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Thousands
upon thousands of transactions are occurring every day on the
"Information Superhighway" both in file transactions
and monetary transactions via credit cards and stocks.
Whenever someone buys a new computer today, no matter how
much, or how little they know about computers, the question on
that person's mind is, "Does this thing have the
Internet?" Or, "How easily can I connect to the
Internet with this thing?" The buyer doesn't even know
what the computer is called, well they do, its called
"thing," ask them "What is the Internet,"
and they'll reply "The Internet is what I want!"
With one invention in demand by so many individuals, in my
humble opinion, is the greatest invention of the 20th Century
and will help us progress into the 21st Century with greater
ease.
The
origins of the Internet read like a family tree. The parents
of the Internet are the people that worked for ARPA, the
United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research
Projects Agency. Leave it to the people of the 1960s to bring
us something so wacky, fascinating and addictive! This new
system of information transferals was known as ARPANET, the
base technology of the Internet. It wasn't until the 1970s
when scientists finally began studying data transfer protocols
between one or more computer networks. The ARPA discovered
that the strength of the system was based on the switching
capacity between miscellaneous networks. The mighty Internet
was born! The large universities in the United States began to
realize this fascinating technology in the 1980s. They decided
to use it for its vast file transfer protocols (FTP) and it's
e-mail capabilities, allowing students to e-mail those last
minute papers to their professors for grading. But now in the
1990s, the emergence of the Internet as a necessity of the
workplace, is also a necessity of the home, which can now be a
combined establishment, doing all of the work from a home
personal computer (PC). 20
The
business aspect is making the Internet highly marketable in
today's society. The chance for corporations to expand their
consumer base is growing as well as the opportunity for the
little people out there in the world to be heard. People who
have a problem getting around in public are finding it easier
to get what they need, by using the Internet to purchase these
necessities, and have the product(s) delivered to their door.
For those people that are paraplegic, new voice recognition
technology can help to order off the Internet as well. The
businesses that advertise on the Internet, both large and
small, are bound to learn of others products and their
companies expanding due to their newly discovered consumer
base. With all the opportunities these businesses receive from
the Internet, the business aspect of the Internet is only
beginning to boom. According to a television commercial for a
Canadian investment firm (seen December 30, 1998), Altamira
[http://www.altamira.com], the Internet will be a major
factor in the transaction market by the year 2007, dealing
with more than one trillion dollars in online transactions.
For a business to miss out on this slice of the monetary pie
would be financial suicide to that company. They would lose a
large portion of the market to the competition and that would
pose a threat to the company's bankruptcy.
What
else can the Internet do for the betterment of society?
Another large issue in many countries is that of women's
rights. The Internet could possibly help women benefit from
the job problems associated with maternity leaves. Depending
on the type of job the woman has, she could still send and
receive documents to and from her co-workers and bosses or she
could be sending the documents to her staff, depending on her
level in the business. Their company while spending time at
home could still pay these women their salary. This is
important because the home would probably provide a calmer
atmosphere for the woman and would have a lower level of
stress than the busy office setting. And when the woman
returns to her work after the maternity leave, she'll be
up-to-date in the news surrounding the company, nor will she
be behind in her workload, which benefits the company as well
as the woman.
Personal
home/web pages are the big things on the Internet for the
"everyday" person. The person not using the Internet
for business wants to be heard by the same amount of people as
the companies receive. Most of the time they are low
maintenance, slow-paced ramblings by someone who has an
opinion just as important as the next person, but he or she
just cannot find the time to update this page on a weekly or
even monthly basis, even when he or she says their page will
be updated periodically. Now, I must admit I'm a culprit of
this crime as well, so I know what I'm talking about when I
say how petty some web pages are. But, there is a flip side to
this vision. There are some rather astounding personal web
pages out there in 91Netland, but you just have to find them,
hence the term "surfing the web." But, most of the
pages you come across on your travels have a certain
importance to the creator or "webmaster" of that
page. More often than not, he or she is detailing their life
to the surfer (or is that sufferer?!). Sometimes quality isn't
better than quantity, and that's how many amateur webmasters
view their pages, as just a release from reality to a virtual
reality, where grammar and spelling take a backseat.
With all of
the new uses for the Internet springing up on a monthly, even
weekly basis, our future and the 21st Century are looking
brighter than ever. Young entrepreneurs can see how a business
runs its web page(s) and can ask the webmaster how to make
their own page(s) look as good as or better than the
professionally created web page. Businesses are sure to propel
themselves onto the "on ramp" and fly down the
"Information Superhighway," where the speed limits
are sure to increase as the number of personal, professional
and informative web pages reach their full potential. But for
now, we will have to go surfing to find which organization has
the best Y2K Raid for the Y2K bug!
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