Internet

The internet is a global and standardized system that connects millions of people and is used to transfer information, with an application built on top of it called the World Wide Web. There can be many networks within the internet, some for business, academic and government. All of these provide services to the public, most used being communications, entertainment and news, and become a massive storage of information placed in servers across the world.

History
The Internet was created in the United States in 1969 by the "United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency".

Scale
In fact, the size of the internet, according to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is 5 million terabytes, which is around 5,461,333,333 Gmail accounts, assuming each Gmail account is 7.5 gigabytes big, and Google, a web search engine, has only indexed around 170 terabytes of data (You'll learn more about web search engines and indexing later.) You can find almost anything on the internet.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
Today, we can easily access the web by paying a fee to a internet service provider (Hong Kong's main internet provider being PCCW).

Content
The Internet has evolved significantly since its introduction to the public in the 1990s. Once connected to the web, the user will have access to a wider variety of services, both paid and free. There is a large variety of resources and tools for people to utilize them. Here are just some of the major categories.

Search engine
A search engine

File downloading and sharing
Additionally, by using the internet, the user can also share files between their computers to other computers, files can be downloaded off the web to the user's computer and users can also upload files onto the web to download. Because of this function, information and files can be passed on from computer to the web and thus distributed to untold billions of computers in a short amount of time.

News and RSS Feeds
Version 1 of Google Reader screencast:http://www.screencast.com/t/4jQdejbnnL

Browsers

 * Main Article: Internet Browsers

Whilst anyone can access the internet, he or she needs to download a web browser to navigate though it.

Videos


History of the Internet