Internet is certainly one of the most frequently used words today. Most of the educated people have heard about it, and a substantial number of them have used it at some point of time. The Internet, also called the Net at times, and erroneously the Web, is a huge network of computers. Internet is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web (WWW). It was not invented in a day, but grew and evolved over years and decades, adding features and parts to it and touching more and more lives.

We can trace internet’s origin to the ARPANet, and the NSFNet, two scientific and academic networks that were partly inspired by the Cold War rivalry with USSR. The two most significant contributions to its development were the development of the TCP/IP protocol, and the HTML/Web project (of CERN, Switzerland) that allowed documents to be hyperlinked and viewed over a public network. One reason for the phenomenal growth of the Internet is its decentralized nature allowing all operators and contributors to add their parts. Its lack of a standard allowed the attachment of many other protocols, like IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, PPP, SLIP, ICMP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, Telnet, FTP, LDAP, SSL, and TLS. Some of the popular services on the Internet that make use of these protocols are e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, file sharing, Instant Messenger, the World Wide Web, Gopher, session access, WAIS, finger, IRC, MUDs, and MUSHs. Of these, e-mail and the World Wide Web are clearly the most used, and many other services are built upon them, such as mailing lists and blogs.

The Internet makes it possible to provide real-time services such as Internet radio and webcasts that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. With time, the Internet is becoming more prevalent as a way of communication, business, entertainment, information, artistic expression, revolt and much more. In this section we provide links to internet resources, ISPs, web-marketing companies, and other online products and services.

 Related Resources