Impact of Internet

One cannot accurately fathom the effect Internet has made on the world. Let alone me trying to achieve this in just one chapter. Internet is among the most important inventions of the century. No other technology has impacted humans globally like Internet has. Internet has changed our lived within 3 decades of its existence. Initially people thought that the Internet would be a small and limited project and would not last long. But now there billons of people who use Internet on daily basis. There are millions of new people each year who gain access to the Internet. It is an undeniable fact that both computers and the Internet have become one of the most important achievements of modern society. This brought its own revolution in human daily life (science, education, information, entertainment etc.) eliminating the distances and offering immediate and easily access to information and communication.

in August 1962, an American psychologist and computer scientist Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known simply as J. C. R. proposed a new but monumental idea; computers that could talk to one another. A simple idea; but one whose implications resulted in a world changing Network. The first message sent over the Internet which at this time was called the ARPANET was sent from UCLA to Stanford in 1969. Their goal was just to try and find a way to make computing power more efficient. During this time computers were basically huge machines called Mainframes that sat in rooms of buildings doing nothing but handling one task at a time. The ARPANET planned to connect these mainframes to create multiple streams of processing power to improve research. The idea of the Internet at this point was for science. The first message sent was login and it failed. The computer at Stanford only received the L in the O before the system crashed. But it worked and it changed everything. The shift from newspapers to radio was barely anything when compared from the transition from radio to television. People could see and hear people from parts of the world that they had never seen before. Almost immediately the world became connected in a way that was never before imagined. TV changed the way people and our families were entertained.

However the Internet as we know it change the world in ways that make the past 2,000 years of work and technological advancement look like baby steps. A hundred year ago the fastest way to send of mail from one side of the country to the other was by horse riders. He could deliver a letter from Kashmir to Kayakumari over 2,800 kilometers away in only 10 days. Today however user could do that in literally a second. This did not happen overnight.  In early 1970s there were huge computers in multiple places. However they really had no way to communicate with each other. Because they had different software’s, programs and so on. It made the communication almost impossible. Until TCP/IP came in and it changed everything. It’s the foundation of how every computer talks to one another today. TCP/IP allows data to be chopped up into what we call packets sent from one place to another and regardless of how it gets there. It’ll display the same information on the other side. Using TCP/IP computers could talk to one another. So this can be considered the beginning of the internet. Except it isn’t the same Internet as we know it today. In the 1970s most traffic across the internet was just email. Until Tim Berners-Lee came in 1990s. He saw a way of being able to store information and data on the Internet. At this time the internet was just full of basically documents full of text information. It was boring. But Tim Berners-Lee created something that allows for people anywhere sharing any and all information they had through separate pages and with a specific location to be found. Webs of information a user can reference, certain pages the chapters go back and forth. The year is 1991 and Tim Berners-Lee had just created what we know today as the World Wide Web. After that the connectivity begins to explode more and more, things are being connected to the Internet. With the continuous development of new technologies, the Internet users are able to communicate anywhere in the world to shop online, use it as an educational tool, work remotely and carry out financial transactions with various services offered by banks. Since its creation, the Internet has grown exponentially in terms of numbers of networks connected to it. By 1985, only 100 networks, both public domain and commercial were utilizing TCP/IP protocol suite. Within a couple of years in 1987 the number had grown to two hundred. In 1989, it exceeded five hundred and by the end of 1991, the Internet had grown to include some 5,000 networks in over 36 countries, serving over 700,000 host computers used by over 4,000,000 people. In a matter of very few years, the Internet consolidated itself as a very powerful platform that has changed forever the way we do business, and the way we communicate. Internet has affected everyone’s life, even of those who never used it at all.

Two things have immensely contributed to the growth of Internet. First being the invention and growth of Mobile Phone technology and introduction of Social networking. These two innovations have changed the way people use the Internet. With the help of Social networking services people have found a new way to communicate with each other. Since its creation in year 2004, Facebook has grown into a worldwide network of over 2,70,00,00,000 (2.7 Billion) active users as of August 2020. Mobile technology has made possible a much greater reach of the Internet, increasing the number of Internet users globally. The numbers are still growing day by day.  Almost every phone sold today has some sort of access to the Internet. Internet is making its way into every piece of technology that we use today. The things that used to be average items like Television, Fridge, and Wrist-watch are now being connected to the Internet.  From Smart TVs, Smart Cars, Smart watches, Smart washing machines are now replacing the old mechanical things. Refrigerators for some reason are able to connect to the Internet, so our washers and dryers and blenders.