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HISTORY OF THE INTERNET |
As interest in wide spread networking grew, and new applications for it arrived, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. TCP/IP's network agnostic approach led to it being easy to use any existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic. In 1984, University College London replaced its transatlantic satellite links with TCP/IP over IPSS.
Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create simple gateways to allow transfer of e-mail, then the most important of applications. Those sites which could only have intermittent connections would use UUCP or Fidonet, and rely on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple e-mail peering, such as allowing access to FTP sites via UUCP or e-mail.
A digital divide
While developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the internet, developing countries began to experience a Digital divide seperating them from the Internet. At the beginning of the 1990s African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications. In 1996 a USAID funded project, the Leland initative , started work on developing full Internet connectivity for the continent. 1997 saw Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gain satellite earth stations, followed by Côte d'Ivoire and Benin in 1998.
In 1991 China saw its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET. China went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own Digital Divide, by implementing a country wide content filter.
Email and Usenet—The growth of the text forum
E-mail is often called the Killer application of the Internet; however e-mail actually predates the Internet. Existing e-mail systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. In 1969 US Air Force users were sending text messages by making punched cards and transmitting them as card decks from one computer to another.
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