Internet - services, facilities, protocols and architecture

Why the ongoing surge in Internet popularity? The simplest explanation is that there is nothing else like it. Local area networks enable data exchange only with a select set of other users. The Internet is the largest wide area data network in existence—there are nearly 12 million hosts and over 250 000 web sites covering 83 countries. Currently there are around 40 million users which is expected to grow to 100 million by the year 2000. The Internet can now support storage, searching and transmission of full multimedia data including audio, video, formatted documents as well as conventional data. The Internet allows local and wide area users to communicate with more people, in more ways and provides access to the largest range of database servers in the world. The growth in demand for Internet access has been accompanied by the development of an ever-growing range of client–server tools and GUIs (graphical user interfaces). This tutorial paper discusses a number of the pertinent issues relating to the protocols, architecture, services and facilities of the Internet. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.