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Technology Infrastructure: The Internet and the World Wide Web

wrote a program that could send and receive messages over the network. This new
method of communicating became widely used very quickly. The number of network
users in the military and education research communities continued to grow. Many of 63
these new participants used the networking technology to transfer files and access
computers remotely.
The first e-mail mailing lists also appeared on these military and education research
networks. A mailing list is an e-mail address that forwards any message it receives to any
user who has subscribed to the list. In 1979, a group of students and programmers at
Duke University and the University of North Carolina started Usenet, an abbreviation for
User’s News Network. Usenet allows anyone who connects to the network to read and
post articles on a variety of subjects. Usenet survives on the Internet today, with more
than 1000 different topic areas that are called newsgroups.
Although the people using these networks were developing many creative
applications, use of the networks was limited to those members of the research and
academic communities who could access them. Between 1979 and 1989, these network
applications were improved and tested by an increasing number of users. The Defense
Department’s networking software became more widely used in academic and research
institutions as these organizations recognized the benefits of having a common
communications network. As the number of people in different organizations using these
networks increased, security concerns arose; these concerns continue to be problematic.
You will learn more about these network security issues in Chapter 10. The explosion of
personal computer use during the 1980s also helped more people become comfortable
with computers. During the 1980s, other independent networks (such as Bitnet) were
developed by academics worldwide and researchers in specific countries other than the
United States (such as the United Kingdom’s academic research network, Janet). In the
late 1980s, these independent academic and research networks from all over the world
merged into what we now call the Internet.

Commercial Use of the Internet
As personal computers became more powerful, affordable, and available during the 1980s,
companies increasingly used them to construct their own internal networks. Although
these networks included e-mail software that employees could use to send messages to
each other, businesses wanted their employees to be able to communicate with people
outside their corporate networks. The Defense Department network and most of the
academic networks that had teamed up with it were receiving funding from the National
Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF prohibited commercial network traffic on its networks,
so businesses turned to commercial e-mail service providers to handle their e-mail needs.
Larger firms built their own networks that used leased telephone lines to connect field
offices to corporate headquarters.
In 1989, the NSF permitted two commercial e-mail services, MCI Mail and
CompuServe, to establish limited connections to the Internet for the sole purpose of
exchanging e-mail transmissions with users of the Internet. These connections allowed
commercial enterprises to send e-mail directly to Internet addresses, and allowed
members of the research and education communities on the Internet to send e-mail
directly to MCI Mail and CompuServe addresses. The NSF justified this limited

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