Easy Guide to the Internet/What's All the Fuss?

In this information age, you must have heard of Internet or its synonyms like Net, Web or Information Highway. However, you may or may not be familiar with the full potential of this tool. Even though the Internet has been around since the 1960s, it is only in the last two decades that it has become a household word. As with many other inventions, the origin can be traced to army use. The US military created it as a means of sharing information between a number of interconnected computers over a distance. The design then was rather primitive. The Internet in its modern form with various protocols like Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) came into being only in the early eighties. The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1989, has allowed the internet to be used in applications other than for sharing information. These include emails, phone, video messaging, instant messaging etc. The list is an ever expanding one, the only limit being human ingenuity.

Internet Usage
The evolution of web communities has been drastic over the decades, ranging from scientists to heavy electronic game players. The Internet once was the ARPANET, created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a result of the USSR's launch of the space satellite of Sputnik. ARPA gave the ARPANET contract to BBN Technologies, and the physical network was built in 1969, linking four nodes: the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. In 1972, ARPA renamed "DARPA", or The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The first e-mail program was also developed in the same year. Through the decades, the ARPANET became the DARPANET,

As of December, 2009, the total global internet audience has exceeded one billion visitors (excluding people age 14 and younger). Worldwide, there were 1,007,730 unique visitors .

Asia seems to be biggest user of the Internet, accounting for 42.2% of Internet users worldwide. China almost accounts for half of the Internet users in Asia . Europe comes in at the second biggest body of Internet users, accounting for 24.1% of all Internet users, North America at 15.1% of all Internet users, Latin America and the Caribbean at 10.5% of all Internet users, and finally, the rest 8% Internet users is from Africa, the Middle East, Oceania and Australia .