Informative Essay Fairbanks

The Internet

Did you know the internet was funded by the military and it's original purpose was to send data and messages to other bases? The ARPAnet as it was called was a program that allowed it's users to share files and later send messages. Later, college researchers got interested in the ARPAnet because it made it easier to share their findings with other universities. Only government and university computers had been hooked up to the internet. Due to this, the public didn't even know the ARPAnet existed.

In the 1970s, Ray Tomlinson wrote two programs that allowed the users of ARPAnet to exchange messages with one another. This then became the most popular program of the ARPAnet because that was what it was partially meant for. Tim Berners-Lee also added pictures to be stored as a file on the ARPAnet. He then later planned on adding audio and video. The audio and video feature was added in with the web.

On the ARPAnet, it was hard finding the information you needed unless you knew the name of the file or the host computer. This led to many companies making a "searching tool" one of these tools was called the gopher system, which was developed by the University of Minnesota. These "searching tools" was like their google, you could just look up the file you needed. This difficulty of finding files led to the thought of the web. There thought was a huge bank full of files and information that you could search and grab. Tim Berners-Lee and a group called CERN developed a hypertext system that linked files on computers all over the world. The web was distributed by CERN in 1991, This made it super easy to find the file you needed.

In 1970, the market came out with the micro-computer which was named the personal computer. This is where we get the name PC from. These PCs were way more affordable and more easier to get your hands on. In 1975, a build it yourself computer, called the Altair 8800, came out along with the Apple II and the Windows operating system in the mid 1980s. these releases gave the internet a bit more users. By 1985, only 2000 people had internet access. Two years later the internet had grown to 30,000 people. Then by the middle of 1989 there was a total of 159,000 people with access to the internet (Abbate 186).

In conclusion, the internet was only meant for file transfer with words until Tim-Berners Lee added the pictures and video. The creation of the world wide web was actually just to make it easier to find certain files people were looking for. There weren't millions of people using the internet back then and computers were just starting to get somewhat popular and is estimated that 3,079,339,857 people use the internet today ("Internet World Stats").

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Works Cited
Abbate, Janet. Inventing The Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999. Web. 7 July 2015.
"Internet World Stats: Usage and Population statistics." Internet World Stats. 31 December 2014. Web. 8 July 2015.
Moschovitis, Christos J. P. History of the Internet : a chronology, 1843 to the present. Santa Barbara, Cali: ABC-CLIO, 1999. Print.

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