INTERNET

INTRODUCTION
Internet is traditionally written with a capital first letter, as it is a proper noun. The internet society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the World Wide Web Consortium, and several other Internet-related organizations use this convention in their publications.

The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected Computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked web pages and other resources of the World Wide Web (WWW).

History of the Internet
In the 1960s, computer researchers, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor pioneered calls for a joined-up global network to address interoperability problems. Concurrently, several research programs began to research principles of networking between separate physical networks, and this led to the development of packet switching. These included Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock (MIT)'s research programs,
This lead to the development of several packet switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, and X.25. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including UUCP. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This lead to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for inter-networking, where multiple different networks could by joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet protocol suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of inter-network began to form into the idea of a global inter-network that would be called ‘The Internet’, and this began to quickly spread as pre-existing networks were converted over to become compatible with this. This spread quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard and global network. However, the disparity of growth lead to a Digital divide that is still a concern today.
Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet Service Providers in the 1980s, and its expansion into mass popular use in the 1990s; the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by e-mail, text based discussion forums, the World Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided by these innovations would also lead to the inflation and collapse of the Dot-com bubble, a major market collapse. But despite this, growth of the internet continued, and still does.

Terminology
The Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous. The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc. In contrast, the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is one of the services accessible via the Internet, along with various others including e-mail, file sharing, online gaming and others.