Google: A Private History of an Internet Giant

The History of Internet

Internet has reached the limit of 650 million users by 2005 and it has been projected that 1.2 billion people will be internet users by 2015. These figures clearly show that Internet has already become a very important medium and its importance will increase in the foreseeable future. The system which can be called the ancestor of Internet is called ARPANET. ARPANET was a small military intranet system built on 1968. Arpanet was a close intranet system which only provides access to the members of United States military force and high ranked government officials.

In 1971 universities were allowed to use ARPANET , however the number of Internet did not grow significantly until the announcement of World Wide Web (WWW) by CERN in 1991. WWW provided opportunity to build websites and it has shaped the Internet as we know today. After the introduction of WWW, the users of Internet increased very rapidly and it has been evolved into the biggest interpersonal media in the history of mankind.

Internet as A Part of Daily Life

Today internet is a very integral part of our lives. People use internet for almost all kind of purposes: surfing the web, communication, shopping, gaming and many more different areas can be mentioned in this context. Today whole economic system relies on Internet. Chris Forman, a professor of Carnegie Mellon University, stated in his article that the adoption rate of internet among the corporations in United States is much more than 80 percent in 1998.

Under the light of this information, it is safe to state that internet is a part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Today the idea of a life without internet sounds impossible and with the rapid growth of internet tomorrow will be no different. So it is not a matter of "if we will live with internet or not" anymore, but "how will we live with internet?". It is possible to say that a technological development is not just a technological development. All big scaled technological developments bring social, economic and ethical changes. Internet is not an exception in this term. For good or for bad, it triggered a big wave of change in many different areas.

In cyber world knowledge equals to power. The most powerful internet companies usually offer their services free of charge. However these companies still rank in the highest ranks amongst the most successful ones in financial terms. I have just mentioned "free of charge" few sentences ago, but actually these types of services are not free of charge. It is true that they don't directly ask for any money from the end user to use these services. On the other hand they ask for something else: information. There is a price for these services and the currency is information instead of money.