THE INTERNET
The Internet originated as a system used for research by the military in the
USA. Universities were the next group to connect to the system. The Internet started
to develop as a commercial system in the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, home
users were starting to connect to the Internet in significant numbers. Internet usage
is still growing quickly and the number of hours we spend online is rising sharply.
The United States still leads the way in Internet usage, but Europe is catching up. It
is difficult to predict anything in such a fast-growing area, but at the end of 1999, it
was estimated that between 13 and 14 million people in the UK - about one-fifth of
the population - had access to the Internet, while worldwide, at least 100 million
people are connected to the system. E-mail is the simplest application of the
Internet, but it is also the most popular with both businesses and personal users. E-
mail is a straightforward and cost-effective way of communicating using
Internet, falling somewhere between the phone and the fax in
terms of formality and speed. E-mail is cheap and it only takes a
few seconds for a message to reach the Internet. At the
moment, the computer is the most common way people
connect to the Internet, followed by mobile phones, but in the
future, television sets will also have Internet capabilities.
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