The Internet and World Wide Web: E-commerce Infrastructure

The Internet and World Wide Web: E-commerce Infrastructure

The Origins of Internet.
The Internet has involved from a collection of mainframe computers located on a few U>S> college campuses to an nterconnected network of thousands of networks and millions of computers worlwide.
The history of the Internet can be divided into three phases:
• During the Innovation Phase (1961-1974), the Internet’s purpose was to link researchers nationwide via computer.
• During the Institutional Phase (1975-1995), the Departement of Defense and National Science Foundation provided funding to expand the fundamental building blocks of the Internet into a complex millitary communications system and then into a civilian system.
• During the Commercialization Phase (1995 to the present), government agencies encouraged corporations to assume responsibility for further expansion of the network, and private business began to exploit the Internet for cormercial purpose.

The Key Technology Concepts Behind the Internet
The Internet’s three key technology components are:
• Packet switching, which slices digital message into packets, routes the packets along different communication paths as they become available, and then reassembles the packets once they arrive at their destination.
• TCP/IP. TCP establishes the connections among sending and receiving Web computers and handles the assembly of packets at the point of transmission, as well as their reassembly at the receiving end. IP provides the addresing scheme, enabling messages to arrive at the proper destination computer.
• Client/server technology, which makes it possible for large amounts of information to be stored on Web servers and shared with individual users on their client computers.

The Role of Internet Protocols and Utility Programs.
Internet protocols and utility programs make the following Internet services possible:
• HTTP delivers requested Web pages, allowing users to view them.
• STMP and POP enable e-mail to be routed to a mail server and then pick up by the recipient’s server, while IMAP enables e-mail to be sorted before being downloaded by the recipient.
• FTP is used to transfer files from servers to client and vice versa.
• SSL ensures that information tranmissions are encrypted.
• Telnet is utility program that enables work to be done remotely.
• Finger is utility program that allows you to find out who is logged onto a remote network.
• Ping is utility program that allows users to verify a connection between client and server.
• Tracert lets you track the route a message takes from a client to a remote computer.

The Structure of The Internet Today.
The main structural elements of the Internet are:
• The bacbone, which is composed primarily of high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable operated by the variety of providers.
• NAPs and MAEs, which are hubs that use high-speed switching computers to connect the backbone with regional and local networks.
• Campus are networks, which are local are networks operating within a single organization that connect directly to regional networks.
• Internet Service Providers, which deal with the “last mile” of service to homes and offices. ISPs offer a variety of types of service, ranging from dial-up service to broadband DSL, cable modem, T1 and T3 lines, and the satellite link service.

The Limitations of Today’s Internet.
To envision what the Internet of tomorrow-Internet II-will look like, we must first look at the limitations of today’s Internet.
• Bandwidth limitations: Today’s Internet is slow and incapable of effectively sharing and displaying large files, such as video and voice files.
• Quality of services limitations: Data packets don’t all arrive in the correct order, at the same moment, causing latency; latency creates jerkiness in video files and voice messages.
• Network architecture limitations: Servers can’t keep up with demand. Future improvements to Internet infrastructure will improve the way servers process requests for information, thus improving overall speed.
• Language development limitations: The nature of HTML restrics the quality of “rich” information that can be shared online. Future languages will enable improved display and the viewing of video and graphics.

The potential Capabilities of Internet II.
Internet2 is consortium working together to develop and test new technologies for potential use on the Internet. Internet2 participants are working in a number of areas, including
• advanced network infrastucture;
• new networking capabilities;
• middleware; and
• advance applications that incorporate audio and video to create new services.
In addition to the Internet2 project, other groups are working to expand Internet bandwidth via improvements to fiber-optic technologies and through photonics technologies such as Dense Wavelenght Division Multiplexing, optical and fiber switches, optical switching components, optical integrated circuits, and optical networks. Wireless LAN and 3G telephone technologies will provide users of cellular phones and PDAs with increased access to the Internet and its various services. The increased bandwidth and expanded connections of the Internet II era will result in a number of benefits, including
• IP multicasting, which will enable more efficient delivery of data;
• latency solutions such as diffserve (differentiated quality of service), which assigns levels of priority to packets based on the type of data being transmitted;
• guaranteed service levels;
• lower error rates;
• declining costs; and
• access anywhere and anytime from mobile hand-held devices.

How the World Wide Web works.
The Web was developed during 1989-1991 by Dr.Tim Berners-Lee, who created a computer program that allowed formatted pages stored on the Internet to be linked using keywords (hyperlinks). In 1993, Marc Andreesen created the first graphical Web browser, which made it possible to view documents on the Web graphically and created the possibility of universal computing.
• Hypertext, which is a way of formatting pages with embedded link that connect documents to one another and that also link pages to other objects.
• HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), which is the protocol used to transmit Web pages over the Internet.