WEB

Introduction to the Web

Introduction to the Web

1. Evolution of the Internet during the Last Decade

The origins of the Internet date back nearly 40 years, with the U.S. military's funding of a research network dubbed Arpanet in 1969. Since then, the Internet has undergone more than just a name change. The number of computers connected to the Internet has grown exponentially, while the number of users has risen from a handful of computer scientists to 1.5 billion consumers. The network's reach has expanded beyond the United States to every corner of the globe. But its popularity has a dark side, as it has evolved from a friendly research network to a hotbed of criminal activity including fraud and identity theft.

The number of computers connected to the Internet has grown dramatically from the network's humble beginnings, when it connected four computers at university research labs. Today, the Internet links more than 440 million computers directly, and millions more have Internet access through private addressing schemes.

Internet usage has exploded since 1995, when researchers first started tracking this statistic. Although estimates vary from the Internet having 1 billion to 1.5 billion users, everyone agrees that the 'Net has room for growth as the worldwide population tops 6 billion. That leaves more than 4 billion people around the world without Internet access today.

In 1998 the Internet had about 50 million users, supported by approximately 25 million servers (Web and e-mail hosting sites, for example, but not desktops or laptops). In that same year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) [1] was created. Internet companies such as Netscape Communications, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon were already 3 to 4 years old and the Internet was in the middle of its so-called "dot-boom" period. Google emerged that year as a highly speculative effort to "organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful." Investment in anything related to the Internet was called "irrational exuberance" by the then head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan.

By April 2000, the Internet boom ended—at least in the United States—and a notable decline in investment in Internet application providers and infrastructure ensued. Domino effects resulted for router vendors, Internet service providers, and application providers. An underlying demand for Internet services remained, however, and it continued to grow, in part because of the growth in the number of Internet users worldwide.

During this same period, access to the Internet began to shift from dial-up speeds (on the order of kilobits to tens of kilobits per second) to broadband speeds (often measured in megabits per second). New access technologies such as digital subscriber loops and dedicated fiber raised consumer expectations of Internet capacity, in turn triggering much interest in streaming applications such as voice and video. In some locales, consumers could obtain gigabit access to the Internet (for example, in Japan and Stockholm). In addition, mobile access increased rapidly as mobile technology spread throughout the world, especially in regions where wireline telephony had been slow to ...