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Which two people have done more for world unity
than anyone else? Well, Prof. TCP and Dr. IP must be
somewhere in the Top 10. They have done more to unify the world
than all the diplomats in the world have. They do not respect national
borders, time zones, cultures, industrial conglomerates or anything
like that. They allow the sharing of information around the
world, and are totally open for anyone to use. Top marks to Prof.
TCP and Dr. IP, the true champions of freedom and democracy.
Many of the great
inventions/developments of our time were things that were not really
predicted, such as CD -R OMs , RADAR , silicon transistors,
fiber-optic cables, and, of course, the Internet . The Internet
itself is basically an infrastructure of interconnected networks
which run a common protocol. The nightmare of interfacing
the many computer systems around the world was solved because of
two simple protocols: TCP and IP . Without them the Internet
would not have evolved so quickly and possibly would not have occurred
at all. TCP and IP are excellent protocols as they are simple and
can be run over any type of network, on any type of computer system.
The Internet
is often confused with the World Wide Web (WWW ), but
the WWW is only one application of the Internet. Others include
electronic mail (the No.1 application), file transfer, remote
login and so on.
The amount of information transmitted
over networks increases by a large factor every year. This is due
to local area networks, wide area networks and of course, traffic
over the Internet . It is currently estimated that traffic
on the Internet doubles every 100 days and that three people join
the Internet every second. This means an eightfold increase in traffic
over a whole year. It is hard to imagine such growth in any other
technological area. Imagine if cars were eight times faster each
year, or could carry eight times the number of passengers each year
(and of course roads and driveways would have to be eight times
larger each year).
© W.
Buchanan, 2000
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