The worldwide collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols to communicate with one another. At the heart of the Internet is a backbone of high-speed data communication lines between major nodes or host computers, consisting of thousands of commercial, government, educational, and other computer systems, that route data and messages. One or more Internet nodes can go off line without endangering the Internet as a whole or causing communications on the Internet to stop, because no single computer or network controls it. The genesis of the Internet was a decentralized network called ARPANET created by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969 to facilitate communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Eventually other networks, including BITNET, Usenet, UUCP, and NSFnet, were connected to ARPANET. Currently the Internet offers a range of services to users, such as FTP, e-mail, the World Wide Web, Usenet news, Gopher, IRC, telnet, and others. Also called: the Net. See also BITNET, FTP1 (definition 1), Gopher, IRC, NSFnet, telnet, Usenet, UUCP, World Wide Web.
Worldwide network of computer computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange; SYN. cyberspace.
An enormous network consisting of literally millions of hosts from many organizations and countries around the world. It is physically put together from many smaller networks and data travels by a common set of protocols.
The Internet is a network of networks, linking computers to computers by speaking the same language called TCP/IP protocol. Each computer runs software to provide or serve information and/or to access and view information. The Internet includes a variety of electronic services such as electronic mail (e-mail), Telnet (remote login), FTP (File Transfer Protocol for downloading or uploading of files), Gopher (an early, text-only method for accessing Internet documents), and the World Wide Web. The Internet was originally developed for the United States military, and then became used for government, academic, and commercial research and communications.
Global, on-line computer network connecting governments, companies, universities, and many other networks and users. The service offers electronic mail, conferencing and chat services, as well as the ability to access remote computers and send and retrieve files. It began in 1984 and by late 1994 was estimated to have over 40 million users on 11,000 networks in 70 countries, with an estimated one million new users joining each month.
The Internet began with funding from the US National Science Foundation as a means to allow American universities to share the resources of five national supercomputing centers. Its numbers of users quickly grew as access became cheap enough for domestic users to have their own links on personal computers. By the early 1990s the wealth of information made freely available on this network had increased so much that a host of indexing and search services sprang up to answer user demand. Such programs as Gopher, Archie, Veronic, and WAIS (Wide Area Information Service) provide such services through a menu-based interface; the World-Wide Web uses hypertext to allow browsing. + prikaži više

1. Short for Internet.
2. Short for Usenet.