The Internet is the name for a group of worldwide information resources. These resources are so vast as to be well beyond the comprehension of a single human being. "Not only is there no one who understands all of the Internet, there is no one who even understands most of the Internet" (Harley 2). The Internet is often thought of as a computer network, or sometimes a group of computer networks connected to one another. The computer networks are simply the medium that carries the information. The beauty and utility of the Internet lie in the information itself that is being transmitted.The Internet has undergone a remarkable transformation since its early days. The original Internet was a low-speed, text-based network used to connect a few government sites to the research and defense contracting community. The Department of Defense began a project known as ARPAnet (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) back in the late 1960's, starting the first internet. It was designed by the network architects to interconnect government computers with defense contractors (Banta 2). The design of the network was such that no one computer system was dependent upon the functioning of any of the other computer systems. If any one computer network node was destroyed, such as in a nuclear attack, the rest of the network would continue to operate (Banta 2). "In the 1970s, the Internet began to be interconnected with large universities and research organizations" (Banta 2). The type of information going across the Internet began to change from that of being primarily government oriented to that of research oriented. During the 1980s, more universities and government contractors began using the internet contributing to its growth. As the amount of network traffic increased, the speed of the Internet began to slow down. In the mid - 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense split the network into the ARPAnet and the MilNet. The MilNet consists of only traffic...
