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The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, internet telephony, and file sharing.

The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching in the 1960s and the design of computer networks for data communication. The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the internetwork. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. (Full article...)

Selected article

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.

Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon, with copycat websites emerging in response. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; As of 9 May 2009, it was 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross. (Full article...)

Selected picture

Norwegian Army Lieutenant, testing LAN/WAN system
Norwegian Army Lieutenant, testing LAN/WAN system
Credit: Defense Visual Information Center

Wide Area Network (WAN) is a computer network that covers a broad area (i.e., any network whose communications links cross metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries). Or, less formally, a network that uses routers and public communications links. Contrast with personal area networks (PANs), local area networks (LANs), campus area networks (CANs), or metropolitan area networks (MANs) which are usually limited to a room, building, campus or specific metropolitan area (e.g., a city) respectively. The largest and most well-known example of a WAN is the Internet.

Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send, receive, digitally sign, and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013.

The company's early focus was on helping users send files that were too large for email; it started adding features and plug-ins for businesses in 2007. The service grew quickly, and the firm raised $49 million in funding between 2005 and 2010. The service can now be used via the web, a desktop client, mobile devices, or from within business applications using a Hightail plugin.

In May 2015, the company launched Hightail Spaces, designed to encourage creative professionals from conception of an idea to delivery.

In 2018, Hightail was acquired by OpenText. (Full article...)

WikiProjects

WikiProjects

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

  • ... that ComicBook.com originally began as a website with sales links and press releases before becoming an entertainment news site?
  • ... that Kenshi Yonezu's song "Dune" describes his perception of a "desert-like atmosphere" on the video-sharing website Niconico?
  • ... that Parker Short became popular on social media for singing and dancing to "Not Like Us" at a rally for Kamala Harris?
  • ... that "Prius Missile" is internet slang for traffic accidents involving older drivers in Japan?
  • ... that Amie Parnes allegedly first heard about her employer, The Messenger, ceasing operations from a New York Times article?
  • ... that Michael Sugrue became an "internet phenomenon" during the COVID-19 pandemic for his lectures on YouTube, recorded in 1992, that covered "the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history"?

Selected biography

Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military–industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, Bush was a prominent policymaker and public intellectual ("the patron saint of American science") during World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Through his public career, Bush was a proponent of democratic technocracy and of the centrality of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical security.

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various internet-related articles on Wikipedia.

Selected quote

Jimmy Wales
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
Jimmy Wales, 2004

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