Here is a link my cousin in the USA sent to me and is guaranteed to set a few discussions in motion:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/us-broadband-speed-cost-infographic/
Enjoy.
By the way did the Americans invent the internet? I will have to check this 'fact'.
Hi Brian, How times have changed. My father worked for IBM in the Spango Valley site in Greenock Scotland in the late 50's until moving to ICI in Slough in 1960. I worked on the old ticker tape and punch card IBM computer system at Slough College in the late 60's which had all of the power of a modern mobile phone but was the size of a room. Moved to Apple in 1989 when I started my own business and got onto AOL dial up for the internet when assorted companies were all vying for business. Find it essential now and like my cousin in the USA find it unthinkable that the small users will be forced out by the big multinationals.
Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET brought the two together as part of internetworking his two and several others such as Telenet, NPL, Tymnet, and a load of others in the mid-60s. In 1974 in the UK X.25 was the basis of SERCnet network between British academic and research sites later called JANET (Joint Academic Network) in 1976 when I got my terminal and punchcard printer that gave me stacks of boxes of the bl**dy things in my office for several years until the first storage disks appeared.
Initially the Internet was a network between government research laboratories and some departments of universities, which included us in Cambridge. By the late 1980s it became public and commercially accessible. All restrictions on free use were ended by 1995, which was four years after the WWW came into being.
Tim Berners-Lee was working on the CERN project and faced with problems of information presentation. Physicists around the world needed to share data but there was no standard machine or common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in 1989 for that there should be a big hypertext database with typed links. He eventually built all the tools necessary for a working web starting with the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP. The rest just came from there and now we have both the Internet and WWW. Berners-Lee was up and running with the WWW before the Internet though and one did not initially have anything to do with the other.
Other than that, yes the USA produced the net but it could easily have come from France with their initially very promising model and the UK not far behind. However, CERN as a fully international project with far wider reach than the French design put the US system up front.
Interesting history. We had lectures about it very early on because we were privileged to be using JANET, which became EURONET and then was superseded by the Web. I am not even in the computer 'industry' but was a very early user.
Found this and it has corrected my mis-conception of tying the internet and the WWW together. Learning all the time!!
If you had to isolate the key inventors of the Internet it would have to be two people:Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The WWW, which is different from the Internet, but what most people think of as the "Internet" was invented later by Tim Berners-Lee.