Page 87 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 2

The part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, or, more simply, the Web,is
a subset of the computers on the Internet that are connected to one another in a specific
62 way that makes them and their contents easily accessible to each other. The most
important thing about the Web is that it includes an easy-to-use standard interface. This
interface makes it possible for people who are not computer experts to use the Web to
access a variety of Internet resources.

Origins of the Internet
In the early 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense became concerned about the possible
effects of nuclear attack on its computing facilities. The Defense Department realized that
the weapons of the future would require powerful computers for coordination and control.
The powerful computers of that time were all large mainframe computers.
The Defense Department began examining ways to connect these computers to each
other and also to connect them to weapons installations distributed all over the world.
Employing many of the best communications technology researchers, the Defense
Department funded research at leading universities and institutes. The goal of this
research was to design a worldwide network that could remain operational, even if parts
of the network were destroyed by enemy military action or sabotage. These researchers
determined that the best path to accomplishing their goals was to create networks that did
not require a central computer to control network operations.
The computer networks that existed at that time used leased telephone company
lines for their connections. These telephone company systems established a single
connection between sender and receiver for each telephone call, and then that connection
carried all data along a single path. When a company wanted to connect computers it
owned at two different locations, the company placed a telephone call to establish the
connection, and then connected one computer to each end of that single connection.
The Defense Department was concerned about the inherent risk of this single-channel
method for connecting computers, and its researchers developed a different method of sending
information through multiple channels. In this method, files and messages are broken into
packets that are labeled electronically with codes for their origins, sequences, and
destinations. You will learn more about how packet networks operate later in this chapter.
In 1969, Defense Department researchers in the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) used this direct connection network model to connect four computers—one each at
the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI International, the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah—into a network called the ARPANET. The
ARPANET was the earliest of the networks that eventually combined to become what we now
call the Internet. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many researchers in the academic
community connected to the ARPANET and contributed to the technological developments
that increased its speed and efficiency. At the same time, researchers at other universities
were creating their own networks using similar technologies.

New Uses for the Internet
Although the goals of the Defense Department network were to control weapons systems
and transfer research files, other uses for this vast network began to appear in the early
1970s. E-mail was born in 1972 when Ray Tomlinson, a researcher who used the network,

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