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Information Technology Concepts- What is the Internet?

Occasionally I might end up having a homework assignment that might have to be posted on a blog, so you might see some stuff that doesn’t really pertain to the overall content of my blog, but it loosely relates since this blog is about school. So without further ado, my first assignment that requires a blog post. In terms of the history of technology, the internet is maybe a middle schooler. The internet as we know it today has only been around for maybe 10 years. But some of the foundations of the internet were actually started around 50 years ago. The internet actually started by a government organization called ARPA or Advanced Research Projects Agency. It started as a need to share information from one computer to another. The first nodes or computers on the network were between 4 universities, UCLA, UC Berkley, Stanford and the University of Utah. Once these computers were able to communicate, other computers started joining the network across the US. But it was hard work and took a lot of time to send messages and email or electronic mail from one node to another. And when other networks across the globe began appearing and wanting to connect to the network in the USA, it was hard work because the protocols that had been in place for connecting node to node in America, wasn’t the same as in other countries. This established two major components of the internet that are still in use today. The TCP/IP or Transmission control protocol / Internet Protocols and the DNS or Domain Name System. TCP/IP established protocols or ways that networks should connect to the internet, all around the globe. This made connecting one node in one country to another one much easier. The DNS established a way to identify nodes or computers on the internet based on the levels of the domain i.e Top level (.com .edu .gov) or second level (google amazon yahoo). Both of these helped the internet grow faster, but it was still limited to Universities and research until 1989 when ARPANET ended and ISPs (internet service providers started providing consumers with access to the internet).

As consumers started getting online, more and more people were able to connect to other people around the world. But the speed that users could connect was limited by the fact that the data was being sent over phone lines. This made data transfer slow. ISPs wanted to provide faster internet to their customers. So around 2005 broadband internet was created. This was a way for users to connect to the internet over cable lines as opposed to phone lines. Since then we have only continued to expand the type of signal that is being generated into homes and some places even use fiber optics which is very thin strips of glass transmitting data via light.

Image provided by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/_after8_/3554986953 References:  -https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/ -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UStbvRnwmQ With more people than ever before on the internet, it was only a matter of time before we found new ways to communicate over the World Wide Web. Now you may think that the internet and the web are the same thing, but they aren’t. The internet is the network or the way that all the computers connect together across the world. The web is a way to navigate the data that is being shared between all those computers. But how do users now connect to each other? The biggest and most well known is social networking. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit all allow users to post messages and pictures to communicate with other people. Then there are sites like Linked In and Monster that allow corporations and businesses to communicate with Employees and future employees. Social networking has become a standard across the internet. About the only other thing that is standard is emails. Some of the older generations might not know how to send an email, but almost everyone that uses the internet multiple times a day knows how to send an email.

Image provided by: https://www.pickpik.com/human-google-pinterest-pattern-social-media-50894 Other forms of communication across the internet would be blogs and wikis. A blog is a way for a user to post an entry for anyone to see. This post that I am making now is a blog. It is kind of like an online diary or journal. A wiki is a site where any user on the internet can go in and edit the information displayed on the particular topic. Wikipedia is the most well known for this. Another form of communication that allows users to express themselves on the internet are podcasts and webcasts. These are audio or video files that are released periodically for the internet to access. They could be fictional and telling a story, or it could be similar to a blog or vlog (video blog) that talks about what is going on with the person running it. The last bit of communication that is relevant today is streaming media. This is media across the world that is accessible for anyone on the internet to access. Somewhere there is a storage of files. Whether that is video or audio media and it millions of users a day are accessing those files and allowing their computer to process the data in real time as it is brought into their system. Biggest examples of this would be sites like youtube and Netflix. References:  -https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-networking -https://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/social_networking/

Other than communications today’s internet is otherwise used for commerce. Allowing internet users to purchase products on the internet that they want. The two different type for this would be e- commerce or electrical (internet) commerce and M-commerce or mobile commerce conducted on cell phones. Both of these types allow users to buy almost anything they could think of through the internet.

Image provided by: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E_commerce.jpg References:  -https://ecommerceguide.com/guides/what-is-ecommerce/ -https://www.thebalancesmb.com/let-s-ask-the-basic-question-what-is-ecommerce-1141599 The last thing I want to leave you to think about would be the security of the internet. Back when it was first established, there wasn’t much of a need to make sure information was protected because it was research that was being shared between networks. But as soon as commercial users began to appear, people started to look for ways to exploit the internet. The term hacker was created to define someone who sought to use the internet to gain access to data that they might not normally have access to. The amount of e-commerce we have today, it only makes sense that people out there are looking to gain access to personal information to exploit and make a profit off of. So the security of the internet has had to adapt and will continue to adapt and the internet develops, to protect the users that access the billions of web pages around the world.

Other text references taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UStbvRnwmQ

[letownse-blog]

First Post

Just wanted to do a short little post to talk about what this blog will be about. I went to college for a year straight out of high school. That’s what everyone was doing. It was what my parents did, my sister did, and what all my friends were doing. But once I got there, I didn’t have the discipline to go to my classes. There wasn’t anyone telling me I had to be there, so I didn’t go.  After that first year, I joined the army. I went active duty which means that I move base to base whenever they tell me. I was in South Korea for a year, and then a year in Colorado with a year in Afghanistan from there.  After I got back from Afghanistan 4 years after I joined, I moved back home to Indiana. Then I joined the national guard and have put 8 years into the guard. But how does all of that pertain to this blog? Well, throughout the 14 years I have been out of high school I have been to at least 4 different colleges. One of those I have like 60 Credit Hours with because I was using my Post 9/11 GI Bill to go to school. But I exhausted all of those funds.  So here I am, I work at Disneyland and The Walt Disney Company is now paying for my school. So at 32 I’m really working hard to try and finally finish my degree. This blog will be used to talk about what it is like to be taking classes not only at such an older age, but also online, since Disney’s Aspire program is all online classes. So please remain seated with your hands arms feet and legs, inside the Gantry Lift... oh wait... this isn’t Mission Breakout. Well you know... just sit back as I travel through this journey.