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Essay about Surfing The Internet

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Surfing The Internet

Chances are, anyone who is reading this paper has at one time, at least, surfed the net once. Don't worry if you haven't, I will explain everything you need to know about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Including how it started, it's growth, and the purpose it serves in today's society.

The Internet was born about 20 years ago, as a U.S. Defense Department network called the ARPnet. The ARPnetwork was an experimental network designed to support military research. It was research about how to build networks that could withstand partial outages (like bomb attacks) and still be able to function. From that point on, Internet developers were responding to the market pressures, and began building or developing …show more content…

The next thing is Universal Electronic Mail or E-mail. E-mail is the biggest and cheapest system on the Net and is also one of it's biggest attractions. Since all commercial on-line services have something called "gateways" for sending and receiving electronic mail messages on the Internet, you're able to send and receive messages or files to anyone else who is on-line, anywhere in the world and in seconds.

The third feature I mentioned was files and software. This in my opinion is the most impressive one. All the thousands of individual computer facilities connected to the Internet are also vast storage repositories for hundreds of thousands of software programs, information text files, video and sound clips, and other computer based resources. And their all accessible in minutes from any personal computer on-line to the Internet.

So I could do all this stuff on the Internet, why should I take notice?

Because of it's sheer size, volume of messages, and it's incredible monthly growth. From the latest statistics I was able to get, their are currently 30 million people who use the Internet worldwide. To try and put that number into perspective, that's over five times the size of CompuServe, America On-line,
Prodigy, and all other on-line commercial information services combined. Or if you're not familiar with those services, it's more than the combined populations of New York City, London, and

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