Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Development of the globe-spanning Internet has created opportunities
to address a worldwide marketplace, to foster virtual communities, and
to bridge geopolitical and linguistic barriers that once kept peoples from
one part of the world isolated from their peers elsewhere. This chapter
focuses on the use of Internet technologies to build communities and
value in the extended enterprise. The use of portals, intranets, extranets,
and shared virtual environments pose opportunities, challenges, and new
mechanisms for community development in an increasingly geographi-
cally distributed workforce. Services built in this environment have the
potential to reach thousands or even millions of users from all corners of
the world.
What Came Before
Leonard Kleinrock, a researcher at MIT, published his doctoral thesis,
“Information Flow in Large Communication Nets,” in 1961, which estab-
lished the fundamental process of data transfer and routing between inter-
connected computing systems. In 1963, a sociologist named Ted Nelson,
working on creating a user-friendly computer interface coined the term
“hypertext” to refer to embedded links between two textual elements.
Following the Russian launch of the
Sputnik
satellite in 1957, the U.S.
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed and given tasks
including research into command and control uses of computers.
By the end of 1969 the early ARPA Network (see Figure 8.1) was
in place, and sharing of data between research nodes had begun. Dur-
ing the 1970s and early 1980s, the ARPANET project defined internet
working protocols for voice and data communication, including TCP/
IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and Packet Radio
Network (PRNET).
As the ARPANET was extended, user communities emerged between
system administrators, starting with the USENET user's group. Multi-
participant virtual environments also emerged at the end of the 1970s,
with the introduction of early text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)
gaming environments. By 1981, combined transfer services including
e-mail, listserv, and directed file transport were available for BITNET cli-
ents (BITNET was an early research network originally created between
CUNY and Yale and later expanded to other universities), while military
