What Is the Internet and Why Should I Care?
Businesses are just now waking up to the enormous marketing potential represented by the
Internet_the Mother of all computer networks. In this chapter, we will start by briefly looking
at the history of the Internet so you can better understand the Internet culture and heritage.
Then we will see why so many major companies (computer related and not) are jumping on
the Internet and beginning to reach whole new markets. We will cover the basic Internet
functions that allow you to both receive and distribute information. We will consider just how
many people are really on the Internet, how fast the user base is growing, and the user
demographics to help you evaluate the marketing potential offered by the Internet. Then we
will look at how some businesses are marketing over the Internet. Finally, we will help you
answer the question, "Should we be marketing our products/services over the Internet?"
Introducing the Internet and Its History
In basic terms, the Internet is very much what its name implies. It is an interaction or
interconnection between computer networks. A computer network is an electrical
interconnection between two or more computers. These computers may be in one building,
on a campus of buildings, or across the ocean from each other. Most of today's computer
networks send information between computers over either coaxial cable or telephone wires.
Computer networks allow the users of participating computers to efficiently share information, share programs, share equipment, and communicate with one another. The Internet is a
worldwide interconnection between many different computers and computer networks. To
fully understand the Internet, it is necessary to reflect on a bit of history.
The Internet owes its existence to the Pentagon and the Cold War. If an atomic war were to break out, telephones would be the first victim. So, the United States Government wanted to bomb-proof the communications of the nation, an essential part of surviving such a horrible event. In 1964, the concept of a center-less network was developed by the Rand
Corporation, the largest think tank in the nation at that time. This would mean that no single
computer would be the weak link that could be destroyed by a well-placed bomb. The
government think tank conceived hundreds and eventually thousands of computers connected in parallel with plenty of communication-line redundancy built in, the way the human brain is
wired, so that the loss of a few key "neurons" would not result in the loss of key bodily
functions.
They defined a way to bundle information into structures called packets along with the
network address of the recipient's electronic mailbox. Like a message in a bottle, these
packets of information are cast out to drift along the sea of computers in the network, each
forwarding the packet closer to the network address it contains. Once the packet reaches its
destination, the packet structure (i.e., the bottle) dissolves and what is left is the message. All
computer networks use this packet scheme of packaging your messages and delivering them.
The results of all this thinking, planning and innovating was called ARPANET after the
Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the sponsor of the project. It is ironic that
the conception of the Internet was originally a military-driven national security project. Today,
with the collapse of the Cold War, it is used as a backbone of the peaceful economic security
of the entire world. This goes a long way to demonstrate the theory that government is very
useful to accomplish some things that private enterprise cannot do on its own. It is difficult to
imagine a similar setting in private enterprise in which executives of competing corporations
would be forced to share their trade secrets or patented and highly sensitive research
information, but that's exactly what happened with the inception of the ARPANET.
To accomplish all this interactivity and initiate a cooperative computer network, it was
necessary to develop a common "language" or protocol which would be used to move these
packets of information through the complex web of computer networks to their intended
recipients. This protocol is now known as TCP/IP or transmission control protocol/Internet
protocol. TCP defines how packets are to be handled and IP does the same for the
addressing of these packets. Both these protocols are the essential part of the Internet.
Transparent to the user, they are the bottles or packets that your computer sends to others on
the network with the messages inside.
Since its inception, the Internet has grown from four to thousands of interconnected
networks. In 1989 the ARPANET was decommissioned. The greatest measure of its success
lies in the fact that when it was shut down no one even noticed. The number of users of the
Internet began to grow and is still growing today_at a rate of 20% per month by many
estimates. Amazingly enough, the speed of growth is increasing steadily all the time. At the
present rate of growth, every man, woman, and child on earth will have access to the Internet
by the year 2000. Obviously, this leads one to believe that the rate of growth will decline, but
as of this writing, the current rate of growth is still increasing!
This rapid expansion is mostly due to companies and individuals joining the Internet to
control phone and Fax costs, research costs, and other costs of doing business. Indeed, the
first trick we all learn when we first arrive onthe Internet is how to send E-mail, short for
electronic mail. E-mail is probably the major force for this incredible expansion of the Internet.
Sooner or later, people connected to the Internet begin to explore and find more and more
resources and things that make their jobs easier, until eventually they wonder if they can
perform traditional marketing functions that can help their business grow. The answer is a big
yes, and we will show you how by the time you finish this book.
As soon as a business gets two or more computers, the first thing they are likely to do is
to network the computers together. This allows for greater productivity and more worker
cooperation. The two basic types of networks are local area networks (LANs) and wide area
networks (WANs). A LAN is a computer network consisting of a group of a local (within a
single building or campus) computers. A WAN is a computer network that ties distant
computer systems (e.g., across town or across the earth) together. Most of today's
companies today use some type of LAN and/or WAN technology, and the popularity of
computer networks continues to grow steadily. Today it is possible to send computer files
containing text, voice, pictures, even full-motion video over LANs and WANs. Each LAN or
WAN might connect thousands of employees or related companies together. Using the
network, you can broadcast messages and files to everyone or just to a special group of
people. You can even have online conferences, or group discussions, and share your
appointment calendars. All these functions make it easier for individuals and companies to
function.
The Internet is an infrastructure, in place and functioning today, that ties thousands of
LANs and thousands of WANs together. We are then able to communicate with a vastly
larger audience. One must stretch the imagination to understand the number of users and the
amount of information available on all of these independently maintained networks connected
together by the Internet. So you can begin to see that the capability to research almost any
topic and share any type of information that can be loaded into a computer_including photos,
video clips, voice, and music recordings_is here now and available for all to use.
The productivity gains that we have experienced in the past using individual LANs and
WANs will pale in comparison to future productivity gains when we are all more proficient at
using this super-interconnection, the Internet in all its glory. Soon, the Internet may feed the
world!
