8/462 Information systems and the Internet
Keith Andrews
The Internet, the world-wide computer network, now connects over 6.6 million individual computers (July 1995) with a growth rate of between 10 and 15% per month or around 100% per year. Estimates of the number of regular users of the Internet vary from 20 million to 50 million. If current growth rates were to continue, the whole of the world population would be connected by the year 2004!
Around 18 Terabyte of information (18,000,000,000,000 bytes) traversed the main US backbone of the network, the NSFNET, in the month of November 1994, a figure which was also double that of the previous year. In December 1994, NSFNET traffic began migrating to the new NSF network architecture, for which no comparable statistics are available. These statistics highlight the immense social and economic significance which the Internet is attaining. More and more businesses are realizing the enormous potential of the Internet: in the Summer of 1994, the number of commercial sites in the United States overtook the number of educational sites.
Over the past couple of years, with increasingly powerful desktop computers and heavy investment in network bandwidth, attention has shifted significantly from traditional Internet services such as electronic mail and file transfer to more appealing, but resource-hungry, information systems and interactive services, which now account for more Internet traffic (in bytes) than any other Internet service.
 2.1 The Internet |
 2.2 Basic Internet services: remote login, file transfer, Email, and Network News |
| 2.3 Archie |
| 2.4 WAIS |
| 2.5 The Internet Gopher |
| 2.6 The World Wide Web |
| 2.7 Hyper-G |
| 2.8 Further reading |