What is the sound of one hand clapping?  Whatever it sounds like it is pretty quiet, and solitary.  In the late days of super-large mainframes the users began to realise that they needed to share their information.  One scientist here realised that if he could just look at the research notes of another scientist he might be able to help, and maybe even further his own research.  Some way of linking computers together had to be established, the problem is that there were literally hundreds of different types of computers out there in the market, they would need to create a completely new standard.  The scientists hopes were answered with ArpaNET, the precursor to the internet.  Basically on the ArpaNET every computer gains a path to any other computer on the network, directly or indirectly.  It began as only e-mail, which believe it or not has remained basically unchanged since its inception in 1960.  Scientists began to correspond, next a scientist wished to browse the research notes of a colleague.  Soon everybody wanted into this sea of knowledge.  Several years later a standard that controlled how to create data on the internet, a standard that allows both Internet Explorer users and Netscape users to view this page, a standard called HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language).

    Up until the mid-eighties the internet was controlled by the universities and companies that owned the communication lines called the backbone.  Because of cost restraints the internet backbone was reallllllly slow, not much faster than a 28.8 kbps telephone modem, then the government

stepped in.  The control of the internet backbone switched entities in the 1980's; the government immediately improved bandwidth allowing faster transfers and better content, they didn't know where the internet was going but they were determined to let it grow to what it demanded.  The super fast 28.8 kbps was replaced with 33.6, then 56.6 kbps, and now many of the users on the internet own cable modems, or connect over a digital satellite link, or through even faster T1, T2, and T3

connections.  Constant transfer-rates in 1995 were 3 Kb/s, today 200 Kb/s  is easy to obtain.  The introduction of fiber-optic cable is set to increase bandwidth by tenfold.
    But why discuss the internet and communication in a presentation about the information revolution?  For many years communication has been sought by many people.  Samuel Morse invented the telegraph allowing text communication, and important information to flow from place to place instantly; at a time when mail took months to deliver.  Alexander Graham Bell created the telephone in order to allow people to hear each others' voice at long distances.  The internet satiated this desire even further providing a less intrusive, much

more instant, and much more versatile form of communication than has ever existed before
    Now the world has a place to store vast amounts of data and allow others to see it, now they also have a way to retrieve the data quickly.  Now society is struggling to come to terms with the legality and morality of what the internet contains.  These will be discussed on a later page.