Commercialization of the Technology

Commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive, private network services, but also the development of commercial products implementing the Internet technology. In the early 1980s, dozens of vendors were incorporating TCP/IP into their products because they saw buyers for that approach to networking. Unfortunately they lacked both real information about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this approach to networking. Many saw it as a nuisance add-on that had to be glued on to their own proprietary networking solutions: SNA, DECNet, Netware, NetBios. The DoD had mandated the use of TCP/IP in many of its purchases but gave little help to the vendors regarding how to build useful TCP/IP products.

In parallel with the commercialization efforts that were highlighted by the Interop activities, the vendors began to attend the IETF meetings that were held 3 or 4 times a year to discuss new ideas for extensions of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Starting with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these meetings now often exceeds a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community and paid for by the attendees themselves. This self-selected group evolves the TCP/IP suite in a mutually cooperative manner. The reason it is so useful is that it is comprised of all stakeholders: researchers, end users and vendors.

Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and commercial communities. In the beginning of the Internet, the emphasis was on defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation. As the network grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the network would not scale. Manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults. In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way. Several protocols for this purpose were proposed, including Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP (designed, as its name would suggest, for simplicity, and derived from an earlier proposal called SGMP) , HEMS (a more complex design from the research community) and CMIP (from the OSI community). A series of meeting led to the decisions that HEMS would be withdrawn as a candidate for standardization, in order to help resolve the contention, but that work on both SNMP and CMIP would go forward, with the idea that the SNMP could be a more near-term solution and CMIP a longer-term approach. The market could choose the one it found more suitable. SNMP is now used almost universally for network based management.

In the last few years, we have seen a new phase of commercialization. Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services. The Internet has now become almost a "commodity" service, and much of the latest attention has been on the use of this global information infrastructure for support of other commercial services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users easy access to information linked throughout the globe. Products are available to facilitate the provisioning of that information and many of the latest developments in technology have been aimed at providing increasingly sophisticated information services on top of the basic Internet data communications.

AI AND E-COMMERCE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Conventional data processing is concerned with inputting and processing data in the form of facts and figures in order to produce operational or management information.Artificial intelligence,on the other hand, is based on knowledge.A widely accepted definition of artificial intelligence is based on a test devised by Alan Turing in 1950.

Suppose there are two identical terminals in a one connected to a computer,and the other operated remotely by a person.If someone using the two terminals is unable to tell which is connected to the computer and which is operated by the person, the computer can be credited with intelligence.

Following on from this idea we could say that artificial intelligence is the science of making machine perform tasks that would require intelligence if done by people.Artificial intelligence covers such fields as expert systems,problem solving,robot control, intelligence database querying and pattern recognition.Pattern recognition includes speech comprehension and synthesis,image processing and robot vision.Getting a computer to communicate in natural language is yet another field of research.One aspect of artificially intelligent computers is that they should be capable of learning and therefore improving their performance at a given task.Computer have been successfully trained,for example-to recognize (with as much accuracy as a human being) a face as either male or female, and to be able to recognize an underground train station as being crowded or not.

ELECTRONIC COMMERCE (E-COMMERCE)

E-commerce is broadly defined as the use of telecommunication or wide area networking to carry out financial transactions.With the emergence of internet and inexpensive personal computers,E-commerce has grown widely now a days.Almost infinite variety of goods and services is available on the internet.You can bid for any kinds of work,purchase equipment and materials, book your holiday, hire car, theatre tickets and restaurant meal, buy anything from groceries to a car.You can buy or sell stocks and shares on-line, do your banking, and apply for a job.

Informations on Hardware

About Microsoft Hardware

For more than two decades, the Hardware Group has employed innovative engineering, cutting-edge industrial design and extensive usability testing to create products of exceptional quality and durability that enhance the software experience and strengthen the connection between consumers and their PC. Microsoft Hardware leads the industry in ergonomic engineering, industrial design, and hardware/software compatibility, offering consumers an easier, more convenient and more enjoyable computing experience. Microsoft IntelliMouse® Explorer, which launched in 1999, earned a place on PCWorld.com’s list of “The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years” as the first mainstream optical mouse that “brought gunk-free pointing devices” to a broad consumer base.

HOW COMPUTERS WORK?

A general purpose computer has four main sections: the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), the control unit, the memory, and the input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are interconnected by busses, often made of groups of wires.
The control unit, ALU, registers, and basic I/O (and often other hardware closely linked with these) are collectively known as a central processing unit (CPU). Early CPUs were comprised of many separate components but since the mid-1970s CPUs have typically been constructed on a single integrated circuit called a microprocessor.

HARDWARE

The term hardware covers all of those parts of a computer that are tangible objects. Circuits, displays, power supplies, cables, keyboards, printers and mice are all hardware.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Programming languages provide various ways of specifying programs for computers to run. Unlike natural languages, programming languages are designed to permit no ambiguity and to be concise. They are purely written languages and are often difficult to read aloud. They are generally either translated into machine language by a compiler or an assembler before being run, or translated directly at run time by an interpreter. Sometimes programs are executed by a hybrid method of the two techniques. There are thousands of different programming languages—some intended to be general purpose, others useful only for highly specialized applications.

