The Internet is something evil that keeps growing larger and larger like the blob did in the 1950’s movie. At least this appears true if you’ve watched any TV news programs lately. Since the job of the TV newscaster is to encourage viewers to watch the rather long commercials between the small spots of news, the full story about the Internet is never shown.
The Internet exists primarily to allow one computer network to connect to another. It has a hardware component that provides a physical connection from one network to another, and it has a software component that ensures that what one computer sends to another is understood by both. While a discussion of the hardware involved in networking can be very interesting, the software component is much more important to the Visual Basic programmer.
The origins of the Internet date back to the late 1960s, when the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (known as ARPA) began funding research projects into computer networks. For the most part, the work was done in a university setting, with some research being done by private research corporations.
In December 1969, four computers were connected together in what was known as the ARPANET. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, ARPA (then known as DARPA) encouraged universities and other organizations working on its project to connect to the ARPANET. In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created its own independent network known as NSFNET. The term Internet came to be when these two networks were connected.
It’s important to understand that because most of the work was done by universities, many of their personal philosophies became incorporated into the design of the Internet. One of the most important things is that nothing is fixed in place. Anything and everything is open to discussion and change, which means that no one person or organization is really in charge of the Internet.