Tuesday, September 08, 2009
40 Years Young
There now are 226 million Web sites registered for use.
This article states:
The Internet itself is a mind-boggling complex overlay of technologies that spans every level from steering photos down a glass fiber to showing where your friends are on a dynamically generated map. But the first half of its 40 years were spent largely in obscurity. Its early years involved just a relative handful of computers sending data to one another over increasingly large distances. The 1970s brought a key innovation, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that governs how data is broken down into packets, routed across numerous networking devices, and reassembled into their original form at the other end of the pipe. In the 1980s, e-mail started blossoming in earnest as a killer application for the Internet, and the World Wide Web arrived in the 1990s. These innovations vaulted the Internet from academia into the mainstream. Exploding popularity led to companies that sold Internet access, equipment, and services--and the first dot-com bubble. The bursting of that bubble was cataclysmic in the industry, but it was a mere blip in the Internet's history. According to Netcraft, there were 226 million Web sites in August, nearly 10 times the number around when the bubble burst. Google filled the void left by the collapsed start-ups with a powerfully profitable business making sense of the Internet's information chaos.
This article includes a lot of different information about the internet; from the internet acting as a global community to the technological aspects of it, and even includes "the dark side" otherwise known to us regular users of the internet as unsafe areas and unsecure websites. It was actually a very informing read on both the history of the internet and computers and covered interesting topics on the present internet and the way everything works.
What is the key point here? The "exploding popularity"?
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