Internet

Socializing today is a far cry from what it once was, as a child to socialize meant that you were going to get together with friends and ride bikes or play baseball in the street. Today when we think of socializing we automatically think about the internet and Facebook or myspace. When we have a few minuets to kill we jump on our phones and play games or watch a movie on Netflix.

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system. Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing through the government funded Internet backbone. As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services...