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Years from now, the operating system you use will be largely irrelevant, as will be the speed of your computer, the amount of memory you have, and the number of terabytes of storage that hum in the background. Microsoft will keep milking its cash cow, but the industry will move on. Individuals and businesses will stop shelling out big bucks for Windows and the iron to run it. Instead, the major push will be online. Rather than spend money on PCs that become obsolete the week after you purchase them, folks will spend money on big data pipes: It’ll be less about me and more about us. Why? Because so much more is “out there” than “in here.” Count on it.

But what is the Internet? This section answers this burning question (if you’ve asked it). If you don’t necessarily wonder about the Internet’s place in space and time just yet, you will … you will.

You know those stories about computer jocks who come up with great ideas, develop the ideas in their basements (or garages or dorm rooms), release their products to the public, change the world, and make a gazillion bucks?

This isn’t one of them.

The Internet started in the mid-1960s as an academic exercise — primarily with the RAND Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the National Physical Laboratory in England — and rapidly evolved into a military project, under the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), designed to connect research groups working on ARPA projects.

By the end of the 1960s, ARPA had four computers hooked together — at UCLA, SRI (Stanford), UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah — using systems developed by BBN Technologies (then named Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.). By 1971, it had eighteen. I started using ARPANET in 1975. According to the website www.internetworldstats.com, at the beginning of 2020, the Internet had more than 4.5 billion users worldwide — well over half of the global population.

Today, so many computers are connected directly to the Internet that the Internet’s addressing system is running out of numbers, just as your local phone company is running out of telephone numbers. The current numbering system — named IPv4 — can handle about 4 billion addresses. The next version, named IPv6, can handle this number of addresses:

340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That should last for a while, don’t you think?

Ever wonder why you rarely see hard statistics about the Internet? I’ve found two big reasons:

 Defining terms related to the Internet is devilishly difficult these days. (What do you mean when you say, “X number of computers are connected to the Internet”? Is that the number of computers up and running at any given moment? The number of different addresses that are active? The number that could be connected if everybody dialed up at the same time? The number of different computers that are connected in a typical day, or week, or month?)

 The other reason is that the Internet is growing so fast that any number you publish today will be meaningless tomorrow.