מבוא לבניית אתר אינטרנט - התפתחות האינטרנט (מאמר באנגלית) 

The internet is a powerful tool that's growing rapidly. It only exists for about 40 years and it's all ready a gigantic market and every day tool for most of the western world. In this lesson we will learn the basics of the internet, what is it and what can we do with it.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the name for the part of the internet that contains linked hyper textual information. The World Wide Web is build from web sites and web pages; these web pages are built from regular text, linked text, audio, video, pictures and everything else you stumble upon while browsing the internet. The World Wide Web is what most people call 'internet' and it's special because it contains "hyper" text which connects the user to a different web page when he clicks it.

The term "web 2.0" (as an opposite to "web 1.0" or simply "web") is used to emphasize the fact that the web's 2^nd generation is much more then "just" hyper textual pages. The web 2.0 is all about using the network as an infrastructure and put the users at the center. Wikipedia, blogs, sotial networks, ebay, youtube and much more are the living proof for the web 2.0, in which user generated content and users participation are what brings more people to web sites.

As the internet getting more powerful and meaningful to every day life, the amount of data going through it is bigger; as more people download and upload movies, songs and other content and as the web sites are filled with user content, you want your internet to be as fast as it can. Today's regular ADSL can get up to theoretical maximum speed of 8 megabit/second downstream and 1 megabit/second upstream. The ADSL2+ have almost 3 times faster downloading and the VDSL can get up to theoretical maximum speed of 52 megabit/second downstream and 12 megabit/second upstream.  But a low throughput is not only caused by your bandwidth, but may be caused by things such as noise on the line, a bottleneck in your PC, or simply because the internet is busy.

Because the internet is a gather of web sites that connects trough servers all around the world and because the data in these servers is increasing every second, it's very hard to know the exact size of the internet. The internet is growing at a rate of 50-100% each year and at 2005 the internet's size was about 500 terabytes large (these are only remote calculations). This information refers to the "whole" internet; the part of the internet that most people surf in (through search engines like Google and Yahoo) is about 10% than that. The problem the search engines have is that the internet grows faster than they can index it.

The fact that the internet is so big and growing so rapidly is because it changed the functionality of computers. The internet is mainly used for three things: to communicate between people, between people and computers and between computers and computers. Example of the first is e-mail and chats; example to the second is search engines and file sharing and example to the third is the sati@home project in which your computer helps solving world wide calculation problems while you are not working on it. Entrepreneurs find new uses to the internet every day and it seems that this is only the beginning.

On of the benefits of the internet is that you can do incredible things with it; here are five of them:

• Watch your home from anywhere - you can connect your webcam or any security camera to your computer and log in from any distant computer to watch in real-time (you can even record and capture motion) for free.
• Control your computer from another computer - using free software you can connect and control your remote computer just as if you were sitting next to it.
• Operate your entire home - open the curtains, turn on the boiler or even shut down the oven; today's smart homes technology lets you control your entire house from the internet.
• Check your e-mails and chat with friends through your mobile phone - software you can download to your cell phone for free lets you connect to your e-mail server, instant messaging software and chat through the internet in your phone.
• Know where your car is and how fast it's going at real-time - log on and watch your car's history and real time information and location. It costs some money, but it's very cool.

As there are many people who gained the title "internet guru", there are three that seem to have the marvelous talent of foreseeing what will the world like next.

Joseph "Yossi" Vardi - a hi-tech investor who led more then 40 companies to success. Dr. Vardi is known for his involvement in ICQ (Mirabilis), Amazon, AOL and other world wide successful internet companies. Verdi's motto is "income is a distraction".

Michael Arrington - the man behind the technological blog "techcrunch.com", Arrington is one of the Most Influential People on the Web. In his blog, which for many people is the "bible" of the internet, Arrington writes every day about start-up companies and new technologies. Being mention by Arrington is far more important than to be mentioned at the "New York Times".

Philip Rosedale - the founder of the virtual world "second life". Rosedale was the first to build an entire virtual world that is parallel to the real world. In Second Life anyone can "live" and interact just like in the real world, without getting up from his computer. Many believe that this is the future of the internet.