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Английский язык.

The networked world
What is the Internet?

The Internet is the worldwide network of computers and other electronic devices. The devices are connected together in a variety of ways, including through ordinary phone lines, cable systems, and satellite dishes. A computer user taps into the Internet through an Internet Service Provider, or ISP, an organization that provides a user with connections to the Internet.
How did we manage to survive before the Internet? That question has probably crossed the minds of many people since the 1990’s. The Internet has become such an important part of our everyday activities – including how we shop, how we are entertained, how we work, how we keep track of the news, and how we communicate with family and friends – that it is sometimes hard to imagine life without it.
If you grew up after 1990, when the World Wide Web was invented, you may have never known life without the Internet. You may even take for granted the many amazing things that the Internet allows you to do – send instant e-mails to your friends in different cities, download your favorite songs from an online music site, upload photographs to your own Web site, find information for school projects, and much more. Did you ever wonder how the Internet can place the whole world at your fingertips?
The Internet is expected to continue to grow and to charge in ways that will make it increasingly important to people. For example, the Internet might someday bring live three-dimensional displays of classroom, offices, and concert stages to your advanced personal computer system, enabling you to “be” in these places without leaving the comfort of your home.
Although there are many expectations for the Internet, there are also some concerns. Does the Internet make it easier for criminals to steal personal information, such as credit card and bank account numbers? Will the Internet help terrorists around the world plan future attacks? Might governments use the Internet to gather private information on citizens? Such questions highlight the fact that the Internet, like many other technological breakthroughs in history, has the potential for both good and evil.
Despite these concerns, most Internet users enjoy the many benefits of this global computer network and look forward to the future of our networked world.
Finding a way to locate information on the Internet was not the only challenge faced by researchers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Another challenge was to develop a program to bring pictures and sound to the Internet, which had been limited to displaying text.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer programmer at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web, the system that allows the Internet to display photographs, video, and sound. Berners-Lee designed the Web to help scientists share multimedia information over the Internet. He created a special programming language, called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), to control the way that documents on the Web appear and behave on the computer screen. HTML consists of tags, or codes, that a Web browser (a program that allows a computer user to view Web documents) uses to display text and images.
To ease the task of finding information on the Web, HTML also includes codes that enable a document on the Internet to be linked to other documents. With Berners-Lee’s system, a computer user could move from one document to another by typing in a uniform resource locator, or URL, the address on the Internet where the desired document is located.
Universities and research centers around the world rapidly obtained Berners-Lee Web program, which was freely available on the Internet, and installed it on their computers. By late 1992, the program had been used to create about 50 sites on the World Wide Web.
Although Berners-Lee’s program was powerful, it was difficult to install and use. In 1992, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, students working at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Urbana-Champaign, developed a browsing program that made it mush easier for people to access the World Wide Web. Andreessen and Bina added two special features to the program, called Mosaic, that were not available in Berners-Lee system. The first was the ability to display images directly on a Web page. The browse in Berners-Lee’ program could display images only in a separate window. The other added feature was hyperlinks, programmed connections that allow computer users to jump from one document to another by clicking on a link, which usually appears as an underlined word or phase, rather than having to type in the URL.
Within weeks after NCSA made Mosaic available for free in 1993, tens of thousands of people downloaded copies of the browser program. In early 1994, Andreessen and Jim Clark, the founder of a California computer manufacturing company called Silicon Graphics, formed Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California. In October 1994, Mosaic Communications launched a commercial Web browser program called Mosaic Netscape. The following month, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications Corporation and the program’s name to Netscape Navigator.
In 1995, the Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington, released its own Web browser, called Internet Explorer. Microsoft and Netscape immediately entered into a battle to build the most popular browser. In 1999, America Online, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, purchased Netscape. By 2000, the Web had expanded to include more than 36 million sites, with thousands more added every day.
By this time, the Web was also being used in a variety of new and different ways. For example, a new computer language called Extensive Markup Language (XML) made it possible for Web pages to be viewed more easily on such devices as cellular phones and handheld computers – enabling people to access the Web anywhere on Earth. These wireless devices were speeding the transformation of the world into an Internet-connected global village.