internet
5 definitions found
internet - Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :
internet \in"ter*net\ ([i^]n"t[~e]r*n[e^]t), n.
A large network[3] of numerous computers connected through a
number of major nodes of high-speed computers having
high-speed communications channels between the major nodes,
and numerous minor nodes allowing electronic communication
among millions of computers around the world; -- usually
referred to as the internet. It is the basis for the
World-Wide Web.
[PJC]
internet - WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) :
internet
n 1: a computer network consisting of a worldwide network of
computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to
facilitate data transmission and exchange [syn: internet,
net, cyberspace]
internet - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :
Internet
<networking> (Note: capital "I"). The Internet is the largest
internet (with a small "i") in the world. It is a three
level hierarchy composed of backbone networks, mid-level networks
, and stub networks. These include commercial
(.com or .co), university (.ac or .edu) and other research
networks (.org, .net) and military (.mil) networks and span
many different physical networks around the world with various
protocols, chiefly the Internet Protocol.
Until the advent of the World-Wide Web in 1990, the Internet
was almost entirely unknown outside universities and corporate
research departments and was accessed mostly via command line
interfaces such as telnet and FTP. Since then it
has grown to become an almost-ubiquitous aspect of modern
information systems, becoming highly commercial and a widely
accepted medium for all sort of customer relations such as
advertising, brand building, and online sales and services.
Its original spirit of cooperation and freedom have, to a
great extent, survived this explosive transformation with the
result that the vast majority of information available on the
Internet is free of charge.
While the web (primarily in the form of HTML and HTTP) is
the best known aspect of the Internet, there are many other
protocols in use, supporting applications such as
electronic mail, Usenet, chat, remote login, and file transfer
.
There were 20,242 unique commercial domains registered with
InterNIC in September 1994, 10% more than in August 1994.
In 1996 there were over 100 Internet access providers in the
US and a few in the UK (e.g. the BBC Networking Club,
Demon, PIPEX).
There are several bodies associated with the running of the
Internet, including the Internet Architecture Board, the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the Internet Engineering and Planning Group
, Internet Engineering Steering Group
, and the Internet Society.
See also NYsernet, EUNet.
The Internet Index (http://openmarket.com/intindex) -
statistics about the Internet.
(2000-02-21)
internet
<networking> (Note: not capitalised) Any set of networks
interconnected with routers. The Internet is the biggest
example of an internet.
(1996-09-17)
internet - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :
Internet
n.
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the
ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has
been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network
architecture for military command-and-control that could survive
disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact,
ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical
use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who
was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some pains to debunk
the
"survive-a-nuclear-war" myth, but it seems unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to
support
what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of
distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail
quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs
and
defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a
medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily
increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics,
techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this
lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and
PDP-20s, running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXen
and
Suns running Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
microcomputers.
The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move
from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name
Service in 1983. It was around this time that people began referring
to the collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core
as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines --
connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research
project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join
didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation
built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing
centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the
original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990).
Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major
telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone
completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered
the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated
one
-- rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and
multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet
has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack
favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of
absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during
the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had
become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a
globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying
communications technology of the next century. See also the network
.
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