HISTORY AND FUTURE

The Internet technology was created by Vinton Cerf in early 1973 as part of a project headed by Robert Kahn and conducted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the United States Department of Defense. Thereafter, Cerf led many efforts to build, scale, and standardize the Internet. In 1984 the technology and the network were turned over to the private sector and to government scientific agencies for further development. The growth has continued exponentially. Service-provider companies that make “gateways” to the Internet available to home and business users enter the market in ever-increasing numbers. By early 2000, access was available in over 200 countries and encompassed around 100 million users. The Internet and its technology continue to have a profound effect in promoting the sharing of information, making possible rapid transactions among businesses, and supporting global collaboration among individuals and organizations. In 1999, 205 countries and territories in the world had at least one connection to the Internet. The development of the World Wide Web is fuelling the rapid introduction of new business tools and activities that may by then have led to annual business transactions on the Internet worth hundreds of billions of pounds. The potential of web-based commerce is immense. Techniques that allow safe transactions over the Net (for payment and funds transfers), the construction of faster, more secure networks and the development of efficient search techniques make the Internet an ideal trading medium.
Future concerns are focused in a number of areas, including the efficiency of search engines—even the most efficient of them cover less than a sixth of all publicly available pages—as well as privacy, security, and Internet piracy. By its very nature, the Internet does not cope well with traffic that requires a dedicated link between two points (such as voice) as end-to-end delay cannot readily be controlled. Several protocols that allow greater predictability are being developed to guarantee an assured quality of service. The ability to integrate applications is of increasing importance. Common data formats allow e-business applications to cooperate and services such as Internet phones that are easy to install are being refined and deployed.
In addition to these extra features, the core of the Internet—the network hardware that connects everyone together—is undergoing an overhaul that will enable it to cope with ever-increasing traffic loads. The “Internet 2” project has been under way for several years now and is building faster links and bigger switches that will power the Internet for years to come.