Internet is a gift of the rapid progress that information and telecommunication technologies saw in the recent decades. The Net is the World's largest network of networks. "The definition of Internet, which can be best understood by a layman, is that the Internet consists of an incredible number of participants, connected machines, software programmes, and a massive quantity of information spread all around the world. Internet can be considered as millions of people constantly communicating about every topic under the sun."

According to Microsoft "The Internet is a vast network of computers - ranging from banks of powerful corporate machines to a single computer in a teenager's bedroom - linked together by cables and telephone lines. The best known part of the Internet is the World Wide Web, characterized by rich multimedia files that combine text with graphics, audio, photographs, and video. Other less celebrated parts of the Internet exist, carrying computer files that have fewer graphics, such as text documents and databases; but the Web provides the deepest Internet experience."

"The term cyberspace is sometimes used to refer to the non-physical space where all this data exists. In these days of satellite links, you don't even necessarily have to be connected by a wire, you can view the Internet via your television. Cyberspace is both everywhere and nowhere. And you, reading this page, are connected."

"The World Wide Web is collection of documents, just like this one, called Web Pages Web pages are produced and stored independently throughout the world by people with computers linked to the Internet Web pages can contain information on any subject imaginable. They can have text, pictures, sounds, movies, and even the controls for running applications on your or the Web page's computer. Most importantly, a Web page can have links to other related Web pages. It is these links that give the Web it name. With all the Web pages in the world linked to each other a diagram of how it fits together looks like a big, messy spider Web."

The Internet has brought about immense changes to society by revolutionalising not only trade and commerce, but every aspect of corporate activity and of human life itself. It has multiple uses beyond one's imagination. It provides the latest information in every field - sports, education, science and technology, medicine, entertainment, history, arts, geography, economics and hundreds of other subjects. It is a source of instant communication between persons located at different corners of the globe through e-mail, electronic-chat and video-conferencing. It provides for circulation of newsletters amongst newsgroups, transfer of files between different computers through FTP service etc. It thus represent millions of inter-connected computers of but using a common transmission protocol called TCP/IP.

We are here, however interested with the Net as a provider of ready information, the knowledge resource - "What you want to know, surf the Net and ask it and it will tell you instantly". The Net provides diverse information at your asking. It thus serves as a easy and instant mode of knowledge transmission between geographically separated individuals. It provides means of storage of manifold information by several persons across the Globe to be shared with everyone else. Some call it : "Information Super Highway". Others dub Internet as transforming the world into a "Global Village". It is thus the pioneer to usher the "information revolution" of the 21st Century.

"Knowledge Society"

"During the last century, the world underwent a change from agriculture society, where manual labour was the critical factor, to industrial society where the management of technology, capital and labour provided the competitive advantage.

"Then the information era was born, where connectivity and software products drove a part of the economy of a few nations, including our country. In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. Efficient utilisation of this existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth for the nations and also improve the quality of life in the form of better health, education, infrastructure, and other social indicators.

"Ability to create and maintain the knowledge infrastructure, develop knowledge workers, and enhance their productivity through creation, growth, and exploitation of new knowledge will be the key factors in deciding the prosperity of this Knowledge Society.

"Whether a nation has arrived at the state of knowledge society is judged by the way the country effectively deals with knowledge creation and knowledge deployment in all sectors like informational technology, industries, agriculture, health care etc."

Rightly and well-deservedly the Internet can be acclaimed as the symbol and spirit of the emerging Knowledge Society.

Anyone can easily upload data on his website on the world wide web, the main segment of Internet at anytime and anywhere by following the simple related formalities at an incredibly low cost. He can constantly revise and update the information-content on his website to prevent his data getting out-dated. This data can be retrieved by everyone on the globe instantly from anywhere else and at any time . Thus world wide web consists now of more than a billion webpages. All these information are readily available to mankind. What you need is a personal computer with Internet connection to link your computer to the Internet and thence from your desktop you can access any and every information of interest to you.

How this wonderful universal media came about? It was not known before the Nineties to the common citizen.

The evolution of Internet was on account of the felt need for sharing technical-data amongst geographically distributed research centers, but dedicated to the performance of a common task. The Institutions did strive to evolve an easy and instant information-exchange system. It was the peak of the cold war. In 1957 The Russians had successfully sent the unmanned artificial Satellite, 'Sputnik' to the moon. In response, US formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the following year, within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. This gave birth in 1969 to what is known as ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Administration NET), the predecessor of Internet. The ARPAnet, intended to link research centers across the country, provides the foundation for advanced networking and breaks a path toward the Internet. The architect of ARPAnet is Mr.Larry Roberts.

ARPAnet was initially a network of four computers started as an experimental project by the Defence Department of United States. The network was later linked to defence and military research contractors. The four computers could start transferring data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. "Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant."¹

The ARPA agency was subsequently came to be called as the DARPA (Defense Research Projects Administration NET) and the network was divided into MILNET(covering military sites) and a smaller ARPANET covering non-military sites.

The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique advanced, NCP had to be superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated standard. In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet." The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25.

"As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the Internet."¹

This followed in 1986 by The National Science Foundation of USA organising its own NSFNET, which was connected to regional networks which in turn was connected to users in different regions to exclusively provide service for education and research. And other government agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy in the Internet confederation. Several commercial networks later came into being and these were connected to regional networks. The commercial networks functioned using commercial IP (Internet Protocol).

"The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divided up into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were grouped by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu, com, org and net. Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military and educational institutions, which were, of course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as a high-tech research exercise in national security. Com, however, stood for "commercial" institutions, which were soon bursting into the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as gateways between networks.)"¹

While all these developments were centered within the United States, the first international IP network was established in 1973 between England and Norway. In 1982 DARPA launched the commercial version Internet Protocol and from then the term "Internet" came into usage. In 1990, ARPAnet was officially disbanded and the network, which has now grown into hundreds of sites came to be known as the Internet.

The following years witnessed a rapid growth of Internet due to efforts of networking giants like British Telecom, Hyundai, AT&T, etc. who all set up fast and reliable Networks that circled the globe. In order to maintain, set-up, monitor and expand existing networks another layer called ISP (Internet Service Provider) was formed over the IP base. Internet Service Providers purchased ISP pipeline bandwidths from networking giants and in turn provide Internet connectivity to individual users.

In 1971, a mere three decades ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks.

"The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously."¹

In the subsequent pages we will refer more about World Wide Web, which pools information all round and the methods of retrieving information therefrom.