Evolution of the Internet

Project Statement
In today's society, the Internet plays a vital role. From providing information to online banking, almost anything can be accomplished using the Internet. As society is evolving usage trends are changing. The internet has come a long way from when it started out. With its growing expansion, many positive and negative aspects are revealed. Users of the Internet are now abe to select from various different web browsers to use, that cater to the many different needs of the user.

Arguement
The Internet has helped society..............EXPAND

Internet Trends
Internet helps us to “link” with the world instantly. By using the internet, we can obtain information and gather multimedia whenever we want. The growing popularity of internet has become more handy and easy to access. In the near future, we expect the following trends with the usage of internet:

Education Usage
The trend of internet usage is spreading to all education levels. This is because the internet has a very high accessibility and also contains a lot of information. Additionally, the internet allows teachers and students to communicate with each without meeting and provides needed materials for students to access. For example, Desire 2 Learn (D2L) and Blackboard.

Household Usage
There are several reasons why households will have an increasing internet usage in the future. One of the reasons is because by having an internet access at home; it is handy for both work and private use. For example, checking e-mail and online shopping. Secondly, the correlation between the internet and the computers are significant. As the computers are getting easier to use and getting more affordable over time, people have a higher chance of knowing how to use the internet.

Field Usage
When internet was first introduced to the public, we used it mostly for e-mail and research. But now, we use it for all sorts of daily things, such as reading newspaper, Skype, and MSN. Moreover, there is a trend that many applications requires internet for certain purpose. For example, software updates.

Different Browsers
Competition works to ensure that consumers are getting the best products out there. The internet is one area where there is much competition. Many different companies have created different browsers claiming to be better than the rest. The most commonly known browsers are:
 * Internet Explorer
 * Mozilla Firefox
 * Apple's Safari
 * Netscape
 * Opera

The most common web browsers are: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari.

Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer was started in the summer of 1994 and it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95. Internet Explorer 1 debuted in August 1995. It uses a zone based security framework which groups’ sites together based on certain conditions. It is the most used web browser and has many add ons. Internet Explorer is the default browser that comes with Windows. The usage is higher in Asia and Europe. The lasts version, Internet Explorer 8, includes key features such as accelerators which allow users to map directions and even translate words with just a few clicks of your mouse, in private browsing, web slices, search suggestions, smart screen filter, enhanced navigation, increased performance, and improved favourites and history management.

Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser that relies on the extension system to allow users to modify the browser according to their requirements. It is the second most popular browser in current worldwide use. Some many features include: tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search engine. This browser has received many awards such as the PC Magazine Editors’ Choice award. Firefox also has many other features such as: one-click bookmarking, instant web site ID, full zoom, a password manager and a smart location bar.

What the Internet is Today
A Timeline of the Internet 1980-2009

1982
The Internet is an international network of interconnected computer systems which supports various protocols for navigation of remotely hosted data in numerous formats. The most frequently used part of the Internet is the World Wide Web, which offers millions of websites, and is growing literally every day, created for numerous reasons including commercial, educational, and informational purposes.

1982-1989
In 1984 an Englishman named Tim Bernes-Lee was working for CERN, European Particle Physics Laboratory, and came to the conclusion that physicists had no way to share data around the world. He tackled this problem for five years, creating the software and many other components that he believed were necessary to accomplish this task. Finally in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

1991
On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Even though the WWW project was created to assist physicists and universities in sharing valuable information, the public sector soon realized the incredible possibilities that the WWW project held for them.

1992
Jean Armour Polly is a librarian by profession, the author of a series of books on safe Internet services, and the “mother of the internet”. Polly is credited with creating the phrase "Surfing the Internet", being the author of the first known appearance of the phrase in print, in an article called Surfing the INTERNET, published in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin in June, 1992. In 1992 the popularity of the info.cern.ch was expanding rapidly, the number of daily hits to the world’s first web server was increasing at an astronomical rate, doubling every three to four months. After one year, the number had increased by a factor of ten.

1993
The real popularity boom for the World Wide Web was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic, which would later be developed into Netscape Navigator, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill. Also, in April 1993 CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the outrage caused by the University of Minnesota announcing that it would begin charging fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.

1995
The Internet was growing at an exponential rate, doubling every three of four months during 1995 and 1996.

1996
By 1996 it became obvious to nearly all publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional. At first people saw mainly the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. More dotcoms, displaying products on hypertext web pages, were added into the Web. Microsoft also begins its epic history in 1996. Also in 1996 people realize that long distant phone calls over the Internet can be done for free, but the quality of these calls were less than spectacular. But companies begin to emerge to assist these problems, such as Vonage which has a massive customer base today.

1997
Advances in computer networking combined with much improved home computers and modern operating systems made streaming media practical and affordable for ordinary people. This year also saw a huge increase in the commercialization of the Internet, raising its popularity even more.

1998
Electronic commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.

1999
The concept of online banking as we know it today dates back to the early 1980s, when it was first envisioned and experimented with. However, on October 6 1995 Presidential Savings Bank first announced their webpage open for regular client use. The idea was instantly picked up by other banks lincluding Wells Fargo, Chase Manhattan and Security First Network Bank. Today, quite a few banks operate solely via the Internet and have no ‘four-walls’ entity at all.

The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein. In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center (part of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding, a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

2002
During 2002, multiple numbers of companies found success developing business models that helped make the World Wide Web a more gripping experience. These include airline booking sites, Google's search engine and its profitable approach to simplified, keyword-based advertising, as well as Ebay's do-it-yourself auction site and Amazon.com's big selection of books This new era also begot social networking websites, such as MySpace, Xanga, Friendster, and Facebook, which, though unpopular at first, very rapidly gained acceptance in becoming a major part of youth culture

2005
Internet Ad Revenue created more than 16.5 Billion dollars.

2008
215 million online in the U.S. (71.4% of U.S. population)

1,464 million online worldwide (21.9% of world population)

2009
1 billion users around the globe are surfing the Internet every month