|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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. As of early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom 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. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also network, the and Internet address. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Internet address n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a sitename, and baz is a domain name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with bang path; see also network, the and network address. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also bang path, domainist. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includes bang path addresses and some internal corporate and government networks. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains: |
|
|
|
| | | | | |
|
|
|
|
U.S. government civilian sites |
|
|
|
| | |
|
|