The Internet story

In the 1950s, the USA expected to be first into space. To their surprise, on October  4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the man's first artificial satellite: the Sputnik I, soon followed by another satellite carrying a dog: Laika. The nation's image as a technology super power was badly shaken. In hopes of producing graduates who could out-think the Soviets, high schools and colleges boosted their maths and science requirements. The US Defense Department created yet another O.R. (Operations Research) group, the Advanced Reserch Projects Agency (ARPA) and changed it with the task of developing projects on command, control and communication, known as C3. The Defense Department wanted to use computers not only in the Pentagon, but also in the battle fields. Bulky mainframes of the era were ill-suited for the battlefield, so ARPA sought a communications solution.

The war-planning needs of the military and the research interests of computer scientists began to converge. The Pentagon asked Rand Corporation, a major Air Force supplier to analyze how the military could communicate (by voice telephone as well as data "hookups") after a nuclear war. Rand's solution, developed by Paul Baran, was the creation of a "Survivable" telephone grid based on "packet switching".

As part of its research support, ARPA agreed to fund an experimental computer network, to demonstrate the feasibility of remote computing from the battlefields and test the potential of a post World War III military communications network. In 1968, ARPAnet was born, linking four "sites" already conducting ARPA research: the University of California campuses at Los Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Stanford, California, and the University of Utah (Salt Lake City).

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson of Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN), a research firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts with close ties to prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is credited with inventing the software and sending the first e-mail messages across ARPAnet. At first, scientists used e-mail to collaborate on research projects. There were also rules to obey. ARPA limited use of the network to official business. In 1973 transmission "protocols" were developed to enable different types of computers to exchange packets. The result was TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) converted messages into packet streams and reassembled them - Internet Protocol (IP) transported the packets across different nodes, even different types of networks.

Soon, however, a graduate-student "hacker" attitude took over. Mailing.list software permitted large groups of people to discuss common interests, making e-mail a mass medium. The first list, sf-lovers, linked science fiction fans. Then followed network-hacksters, wine-tasters, and scores of other mailing lists.

By the lid1980s, TCP/IP was linking ARPAnet to other networks belonging to both federal agencies and universities. The result was first called ARPA-Internet and then simply The Internet.

How the Internet works

It is not very easy, if not impossible, to access the Internet directly from our PC without connecting to a dedicated service provider and his host computer. With the help of research engines such as Netscape's Yahoo! and Excite, or Digital's Alta Vista, we can stat "surfing" the World Wide Web (WWW) in search of specific information items.

The engines periodically launch special programs called Web crawlers, wich collect and classify information from all reachable sites. These data are then recorded onto the engine's database with an address, called URL (Uniform Resource Locator). We will use a browser (surfing program) to access the database to obtain a list of Web resources (URLs), which can be activated to reach the sites identified by the search.

The Internet is by far the world's largest library and still growing, as more and more sites are established. Practically everything can be found on the WWW and selection procedures are needed to avoid being flooded with "junk"

Security is another big issue. The Internet is insecure, since it is not centrally managed, and open to use by anyone - including crooks, eavesdroppers and impostors. Various technologies can make it safer for business, but only if consumers and merchants both do their part.

Electronic commerce and the Internet

Electronic commerce on the Internet involves two primary application areas. In one model, Internet-based companies sell their products in high volume to million of consumers. In the other, traditional companies carry out daily business - buying and selling over the Internet with various trading partners. Uniform software applications have been developed to allow companies to engage in real-time transactions which translate into increases in efficiency and thus cost-savings. Companies can make centralized information available in an inter-tralised format to selected individuals within and outside the company.

Currently, major manufacturers and retailers use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), to exchange voluminous files concerning price, supply and orders via Intranets. The Internet lends itself to an interactive approach: you can configure an order - price and volume availability, promised delivery date, etc. Companies that do not want to build and manage a commercial outfit to the Internet can use merchant "hosts" to execute the transaction processing on the Web. These hosts have the same functions of the  Internet service providers we are connected to when we use the Internet.