Essays

Before the Internet, there was  (the predecessor of today's Internet), created almost 25 years ago as an experimental network to support military research for the U.S. Defence Department. One of the primary design goals of  was to prove that distributed networking would protect the network from destruction by locating individual nodes as far apart from each other as possible.

 grew from there as marketing opportunities forced its developers to create Inter-net Protocol (IP) software for nearly every conceivable type of computer. It didn't matter what type of computer equipment the government and universities had (since they had no nationwide standard for purchasing computer equipment), because the IP software was designed to be practically universal.

In the early 80's, the National Science Foundation (NSF) stepped in and created five supercomputer centres and called it NSFNET. Now, anyone that could afford the cost of a leased-line connection could have packets routed to and from these supercomputers and other systems that were also connected to these centres. The popularity and utility of this concept almost immediately wiped out  with the load of data that was being transmitted. NSF then decided to build their own network based on ARPAnet's IP technology. This more advanced network was connected through 56kbps leased lines. In 1992 NSFNET's backbone was upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps) lines around the country - 10-BaseT ethernet operates at 10Mbps. The increased ease with which it was possible to transfer information, also soon completely overwhelmed even this larger network.

In 1987, a contract to manage and upgrade the network was awarded to Merit Network, Inc. in partnership with IBM

and MCI. The old network equipment was replaced with faster telephone lines and faster computers that still used nearly the same IP software to control it. This upgrade cycle will continue as long as Internet is useful. Also, because Internet is distributed, individual nodes can be upgraded without having any effect on the rest of the network, other than to speed it up. The Internet started like that and continued to get bigger and even today the net is getting bigger because of the fact that it is very useful. The Internet has many great uses but as anything else negative things can be done there as well. The beauty of the Internet is that it is so large that it's nearly impossible to keep track of what bad things everyone is doing. A few examples of this are: someone can steal a cell phone and then through using the internet to help them they can reprogram the telephone to work off someone's account and not be traced. Other examples are the sealing of software: someone can get a program that Microsoft sells for about one thousand dollars for free and it can't be traced.

There is also the fact that just about anything can be traded online like Drugs, Weapons like high power guns bombs etc. The list for these items goes on and on. One of the worst things that the police really want to get their hands on is Child Pornography. This was not so hard to keep track of when people had to go out and hand deliver this stuff but through the internet the scum who partake in this don't have to leave their homes. One of the biggest problems that we see with the Internet is the exploiting of the human form. A big problem is the fact that underage kids can see what they are not meant to. This does not just end up back at porn though, there are images of extreme violence on humans and animals. Someone from a site in another country can easily view something that is not allowed here.