Portal:Internet

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Internet Portal

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (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, 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 network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

Selected article

A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), formerly Universal Resource Identifier, is a unique sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource, such as resources on a webpage, mail address, phone number, books, real-world objects such as people and places, concepts. URIs are used to identify anything described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and people who are described using the Friend of a Friend vocabulary would each have an individual URI.

URIs which provide a means of locating and retrieving information resources on a network (either on the Internet or on another private network, such as a computer filesystem or an Intranet) are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Therefore, URLs are a subset of URIs, ie. every URL is a URI (and not necessarily the other way around). Other URIs provide only a unique name, without a means of locating or retrieving the resource or information about it; these are Uniform Resource Names (URNs). The web technologies that use URIs are not limited to web browsers. (Full article...)

More selected articles

Read more

edit

Selected picture

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.

More selected pictures

Read more

edit

News

Wikinews Internet portal

More at Wikinews

edit

WikiProjects

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

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

... that Julia Allison has been described as one of the first influencers?
... that Alexandra Hunt, a former stripper, opened an OnlyFans account in response to an Internet troll during her campaign for a seat in the United States House of Representatives?
... that two years after Instagram's Dear White Staffers started out as a small meme account, it was credited with kickstarting the unionization of U.S. congressional staff?
... that a verse by Kendrick Lamar for The Melodic Blue was leaked before the album's release and went viral as an Internet meme?
... that a pro-EU explanation of how Baileys is made, given by British MP Mike Gapes, was described as being "infinitely memeable" and giving him a "bizarre online infamy"?
... that Internet activist Sally Burch was refused entry into Argentina because her presence was considered to be disruptive?

edit

Selected biography

Danah Michele Boyd (or danah boyd, born Danah Michele Mattas in 1977), is an American academic, researcher, and blogger best known for media appearances where she speaks about social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace. Since 2003, she and her research have been quoted on the subject of social networking in dozens of different articles in media sources such as NPR, Wired, MSNBC, USA Today, Newsweek and The O'Reilly Factor. She was also the subject of a major profile in The New York Times in 2003 and the Financial Times in 2006. She initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andy van Dam, and then pursued her Master's Degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. She advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2006, and will be a non-resident fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the 2007-2008 academic year.

More selected biographies

Read more

General images - load new batch

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

Image 1Internet Connectivity Access layer (from Internet access)
Image 2Stamped 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 3
Internet users in 2015 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 4
Internet users in 2023 as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 5The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server. (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 6Satellite Internet access via VSAT in Ghana (from Internet access)
Image 7The 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 8Wi-Fi logo (from Internet access)
Image 9
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)
Image 10Where the WEB was born (from History of the World Wide Web)
Image 11Postage stamp of Azerbaijan (2004): 35 Years of the Internet, 1969–2004 (from History of the Internet)
Image 12Map of the TCP/IP test network in February 1982 (from History of the Internet)
Image 13
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 14The "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)
Image 15First Internet demonstration, linking the ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET on November 22, 1977 (from History of the Internet)
Image 16
Number of Internet hosts worldwide: 1969–2019
Source: Internet Systems Consortium. (from History of the Internet)
Image 17Robert 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 18T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992 (from History of the Internet)
Image 191997 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 20BBN Technologies TCP/IP Internet map of early 1986 (from History of the Internet)
Image 21
Mobile broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 22
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from Internet access)
Image 23The 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 24Wi-Fi range diagram (from Internet access)
Image 25
Fixed broadband Internet subscriptions in 2012
as a percentage of a country's population
Source: International Telecommunication Union. (from History of the Internet)

edit

Selected quote

You affect the world by what you browse.

— Tim Berners-Lee

More selected quotes

More at Wikiquote

edit

More Did you know...

... that an April Fool's Day "news story" which suggested that bull sharks had been found in Minneapolis's Minnehaha Creek (creek pictured) drew almost 1,000 hits a day to the Nokomis East Neighborhood Association's website?
... that sociology of the Internet is one of newly emerged branches of sociology concerned with issues such as the digital divide, online social capital and public sphere?
... that UnrealIRCd is used on the largest number of IRC servers?

More did you know facts

edit

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

edit

Featured content

Extended content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Internet}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.