and zeroes This digital information travels from the building where it originates through a series of tubes buried along roads and railroad tracks across the bottom of the ocean and on to other buildings around the world Its travel is anything but random Each tiny packet of information is labeled with its own unique address and its destination's unique address The information is sent from a single router today's equivalent of an IMP to nearby routers which then transfer it to routers near them In this way the unique packet of information reaches around the world Billions of information packets zip past continually each one uniquely labeled to be decoded at its destination Physically the tubes contain fiber optic cables bundles of glass strands each as thin as a human hair These cables carry digital information in the form of light across very long distances Computers at the beginning and end of the data transmission have components called transducers which transform the data from digital data to light and back Fiber optic cables transmit information for the Internet telephone systems and cable television 12
again Information traveling these fiber optic cables eventually reaches more than 3 billion people or approximately 39 percent of the world's population HOW PEOPLE SEE THE INTERNET Kevin Kelly a Silicon Valley philosopher carried out an Internet Mapping Project in 2009 On his blog he asked people to draw maps showing how they envisioned the Internet Mara Vanina Osés a psychologist and media professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina analyzed more than 50 of the drawings and created a system to organize people's visions She found two major approaches Some saw the Internet as a chaotic spidery web reaching into infinity Others portrayed the Internet as a village No one included the machines that compose the Internet Instead they described it as a landscape of the mind Today's Internet represents an unsurpassed revolution in worldwide communication It encompasses most important functions of the telegraph telephone radio television and computer It allows us to broadcast worldwide disseminate all forms of information and connect and collaborate almost instantly with anyone the world over Many individuals have made Long thin fiber optic cables major contributions to Internet snake up to 15 000 miles development But more important 24 100 km along the bottom the Internet came about and of the ocean carrying Internet information in the continues to evolve because form of light from continent of collaboration to continent
TIMELINE THE INTERNET 1969 1973 1983 On October 29 Dr Leonard Kleinrock oversees the sending of the first Internet message between the first two computers The term Internet is born Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ARPANET goes global Finalized versions of two basic protocol programs TCP and IP are introduced for ARPANET The domain name system DNS a site naming system is established Domain names include edu gov com mil org net and int The National Science Foundation Network NSFNET connects ARPANET to academic users from research and educational institutions 1993 1995 1990 1998 Tim Berners Lee develops hypertext markup language HTML The White House and the United Nations go online NSFNET grows from 2 000 users in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993 1991 The World Wide Web WWW goes public The Internet transitions from military and educational use to commercial use The Google search engine is launched 2015 2004 Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerberg goes online the Mozilla Firefox browser is launched An online protest in January is mounted to stop two bills in Congress the Stop Online Piracy Act SOPA and the PROTECTIP Act PIPA 2001 2005 The Federal Communications Commission FCC passes new net neutrality laws Wikipedia goes online YouTube is launched 15
