Internet n.
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969
as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed.
Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a
network architecture for military command-and-control that could
survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a
myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to
get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer
resources.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated
forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of
electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage.
Universities, research labs and defense contractors early
discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication
between humans and linked up in steadily increasing
numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies,
hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this
lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many
ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running
Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on
Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable,
most notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of
Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time that people
began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with
ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation
guidelines - connected institutions had to be involved with a
DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the
organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986,
the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to
its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the
backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes
(which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late
1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications
companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely
commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture
discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one -
rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and
multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the
Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI
protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in
the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary
networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking
after 1980. It is now (1996) a commonplace even in mainstream
media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become
the key unifying communications technology of the next century.
See also the network and
Internet address.
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Internet address n.
1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form
_foo@bar.baz_, where foo is a user name, bar is a sitename, and baz is a `domain' name,
possibly including periods itself. Contrast with bang path; see also the network and network address. All Internet
machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses,
thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also
bang path, domainist. 2. More loosely, any network
address reachable through Internet; this includes bang path addresses and some internal
corporate and government networks.
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are
the four most important top-level functional Internet domains
followed by a selection of geographical domains:
_com_
commercial organizations
_edu_
educational institutions
_gov_