I've heard several people say that they are not sure what the Internet is. Don't feel bad, nobody completely understands it*, but here are a few of the essential facts.

Back in the Cold War days of the 1960s, the Pentagon was looking for some way to communicate that could still function if big chunks of the country got nuked. The next important development was the advent of the supercomputers in the 1970s. There were only about five or so of these nationwide, and the National Science Foundation came up with a way for people who weren't located near one of these to use them for their research: big-time number crunching and the like. NSFnet and the Pentagon network (it was called ARPAnet in its first incarnation) together made up what came to be called the Internet. Long story short: what evolved was a "network" of computers that could "talk" to each other in any configuration as long as they all had something called TCP/IP built into their programs. That stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. They did this through telephone lines, and were therefore "inter-networked." In Ohio we had (and still do have) OARnet; this is the Ohio Academic Research Network, and was intended to give access to all the universities in the state to the supercomputer in Columbus. This is what Clark State is a part of now.

As the Cold War drew to a close in the late 80s and the Internet was no longer primarily a strategic invention, the network was opened up to the general citizenry, but no one thought it was any big deal until all kinds of regular folks discovered that it was a great communication tool, and entrepreneurs realized that it had lots of commercial potential, also. You could do e-mail to your friends and colleagues, and newsgroups for people with special interests developed. One interesting feature is that nobody really owns or controls it.

The access to the Internet was through something called a "gopher", which was developed at the University of Minnesota (home of theGophers) and also meant "go for." Without a gopher you couldn't find much; the network was too vast. The gophers organized things into layers, and you would go through a series of menus, ever more specific until you got to where you were going. Sometimes it was
hard to find your way back.

What really made the Internet accessible to us dummies, were the developments of a graphical user nterfaces (better known as a GUIs and pronounced Gooey) and hypertext. The old pre-gooey Internet was just text that looked a lot like what's on this page. Hypertext eliminated all of those menus and intermediate screens, and took you directly to what you were looking for by means of URL links (uniform resource locator is what URL stands for.) This created the World Wide Web. Several browsers were developed for the Web, such as Netscape and Internet Explorer.

So, the Internet is a network of networked computers and telephone lines, and all the smart people who make things available. TCP/IP is the "glue" that sticks all of this together. Netscape is the software that allows you to browse that network. (And all of that porn you're always hearing about doesn't just automatically appear--you have to look for it.)

I consulted a number of sources, most of which you can see by doing a word search in our catalog. Any mistakes are purely my own.

Nancy Schwerner
April 1996

*In his book The Internet Complete Reference, Harley Hahn says, "The Internet is the name for a vast, worldwide system consisting of people, information, and computers. It is so large and so complex as to be beyond the comprehension of a single human being." p.2.

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