The Most Influential Audio-Visual Technological Discovery
In order for something to be the most influential discovery ever it must follow certain criteria. I'm defining the word discovery to be synomous with invention in that it is something that was "happened upon" and developed and didn't necessarily exist for all time. In order to be the most influential it must permeate every part of our lives, from leisure, education, business, and travel, to the very social system itself. It must be capable of world wide use and also improve life both orally and visually for all members of society.
The most important audio-visual discovery of the 20th century is by far the internet. It has revolutionised almost every aspect of our lives from the way we study, work, shop, relax and above all communicate.
The internet as we know it developed from a government project to send secure information from one remote computer to another. The DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) began work on the internet in 1973 under the guiding influence of Larry Roberts. He designed the Arpas first network where a machine called an Interface message processor (IMP) would connect individual sites, route messages, scan errors and confirm the arrival of messages at their intended destination. A number of innovations led to the development of the modern internet. First was the development of the computerised bulletin board (today's message boards) by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss, second was the standardisation of internet access through TCP (transfer Control Protocol) and IP internet protocol, and third was the development of software for information retrieval which would become the WWW. World wide web. (Moschovitis et al)
The internet consists of a global network of computers joined together to form one large interconnected network. It relies on Routers, Naps, ISPs, DNS and powerful servers to connect the network.
Each computer on the network uses a modem to connect to the ISP (Internet service Provider eg Eircom) which operates the telephone lines. When you connect to the internet you become part of their network. Companies may be part of a Local Area Network all connected at points of presence in various cities. There is no overall connecting network but several high level networks connected to each other through Network Access Points or NAP's. Backbones, or fibre optic trunk lines, carry the information through routers, or specialised computers which sort and determine where to send your information.
What is the Internet? The Internet is a global computer network providing a variety of information and communications facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communcation protocols.
The internet was created to test new networking technologies developed to eventually aid the military. The Arpanet, advanced research projects agency network, became operational in 1968 after it was conceived by Leanard Roberts (Watrall, T101, 2/2). Ever since the Arpanet began in 1968, it grew exponentially in the number of connected users. Traffic and host population became too big for the network to maintain, due to the killer application known as email created in 1972. The outcry for a better way sparked the development of the NSFNet. The National Science Foundation Network replaced Arpanet, and ultimately had many positive effects. This early division of the internet spread its netw...
Computers were in development from as early as the 1950’s, but the general public wouldn’t hear of the World Wide Web until the 1980’s. By the year 2000, the internet was accessible to the general public from their home computers. It was used mainly for e-mailing, online shopping and research, but with its growing popularity, the World Wide Web was quick to expand its content. We can now, in the present day, access the internet on a number of platforms such as mobile phones, laptops and PCs, and even Smart Televisions, which makes a vast difference to the platforms people used 30 years ago.
If you ask someone what the greatest technological breakthrough of the twentieth century was, you are sure to get mixed responses. Some may say the television, others will say modern medicine, and
Born in the mind of an MIT professor in the early years of the 1960's, "the internet-or net, for short"(Jonscher,154)-has been maintained as the information-technology center throughout the closing of the twentieth century connecting people and ideas throughout the world in little more than the stroke of a key and faster than the blink of an eye . Imagine the possibility of transferring one bank account to another with the click of a mouse-from New York to Hong Kong, or buying a car or even a house off a computer screen, or talking to a long-forgotten aunt on the other side of the globe for hours upon hours at zero cents a minute, or, especially, the unimaginable possibility of delivering a message to everyone in the world, one person at a time and as fast as that message can be forwarded: these were the dreams of J.C.R. Licklider; the dreams that became reality (Jonscher, 154). In 1966, just four years after the origination of the first idea, Licklider's dream of the Internet was adopted by Larry Roberts, project manager for the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and together they became the pioneers of the "Galactic Network". When Robert's proposal was accepted by the other members of the agency, a plan went into effect to create the "ARPANET", which in time became what we know today as the Internet. The first remnants of the Internet began with defense contractors and universities, beginning with UCLA in 1969. (jonscher, 155)
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network.
Technology has had a huge impact on the universe ever since the first tools were created. Everything that has been discovered or invented in the technological aspect has revolutionized rapidly to create the technology we have today. Every invention has come from the basic idea of another piece of technology to improve or create something so much better than before. There are six main categories of technology: transportation, science and math, construction, manufacture, communication and other technologies.
The Internet is a public, global network of networks which is based on Internet Protocol (IP) and related standards (http://www.teleshuttle.com/media/extradef.htm). The Internet was designed to provide a standard means of interconnecting networks so that any system could communicate with any other system, regardless of physical location. It operates as a confederated network of networks (an "internet"), and offers universal accessibility (http://www.teleshuttle.com/media/extradef.htm).