SOFTWARE

Software refers to parts of the computer that have no material form; programs, data, protocols, etc are all software. When software is stored in hardware that cannot easily be modified (such as BIOS ROM in an IBM PC compatible), it is sometimes termed firmware to indicate that it falls into an area of uncertainty between hardware and software.

THE FIRST INTERNET

ARPANET

The ARPANET was the first wide area packet switching network, the "Eve" network of what has evolved into the Internet we know and love today.

The ARPANET was developed by the IPTO under the sponsorship of DARPA, and conceived and planned by Lick Licklider, Lawrence Roberts, and others as described earlier in this section.

The ARPANET went into labor on August 30, 1969, when BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurements Center at UCLA. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, designed to handle the ARPANET network interface. In a famous piece of Internet lore, on the side of the crate, a hardware designer at BBN named Ben Barker had written "Do it to it, Truett", in tribute to the BBN engineer Truett Thach who traveled with the computer to UCLA on the plane.

The UCLA team responsible for installing the IMP and creating the first ARPANET node included graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield. Wingfield had built the hardware interface between the UCLA computer and the IMP, the machines were connected, and within a couple of days of delivery the IMP was communicating with the local NMC host, an SDS Sigma 7 computer running the SEX operating system. Messages were successfully exchanged, and the one computer ARPANET was born. A picture of Leonard Kleinrock with the first ARPANET IMP is shown below (click on the picture to link to a larger image on Kleinrock's home site).

The first full ARPANET network connection was next, planned to be with Douglas Engelbart's NLS system at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), running an SDS-940 computer with the Genie operating system and connected to another IMP. At about 10:30 PM on October 29'th, 1969, the connection was established over a 50 kbps line provided by the AT&T telephone company, and a two node ARPANET was born.

Milestones. Some of the milestones in the early history of the ARPANET are summarized below:
1)East Coast. In March, 1970, the consulting company Bolt, Beranek & Newman joined the ARPANET, becoming the first ARPANET node on the US east coast.

2)Remote Access. In September, 1971, the first Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) was deployed, enabling individual computer terminals to dial directly into the ARPANET, thereby greatly increasing the ease of network connections and leading to significant growth.

3)1972. By the end of 1972 there were 24 sites on the ARPANET, including the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Board.

4)1973. By the end of 1973 there were 37 sites on the ARPANET, including a satellite link from California to Hawaii. Also in 1973, the University College of London in England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway become the first international connections to the ARPANET.

5)1974. In June, 1974, there were 62 computers connected to the ARPANET.

6)1977. In March, 1977, there were 111 computers on the ARPANET.

7)1983. In 1983, an unclassified military only network called MILNET split off from the ARPANET, remaining connected only at a small number of gateways for exchange of electronic mail that could be easily disconnected for security reasons if required. MILNET later become part of the DoD Defense Data Network, or DDN.

8)1985. By the middle of the 80's there were ARPANET gateways to external networks across North America, Europe, and in Australia, and the Internet was global in scope. Marty Lyons has created a map of the existing network gateways from 18 June 1985.

9)1990. The ARPANET was retired in 1990. Most university computers that were connected to it were moved to networks connected to the NSFNET, passing the torch from the old network to the new.

COMPUTERS

SOME HISTORY ON COMPUTERS AND IT'S BACKGROUND

What is the difference between a Computer and a Calculator? One the most satisfactory definition states, "An automatic computer is a machine that manipulates symbols in accordance with given rules in a predetermined and self-directed manner.."The most significant word here undoubtedly is "self directed". Any calculating device whether it be an abacus or an adding machine must be other-directed, that is, man directed.An automatic computer, however has the ability to accept data and then work upon that data according to a preset program without human intervention, although human beings must, of course, devise the program which controls the automatic manipulation of the data. Regardless whether the computer is one of the special-purpose types for solving engineering and scientific problems or a general-purpose computer manufactured in large quantities, the principle remains the same.

The first true computer to be manufactured in any quantities was Ford Instrument Computer in 1915. A mechanical analog device. The Ford Computer was a marvel of gear trains, linkages, and differentials. It was difficult to keep in adjustment and very complicated to manufacture, but it did the job it was intended to do- find and keep the range for naval guns.

In 1930, the first general-purpose computer was built at MIT under the direction of Dr. Vannever Bush. It to was a mechanical monster, but it could be disconnected and reconnected to solve different equations.All of these devices were analog. That is they operated on real inputs such as voltages or the rotation of gears and they produced real outputs, such as training of the guns of a main battery.

Analog computers have both advantages and disadvantages. They produce almost instantaneous output, but since they act upon analogies to numbers rather than on numbers themselves, their output is never perfectly accurate. They can be used to train a gun but not to calculate a payroll.

In 1939, a major breakthrough occurred when Dr. Howard Aiken of Harvard completed the basic plans for a sequential, digital, electromechanical computer. This computer was an unwieldy conglomeration of office calculating devices, but it embodied two important concepts. First, it operated on real numbers, rather than on analogs of numbers, and, second it had the ability to make decisions. That is, it could compare two numbers when a partial result had been obtained and then follow one of two paths for further computation, depending upon the result of the comparison. All computers operate on this principle today.Dr. Aiken's machine was still an electromechanical device and naturally was subject to failure through wear and tear and had such commonplace troubles as simply getting dirty. Also there were obvious physical limitation on the speeds which it could be operated.