Portal:Internet

The Internet Portal

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...)

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Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes

Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction that focuses on computers or information technology, usually coupled with some degree of breakdown in social order. The plot of cyberpunk writing often centers on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations, tending to be set within a near-future dystopian Earth, rather than the "outer space" locales prevalent at the time of cyberpunk's inception. Much of the genre's "atmosphere" echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. While this gritty, hard-hitting style was hailed as revolutionary during cyberpunk's early days, later observers concluded that in terms of literature, most cyberpunk narrative techniques were less innovative than those of the New Wave, twenty years earlier. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker. The term became widespread in the 1980s and remains current today.

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Photo of Tron Guy taken by subject, Jay Maynard

Credit: Jay Maynard

Jay Maynard is a computer programmer and system administrator. He is most famous for his electroluminiscent Tron Guy costume. He became an Internet phenomenon when his costume inspired by the movie Tron spread across the net from postings on Slashdot and Fark.

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Bezos in 2017

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (/ˈbeɪzoʊs/ BAY-zohss; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, Bezos's estimated net worth stood at US$220.9 billion, making him the third richest individual in the world. He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bezos was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in mid-1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.

Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015 and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth; he flew into space on Blue Origin NS-16 in 2021. He purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.

The first centibillionaire on the Forbes Real Time Billionaires Index and the second ever to have achieved the feat since Bill Gates in 1999, Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion. On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as the CEO and president of Amazon and took over the role of executive chairman. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as the CEO and president of Amazon. (Full article...)

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WikiProjects

Main project: WikiProject Internet
Related WikiProjects: Blogging • Websites • Early Web History • Internet culture

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... that blogger Charles LeBlanc interviewed a man who carried out a mass shooting the following year?
... that Doris Tulifau, after founding an online campaign to counter Samoan gender-based violence, moved to Samoa to expand the campaign in person?
... that a Google Doc written by a high school student has become "part of the online queer canon"?
... that statements about the character Ridley's reasons for not being in the fighting game series Super Smash Bros. led to Internet memes about the character's large size?
... that a researcher called the community on the short-lived collaborative writing website One Million Monkeys Typing "astonishingly harmonious"?
... that Ecco2K created a fashion brand when he was 16 years old by talking online to Chinese factory managers who did not know his age?

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Selected biography

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) was the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore previously served in the U. S. House of Representatives (1977–85) and the U. S. Senate (1985–93), representing Tennessee. He was the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 2000 election, and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work as an environmental activist. Gore has been involved with the development of the Internet since the 1970s, first as a Congressman and later as Senator and Vice-President. His High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (often referred to as the Gore Bill) was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway." Leonard Kleinrock, a key player in the development of the ARPANET, considers the act to be a critical moment in Internet history. Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn stated in the 2000 article "Al Gore and the Internet", that Gore was "the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

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

Image 1
Internet users in 2023 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 2
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 3Wi-Fi range diagram (from Internet access)
Image 4
Number of Internet hosts worldwide: 1969–2019
Source: Internet Systems Consortium. (from History of the Internet)
Image 5BBN Technologies TCP/IP Internet map of early 1986 (from History of the Internet)
Image 6The corridor where the World Wide Web was born, on the ground floor of building No. 1 at CERN (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 7Where the WEB was born (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 8
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 9The digital divide measured in terms of bandwidth is not closing, but fluctuating up and down. Gini coefficients for telecommunication capacity (in kbit/s) among individuals worldwide (from Internet access)
Image 101997 advertisement in State Magazine by the US State Department Library for sessions introducing the then-unfamiliar Web (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 11Map of the TCP/IP test network in February 1982 (from History of the Internet)
Image 12Satellite Internet access via VSAT in Ghana (from Internet access)
Image 13T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992 (from History of the Internet)
Image 14Wi-Fi logo (from Internet access)
Image 15Postage stamp of Azerbaijan (2004): 35 Years of the Internet, 1969–2004 (from History of the Internet)
Image 16
Broadband affordability in 2011
This map presents an overview of broadband affordability, as the relationship between average yearly income per capita and the cost of a broadband subscription (data referring to 2011). Source: Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute. (from Internet access)
Image 17The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server. (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 18
Internet users in 2015 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 19
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 20Internet Connectivity Access layer (from Internet access)
Image 21Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic, and Tim Berners-Lee at the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 22First Internet demonstration, linking the ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET on November 22, 1977 (from History of the Internet)
Image 23Stamped envelope of Russian Post issued in 1993 with stamp and graphics dedicated to first Russian underwater digital optic cable laid in 1993 by Rostelecom from Kingisepp to Copenhagen (from History of the Internet)
Image 24
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 25The "message block", designed by Paul Baran in 1962 and refined in 1964, is the first proposal of a data packet. (from History of the Internet)

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I mean, you go to the Internet and you can see all these conversations and arguments that our fans have about our music and that's wonderful to know, that people would take the time to be that involved.

— Alex Lifeson, 1998

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Main topics

Internet

Articles: Application layer; ARPANET; Blog; Browsers; CERN; Collaborative software; Computer file; Computer network; Computer networking; DARPA; Data (computing); Electronic commerce; E-mail; English on the Internet; FidoNet; File sharing; History of the Internet; HTML; HyperCard; Hyperlink; ICANN; Instant messaging; Internet access; Internet capitalization conventions; Internet censorship; Internet Control Message Protocol; Internet democracy; Internet Exchange Point; Internet Governance Forum; Internet privacy; Internet Protocol; Internet protocols; Internet research; Internetworking; Massively multiplayer online role-playing game; Mosaic (web browser); National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Net neutrality; Online chat; Peering; Remote access; Transmission Control Protocol; Scale-free network; Search engine; Security; Social network service; Unicode; Uniform resource locator; User agent; User Datagram Protocol; ViolaWWW; Virtual private network; VoIP; Web browser; Web resource; Web service; Wide area network; World Summit on the Information Society; World Wide Web

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