Monday, September 8, 2008

ESSAY 1: HOW THE INTERNET WORKS

Innovations can be big and they can be small. Oddly enough when it comes to innovations that led to the Internet there is nothing little, considering every little insignificant thing that occurs around the Internet has a huge impact on it overall. The Internet although young has had countless innovations involving its overall speed, the language it speaks, its structure, and connecting human beings and allowing them to communicate with one another with ease.

Americans live in a fast pace world, to get where they are going and to do it in the shortest amount of time. So in hindsight it is no secret that speed is quite high on our list as Americans, especially when it comes to the Internet. When most Americans want to find out where the largest salt mine in the United States is located, they head online and in a flash they have the answer they were seeking all because of speed. The dial up modems of yesteryear are all but gone from the memories of the American population, because they have all moved onto faster broadband. Whether it is a DSL, cable, or T1/3 connection without these improvements on both the user end and the Internet side (Adams and Clark, 2001), most of the content that we find on the Internet would just not be viable let alone enjoyable. Honestly, who would have waited in the early days of the Internet and downloaded a movie, only to have it completed in two to three days? Hopefully, the answer is no one because without speed the Internet in today’s day and age, would just not be viable.

Ultimately, the speed of ones connection to the Internet does not mean anything if the language of ones computer differs from that of a friend’s computer. With the change from NCP to the newer, stable language of TCP/IP. In its simplest form a common standard and protocol or set computer language called National Control Protocol, or better-known NCP governed the early form of the Internet (“Congressional Digest,” 2007). However, some of those on the network were not able to truly communicate with one another until a new standard was put into place, called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, TCP/IP (Adams and Clark 2001). Without this language to govern the network a personal computer might not be able to communicate with any Apple computers out there on the web, let alone any Linux computers. Try imagining being a student with a major in video editing. As a student, one would of course need an Apple computer of some kind. Yet anytime one wished to go online the results that one acquired were half of that if one had been using a run of the mill personal computer. If anything by instating a new language that eventually everyone adopted, not only simplified the Internet, but increased productivity.

For a second imagine a student enrolled in college and is given an IP, Internet Protocol, address of a page on the Internet to further explore on their own time. But wait a second, imputing long digits into the address field of an Internet browser is not the Internet that we have come to love, or is it? Instead of typing out long IP address in this day and age we have been able to type in the URL, Uniform Resource Locator, or www.albany.edu instead of typing in its IP address, 169.226.1.110. As students, we have all come to love the inclusion of domain names and URLs, notable example albany.edu. Coming about to better classify information, it has made determining websites content even easier before one have reached the page (Adams and Clark, 2001). Looking at the Albany address again one can see edu, which stands for education. Upon visiting the page, as a student, one would assume the page has to do with something educational, due to the fact that it has been assigned an educational domain name. There are countless other domain names as well, some include .com, .net, .org, all of which are designated for certain groups that wish to create their page on the Internet. Although, as time has shown us the registering of domains has become easier. Particularly in 2008 the organization that overseas domains the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN for short announced that they would be relaxing their rules concerning domain name creation (Marguerite Reardon, 2008). All this means is that the general public is now going to be able to register domains that make their lives even easier, or complicated considering the ruling was just passed this June, we as a people will just have to wait and see if www.news.cnn works out for the better, or worse. But one thing is certain with the inclusion of domain names as they stand now, they have definitely made the Internet into what we know it as today.

Yet, the biggest innovation that led to the Internet, as we know it today would have to have come from humans being well, humans and their appetite for communicating with one another. What better way to communicate with individuals over vast distances than e-mail, which was created by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 (Adams and Clark, 2001). Essentially e-mail is taking the simplest form of communication, writing on a piece of paper and mailing it to a designated location, and digitizing it for the twenty-first century. Ironically enough, by simply transferring e-mail across the network, ARPANET, in effect created the Internet that we very well know today. With the use of so much bandwidth being put aside for this form of communication, the military dropped out in effect turning over the reigns to the people (Adams and Clark, 2001).

In closing, whether it is from the speed of ones connection, the ability to download files from a computer different from ones own, researching information on Wikipedia or just the simple yearning to talk to a friend the Internet has helped move humanity into new territory whether it is for better or worse, we will have to see, but hopefully this marriage will only bring us together as a people after all the Internet has come to be through these certain innovations but at its current rate of change no one can be sure of anything will stay the same for long.

Works Cited
Anonymous. (2007, February). Internet History: From ARPANET to Broadband. Congressional Digest, 86(2), 35-64.
Reardon, M. (2008, June 26). ICANN adopts new Web site naming rules. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com
Adam and Clark (2001). Welcome to the Future of Global Communication.

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