Introduction to Internet | Internet Basics | Class 10 CBSE | Computer Application

Introduction

What is Internet?

It is a network of networks or rather, a collection of interconnected networks, publicly accessible from around the world.

Internet provides a lot of services like the World Wide Web (WWW), e-mail, online chat, search engines and much more. This chapter elaborates the concepts related to the Internet and WWW.

Internet and Its Components

Internet is a worldwide collection of publicly accessible interconnected computer network. It is actually a network of networks. It may consist of millions of smaller domestic business, academics, organisation and government networks. Each of these smaller networks might connect hundreds or thousands of computers. Information and services such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and most importantly the resources of the World Wide Web (www) are facilities provided by the Internet.

 These computers on dissimilar networks communicate on the Internet using a common language or set of rules called protocols The Internet follows the standard Internet Protocol (IP) to transmit and receive data. In the initial days of computers, there was no concept of networking at all. The computers were individual systems. Then came the concept of networking and a few computers were connected to each other.

The initial development of the Internet was started in 1969, by the US Department of Defence called Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. This agency created a reliable computer network for its military use called the ARPANET which laid the foundation for today's Internet. The computers were networked using cable lines and then slowly telephone lines were used for the purpose.

The first international packet switched network was created by the British Post Office, Western Union International and the United States Tymnet in 1978. Within a short span of three years, this network became so popular and grew at such a great speed that by 1981, countries like US, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong and Australia became a part of it. The rules for communication also changed to the popular TCP/IP.

Due to extensive public use, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANET was separated from the main network as the MILNET in 1983. The National Science Foundation created a separate network as NSFNet mainly for engineering and research and became popular by 1986. Slowly universities and other smaller networks joined in. By the early 1990's the internetworking of ARPANET, NSFNet and the smaller private networks saw the birth of the Internet. The great growth had started.

In 1991, HTML and HTTP were developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Web browsers like Netscape in 1993, made Internet popular. The launch of Personal Computers witnessed such a tremendous leap in the Internet users that there has been no looking back since then.

In the current scenario, you would have used computers at your home, Internet cafes or your school's computer laboratory. Both your school and the Internet cafe have their own network connected to the Internet. So you would just go there and start working. Those of you who have dial up connections at home will realize that you have to get connected through Internet Service provider (ISP) like BSNL or MTNL.