The Internet

Sit back for a second and imagine your life without the internet. Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's ok, it's just an exercise! It's not really gone, I just wanted you to imagine life as you know it without the capabilities of your smartphone, without email, IM, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, Wiki-whatever, iTunes, you get the point. The world as we know it in 2011 is much much different than even in 1991, when I graduated from high school. At that time beepers were the thing. Yes, beepers! And then there was the Sony Discman,which was a portable CD player that had replaced the Sony Walkman as the portable music medium of the day! Nowadays, thanks to the internet, you don't even need to physically store music on a handheld device. If you have the Pandora app for your iPhone, you can stream music directly off of the internet and into your ears, so long as you have a connection available - and at least 3 bars!

Most people don't realize that the concept of the internet was around long before it became popular and mainstream, and well before Al Gore tried to claim it as his. Conceived at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and dubbed ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, it didn't really get traction with the public until the mid 90's when AOL was all the rave. The internet was originally intended so that universities could share research across a network of computers that was connected using a common communications protocol. Now, everyone in the world has access to this technology. The internet not only makes communication possible and more efficient, but it also changes lives by allowing even the most remote location on earth to communicate with the masses. It has to be the most revolutionizing invention of the 20th Century, maybe #2 after the airplane.

Flashback to the first paragraph. The internet is no longer a luxury or novelty. As we get further into the 21st Cebtury, the internet will become a greater and more necessary part of our lives. As education has shown, internet-based applications will become more accepted in the world. Corporations will exploit the far reaching arm of the internet for things that no one has trusted before like voting, medical care, child care, elderly care, self-driving cars, self-piloting airplanes, and many other applications that we have not inherently trusted to computers in the past. This will also lead to huge leaps forward in technology that is used to secure communications and prevent hackers from disabling these systems. In a few years, the internet will be an afterthought that's widely taken for granted - much like electricity, the telephone, television, radio, the airplane, and space travel have become the most revolutionary and underappreciated inventions of the 20th Century.


http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml