Internet
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982 – 83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols. In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
Internet
By the late 20th century the internet had become the principal global means of information exchange for individuals as well as multinational corporations. Its origins lay in the internal linking of computers in the US Defense Department in the 1960s and research relating to the control of missiles and bombers. These so-called intranets evolved into the internet (a contraction of ‘internetwork’), a term first used in the 1970s but increasingly widely used from the later 1980s and early 1990s. The networking of computers was first publicly seen at the 1972 International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC), the same year in which early applications of electronic mail were being explored. Other developments followed as efforts intensified to build communications between different groups of researchers or military constituencies. The introduction of the internet as it is recognized today was facilitated by cooperation between US federal agencies and other international organizations. The World Wide Web, a term that came into current usage in the 1990s, was a means of accessing information—text, graphics, sound, visual, moving image, and virtual reality. It became a vehicle for a whole range of electronic (or ‘e-’) services such as shopping, banking, travel, and insurance as well as an increasingly prominent means of personal and business communication, e-mail. Its popularity was closely interlinked with the widespread use of Personal Computers (PCs) and the international proliferation of internet cafés, providing individuals with almost limitless possibilities for communication. The design of websites—increasingly important to corporations, public institutions, and organizations as a means of giving them a competitive edge—has become a highly profitable aspect for graphic, communication, and multimedia design consultancies, although it has become increasingly common for individuals and families to design their own.
Internet
The Internet has become an important medium for photographers because it enables images to be transmitted, displayed, and downloaded to computers extremely rapidly worldwide. Photography on the Internet is possible because scanners (and later digital cameras) have been developed to capture images electronically. The first drum scanner was built for the SEAC computer at the US National Bureau of Standards in 1957 by a team led by Russell A. Kirsch (whose other major contribution was to codify the square ‘pixel’ as the basic unit of a digital picture). The Internet itself grew out of the ARPANET, a network developed under the direction of Dr J. C. R. Licklider of the Advanced Research Projects Agency to link major research centres in the USA. The key to the network's flexibility was its decentralized design, involving routers sending packets of information via all possible connections. The ARPANET was commissioned by the US Department of Defense in 1969 and continued to grow throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s independent service providers and bulletin boards were continuing to multiply, and the Internet Activities Board was founded in 1983. The ARPANET ceased to exist in 1990, by which time it had been superseded by its progeny.The Internet developed as a visual medium when the first graphical browsers became available. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee at the Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) proposed a web browser that would display webpages consistently across all computers. With the addition of standardized display formats, the World Wide Web (WWW) came into its own from the mid-1990s. Photographs displayed on the Internet are generally shown as JPEG files (invented by the Joint Photographic Experts Group in 1990), GIF files (Graphics Interchange Format, developed by Bob Berry of Compuserve in 1987), and the non-proprietary PNG format (portable network graphics, a free alternative to GIF, developed by Thomas Boutell from 1995). The JPEG is generally used for photographs whilst the GIF is more suitable for geometric shapes and line art. All these formats involve compression, which means that the image's file size is reduced by simplifying its range of colours. Heavy compression results in obvious image degradation, so there is a trade-off between file size and image quality.The Internet may be used by photographers in several ways. The most obvious is the online gallery, which can showcase one photographer's work or act as a larger repository (e.g. for agencies or picture archives). It presents photographs in a similar way to its physical counterpart, but with the added flexibility of dynamic links and search options to assist viewers. Its layout and style influence its attractiveness to new visitors. The gallery may also be used to sell photographs directly, acting as an online shop. This is useful to freelance photographers wanting to distribute their work, which may be downloaded as secure files or physically mailed to the buyer as prints. Here, the photograph on the website is only a representation of the print, not a substitute for it. The popularity of web-based diaries and writings (weblogs or blogs) has led to collections of images posted as photo journals. Although these are generally by amateurs, the Internet has become a major outlet for online photojournalism. The net speeds delivery of news and photographs, allowing freelancers and small groups to compete with large news agencies. This has broadened the spread of news photography, although some traditional photojournalists fear their skills are being displaced by low-resolution Internet images.The web's interactive forums also allow the widespread discussion of photographic issues, and interactive reviews of new equipment. This benefits both traditional and digital photographers who want to raise questions or develop their skills. These forums also bring new techniques and concerns to light in a worldwide community of photographers. Other sites teach online photographic courses. The Internet also enables large and rarely seen photographic archives—and document collections like the Talbot Correspondence—to be placed online, often as part of major academic projects. For instance, the 17 million photographs of the Bettmann archive, spanning the 20th century, are to be relocated to a mine north-east of Pittsburgh for preservation underground. Their digitized contents will be made available online with other Corbis holdings. However, the physical inaccessibility of the archive concerns some historians, even though the storage conditions will preserve its actual substance. Another problem relating to this and other large collections is the time it takes to digitize material.Copyright is a major issue with Internet photography. As with music files, images can be downloaded from websites and used without their owners' permission. The nature of digital data makes copying extremely easy, and although various technologies, including encryption and digital watermarking, are designed to prevent illegal use of images, most can be circumvented. Additionally, older photographs can be scanned and placed in the digital domain. The resulting problems extend from straightforward breach of copyright to more complex issues such as illegal alteration of images. By 2000 this had become both easy and widespread. In 2004 a widely published composite picture ‘showed’ the US presidential candidate John Kerry with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War protest. It was not only used without the original photographers' permission, but modified for political purposes and posted on websites under the false imprint of Associated Press: a veritable catalogue of infringements. Another notorious 21st-century problem is the creation of pornography at offshore locations and its distribution via the Internet. However, notwithstanding these and other concerns, it seems certain that the Internet will continue to expand rapidly, and probable that, overall, its utility to photographers will continue to outweigh its dangers.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982 – 83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols. In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
Internet
By the late 20th century the internet had become the principal global means of information exchange for individuals as well as multinational corporations. Its origins lay in the internal linking of computers in the US Defense Department in the 1960s and research relating to the control of missiles and bombers. These so-called intranets evolved into the internet (a contraction of ‘internetwork’), a term first used in the 1970s but increasingly widely used from the later 1980s and early 1990s. The networking of computers was first publicly seen at the 1972 International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC), the same year in which early applications of electronic mail were being explored. Other developments followed as efforts intensified to build communications between different groups of researchers or military constituencies. The introduction of the internet as it is recognized today was facilitated by cooperation between US federal agencies and other international organizations. The World Wide Web, a term that came into current usage in the 1990s, was a means of accessing information—text, graphics, sound, visual, moving image, and virtual reality. It became a vehicle for a whole range of electronic (or ‘e-’) services such as shopping, banking, travel, and insurance as well as an increasingly prominent means of personal and business communication, e-mail. Its popularity was closely interlinked with the widespread use of Personal Computers (PCs) and the international proliferation of internet cafés, providing individuals with almost limitless possibilities for communication. The design of websites—increasingly important to corporations, public institutions, and organizations as a means of giving them a competitive edge—has become a highly profitable aspect for graphic, communication, and multimedia design consultancies, although it has become increasingly common for individuals and families to design their own.
Internet
The Internet has become an important medium for photographers because it enables images to be transmitted, displayed, and downloaded to computers extremely rapidly worldwide. Photography on the Internet is possible because scanners (and later digital cameras) have been developed to capture images electronically. The first drum scanner was built for the SEAC computer at the US National Bureau of Standards in 1957 by a team led by Russell A. Kirsch (whose other major contribution was to codify the square ‘pixel’ as the basic unit of a digital picture). The Internet itself grew out of the ARPANET, a network developed under the direction of Dr J. C. R. Licklider of the Advanced Research Projects Agency to link major research centres in the USA. The key to the network's flexibility was its decentralized design, involving routers sending packets of information via all possible connections. The ARPANET was commissioned by the US Department of Defense in 1969 and continued to grow throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s independent service providers and bulletin boards were continuing to multiply, and the Internet Activities Board was founded in 1983. The ARPANET ceased to exist in 1990, by which time it had been superseded by its progeny.The Internet developed as a visual medium when the first graphical browsers became available. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee at the Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) proposed a web browser that would display webpages consistently across all computers. With the addition of standardized display formats, the World Wide Web (WWW) came into its own from the mid-1990s. Photographs displayed on the Internet are generally shown as JPEG files (invented by the Joint Photographic Experts Group in 1990), GIF files (Graphics Interchange Format, developed by Bob Berry of Compuserve in 1987), and the non-proprietary PNG format (portable network graphics, a free alternative to GIF, developed by Thomas Boutell from 1995). The JPEG is generally used for photographs whilst the GIF is more suitable for geometric shapes and line art. All these formats involve compression, which means that the image's file size is reduced by simplifying its range of colours. Heavy compression results in obvious image degradation, so there is a trade-off between file size and image quality.The Internet may be used by photographers in several ways. The most obvious is the online gallery, which can showcase one photographer's work or act as a larger repository (e.g. for agencies or picture archives). It presents photographs in a similar way to its physical counterpart, but with the added flexibility of dynamic links and search options to assist viewers. Its layout and style influence its attractiveness to new visitors. The gallery may also be used to sell photographs directly, acting as an online shop. This is useful to freelance photographers wanting to distribute their work, which may be downloaded as secure files or physically mailed to the buyer as prints. Here, the photograph on the website is only a representation of the print, not a substitute for it. The popularity of web-based diaries and writings (weblogs or blogs) has led to collections of images posted as photo journals. Although these are generally by amateurs, the Internet has become a major outlet for online photojournalism. The net speeds delivery of news and photographs, allowing freelancers and small groups to compete with large news agencies. This has broadened the spread of news photography, although some traditional photojournalists fear their skills are being displaced by low-resolution Internet images.The web's interactive forums also allow the widespread discussion of photographic issues, and interactive reviews of new equipment. This benefits both traditional and digital photographers who want to raise questions or develop their skills. These forums also bring new techniques and concerns to light in a worldwide community of photographers. Other sites teach online photographic courses. The Internet also enables large and rarely seen photographic archives—and document collections like the Talbot Correspondence—to be placed online, often as part of major academic projects. For instance, the 17 million photographs of the Bettmann archive, spanning the 20th century, are to be relocated to a mine north-east of Pittsburgh for preservation underground. Their digitized contents will be made available online with other Corbis holdings. However, the physical inaccessibility of the archive concerns some historians, even though the storage conditions will preserve its actual substance. Another problem relating to this and other large collections is the time it takes to digitize material.Copyright is a major issue with Internet photography. As with music files, images can be downloaded from websites and used without their owners' permission. The nature of digital data makes copying extremely easy, and although various technologies, including encryption and digital watermarking, are designed to prevent illegal use of images, most can be circumvented. Additionally, older photographs can be scanned and placed in the digital domain. The resulting problems extend from straightforward breach of copyright to more complex issues such as illegal alteration of images. By 2000 this had become both easy and widespread. In 2004 a widely published composite picture ‘showed’ the US presidential candidate John Kerry with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War protest. It was not only used without the original photographers' permission, but modified for political purposes and posted on websites under the false imprint of Associated Press: a veritable catalogue of infringements. Another notorious 21st-century problem is the creation of pornography at offshore locations and its distribution via the Internet. However, notwithstanding these and other concerns, it seems certain that the Internet will continue to expand rapidly, and probable that, overall, its utility to photographers will continue to outweigh its dangers.
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