internet: TAMA kaminoge internet manual history the internet concept was born, when about 30 years ago the rand corporation in the us was commissioned to develop an information infrastructure which could withhold a nuclear attack. main prerequisites were to have a decentralized, redundant network which could still be working when parts of it where not functional any more. each node of this network was considered independent and had the only task to receive data and pass them on to the next reasonable node as long as these data were not addressed to this node itself. original data was to be segmented into small packages, allowing switched transmission of different packages in very short intervals to avoid any possible congestion through heavy data- loads. the national physical laboratory in great britain was the first to set up a test network on these principles in 1968. by december 1969, there were four nodes on an operational network, the arpanet, in the us. in 1971 there were fifteen nodes in arpanet; by 1972, thirty- seven nodes. in 1977 a new network protocol, the tcp/ip, transmission control protocol/ internet protocol, was introduced to link other networks to the arpanet. the arpanet was replaced in 1989 by what is known now as the internet.

today there are millions of nodes in the internet, scattered over forty- two countries, with more coming on- line every day. over 30 million people use this network - of- all- computer- networks.

24 mio users between october and december 95

37 mio people over 16 in US and Canada with access to the internet

30 tera-bytes of information per month- the equivalent of 30 mio 700- page novels

11 percentage increase in number of hosts in europe during march, 1995

40 mio web pages indexed by the LYCOS internet catalog

225 000 www servers known to AltaVista

12 mio search requests per day at AltaVista

1 mio subscribers to niftyserve

37 new domain requests, per working hour, handled by internic registration services in march, 1995

internet manual