The Internet consists of a three level hierarchy composed of backbone networks (e.g. ARPAnet, NSFNet, MILNET), mid-level networks, and stub networks. These include commercial (.com or .co), university (.ac or .edu) and other research networks (.org, .net) and military (.mil) networks and span many different physical networks around the world with various protocols, chiefly the Internet Protocol.
Many centuries ago, art was rendered inaccessible by the masses and was reserved for the few high society members who had the means of access to appreciate history in the making. Through the use of technology, art has been made hugely accessible by the ability to trade media forms, mainly through the Internet and other technological means. Much like the printing press was for literature with Gutenberg in 1445, technology has heightened art and moreover, the expression of it.
Initially the internet was created by the military and governments as a way of protecting their communications from enemy sources. In the present time, the internet has become an essential part of a person’s life. It is used for various kinds
Working with Internet does not mean just browsing www and sending and receiving e-mails. The Basic Structure of the Internet was developed through last 30 years of existence of the Internet. The Internet is a heterogeneous worldwide network consisting of a large number of host computers and local area networks. The Internet uses the TCP/IP suite of protocols. This allows the integration of a large number of different computers into one single network with highly efficient communication between them. This way, the user can access information on all kinds of host computers from a desktop PC, Macintosh, or whatever he/she has available. TCP/IP, the communication standard underlying the Internet, originates from work done at the US-Department of Defense in the late 1960s. The first version of the Internet was built in 1969 and consisted of just four computers. In 1982 a set of specifications and protocols have been implemented, which became known as TCP/IP in reference to their two major elements, the "Transmission Control Protocol" and the "Internet Protocol". The development and implementation of TCP/IP stimulated a massive growth process for the Internet. "By late 1987 it was estimated that the growth had reached 15% per month and remained high for the following two years. By 1990, the connected Internet included over 3,000 active networks, over 3,000 active networks, and over 200,000 computers. By January 1992 the number of hosts on the Internet was 727,000, doubling about every 7 months. Various groups of users are connected to the Internet: universities and other educational institutions, government agencies, the military, and at an increasing number private businesses.
The Internet started as a Defense Department Cold War experiment in the 1950’s. (Academic American, 225). The government needed a way to relay information between tanks and headquarters so the APRA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) sought a way to let signals from the battlefield reach a headquarters computer using satellites and radio signals. At the same time the command posts of the nation were located deep underground in mountains in fear of nuclear war. (Diamond, 3). Paul Baran, working for the U.S. Air Force, developed a network that could reroute itself around damage caused by the impact of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile by using "redundancy of connectivity". This meant that in the event of a break in the network the server would re-route the information in an alternate path through a new technique called "packet switching". Packet Switching is a means of breaking up the message being sent into small packets which carry enough information to seek out its destination and sending them out separately towards the destination server. The message after being broken up would take separate routes to the destination and then be re-assembled by the computer at the server where the message was being sent. This was good because with more than one route for information to travel on, the enemy did not have one central point to target their attack to break the lines of communication and in the event of some break in the line information could still travel through. (Diamond, 4).
The internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the internet protocol suite to link several billon devices worldwide (Wikipedia). The internet is sometimes simply referred to as the ‘Net’ or the “online world”, is now the most ubiquitous or universal conveyor of electronic information (Gourley). The term internet essentially refers to the broadcasting, transfer, and reconstruction of digitally-coded data between two or more machines equipped with computer chips. For the today’s online users, the flow of bits and bytes occurs instantly and invisibly. Yet, The internet was technically born decades ago, but the internet was introduced to the world when a company, named Netscape, went public in 1995. Netscape introduced the masses to the free flow of electronic information through a web browser. In other words, it is the translation of digital data from remote repositories and the results are displayed on screen (in form of a website or web page) – while well known online companies like America Online and CompuServe existed prior that time, both restricted their users to from their own portfolio of proprietary data, which is a closed end system known as the Intranet.
"The Internet is a network of networks," according to Quarterman and Salus and they state that it is the world's largest system of routes and connections. No one company or person controls the Internet (Quarterman & Salus). About 8,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connect the matrix of hundreds of thousands of networks operated by many people in many different countries (Quarterman & Salus). The gateway to the Internet from your home computer is through an ISP. To get to the Internet through an ISP you have to have a modem dialup, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop), cable modem, wireless, or leased line. These methods provide a variety of speeds to connect the Internet, without one of these methods you will not be able to connect to the Internet.