THAT DAMN’D EXPLOSIVE INTERNET

By the middle of 1994, the Internet connected over 2.2m computers, serving 25m people. Just one part of the network carried over 12 trillion bytes of data – the equivalent of about 40m books. And for all that the network is still doubling in size and volume each year.

This raises two fundamental questions. First, why should so many people want to throw themselves into an electronic world created by nerds for nerds? How can the network sustain its pace of growth?

Part of the answer to the first question is simple fashion. Young people today embrace technology for some of the same reason that their parents embraced rock and roll. It’s new, it’s exciting and it makes the old folks nervous. But a more

fundamental reason is that the nerd who built the Internet have found new ways of meeting a basic human need: the desire to communicate with other people.

Underlying the Internet are three basic means of communication. E-mail sends electronic messages from one person to another- like letters, but capable of crossing the Atlantic in one minute or so. File transfers move bulk data from one computer to another. And so-called telnet services enable someone to connect to a computer miles away, and, network speed permitting use its services as if it were sitting on the desktop.

In their original form, such services were next to impossible for those without a degree in computer science. But in the past two years, new software has hidden most if the Internet’s complexity, and made it as easy to use as pointing a mouse at the appropriate picture on the screen, and click – the world’s database are at your fingertips.

With these capabilities, the Internet becomes post office, printing press and meeting place all in one. Some use the Internet to exchange letters with loved ones. Others connect to remote computers to play games or to do research. Others join groups to discuss various problems. America’s Securities and Exchange Commission is using the network to distribute reports on corporate finance. NASA distributes photographs from space. And farmers can wallow in a database called “Not just cows”.

Technically, the reason that the Internet can cope with such helter-skelter growth is that it was conceived originally by America’s Defense Department, way back in the late 1960s, as a prototype of a network that could withstand a nuclear strike. Now the Internet is a network of networks, linked together by a collection of voluntary agreed technical standards. Each company, university or organization is responsible for communications among its own computers, and all cooperate in communication between networks – with much duplication and re-routing.

10. Make a written translation of the text.

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