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The Internet

The Internet

• The Internet is a large "network of networks"

Internet - History

• ARPANET - first network developed
  • Aim- exchange information

  • Led to TCP/IP network protocol being developed

• Janet - UK academic network
  • Started Sep. 1980 by JNT (Joint Network Team)

  • JANET was formed by expanding and enhancing the existing wide-area network

  • Maintained compatibility with public networks and restricted access to the academic community

  • Provision of LANs that were compatible with JANET and would form part of the overall network infrastructure was an important part of the networking programme

• At its inception JANET provided access at 9.6 kbit/s and served about 50 sites.

• 1987 JNT improved transatlantic networking by installing a 64 kbit/s link to NSFnet

• 1989 JNT proposed Super JANET

• Traffic growth of has been phenomenal particularly over the last five years
  • growing by 10% a month

  • 35% file exchange

  • 15% email and news

  • 6% interactive traffic

  • 6% WWW

• Host growth of the Internet has also been huge, particularly in education

• The main "product" that the Internet gives you access to is information.

• Now that commercial organizations are connecting to the Internet, the number of services available are exploding.

• The only drawbacks to communication over the Internet are the lack of security and speed

Names & Numbers

• All Internet sites are identified by a unique name, eg.

• The somewhere.domain is called the domain name and identifies the name of a system or location

• Every single machine on the Internet has a unique number or IP Address.

• Most commonly represented as four numbers joined by ".", eg. 143.117.78.2

• A name server takes the name and converts it to an IP address