COMPLETE SCHOOL PROJECT TOPICS & MATERIALS :
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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Research in dividing information into packets and switching them from computer to computer began in the 1960s. The U.S department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded a research that created a packet switching network known as the ARPANET. ARPA also funded a research project that produced two satellite networks. In the 1970s, ARPA was faced with a dilemma: Each of its networks had advantages for some situations, but each network was incompatible with the others. ARPA focused research on ways that networks could be interconnected, and the internet was envisioned and created to be an interconnection of networks that uses transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP). In the early 1980s, a group of academic computer scientists formed the computer science network, which used TCP/IP protocols.

As large commercial companies began to use TCP/IP to build private internets, ARPA investigated transmission of multimedia-audio, video, and graphics across the internet. Other groups investigated hypertext and created tools such as Gopher that allow users to browse menus, which are lists of possible options. In 1989 many of these technologies were combined to create the World Wide Web (www). Initially designed to aid communication among physicists who worked in widely separated locations, the web became immensely popular and eventually replaced other tools. Also during late 1980s, the U.S. government began to lift restrictions on who could use the internet, and commercialization of the internet began. In the early 1990s, with users no longer restricted to the scientific or military communities, the internet quickly expanded to include universities, and companies of all sizes. Libraries, public and private schools, local and state governments, individuals and families had access to the internet.

The simplicity and user-friendliness of the World Wide Web protocols led to an exponential growth in web utilization for technical and educational publishing on the internet. This paved the way for the development of browsers (software allowing the user of the World Wide Web to navigate through the World Wide Web and to display the information downloads) like Viola, Mosaic, Opera, Mozilla and Netscape, and its multimedia characteristics. The World Wide Web became extremely popular for commercial and personal publishing.

Now the www is by far the most rapidly expanding parts of the internet. The number of computer hosts (end-user terminals) was approximately 6.64 million worldwide as of July 1995 with more than 35 percent of these hosts outside the U.S.A. The figure has been doubling every year since 1981. In August 1995, there were around 80,000 web servers, providing information and services to the www.users . The internet is a global web of computer net-works that has made instantaneous and decentralization of global communication possible. Users can browse the internet and have a link with fully integrated text, graphics, images and sound. Also users can send e-mail messages, exchange views, shops for product, and access news, recipe art, and information on business growth and development. The internet itself is free, though owning a website costs some amount to design both for individuals and for corporate organization.

The internet is a voluntary interconnected collection of computer networks that links people and organizations throughout the world. Internet users can communicate freely and directly regardless of time or distance, there is a common language (English); and no single government regulatory control. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a network of documents accessible via the internet, offering its facilities plus the additional features of multimedia: sound and fun colour graphics. Anyone can have a presence on the internet in the form of specially written files (web “pages”) that appear in a web “site” (i.e. a cyberspace location indexed by a page number) which net users can visit, browse, explore in detail and sometimes interact with “online”. Websites are placed on a computer (web server) connected