"Bruce Sterling - Internet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing
and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the
phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable
as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources.

A fax machine is only valuable if *everybody else* has a fax
machine. Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET,
too, was a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became
an utter necessity.

In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act,
through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET
set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster,
shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and
expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. 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.

The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied
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. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard
feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) 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.)

ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its
own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's
functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of
TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a
mere twenty-one years 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.

The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular,