When did the Internet “CYBER SPACE” become the ‘World Wide Web’?
CYBERSPACE has become a region, by the (beginning of 1995) growing consensus, that could significantly affect the structure of our economies, the development of our communities and the protection of our rights as free citizens.
Novelist William Gibbson described it in his book Neuronzancer (1984) and several later novels as an artificial environment created by computers. Unlike a motion picture, which presents moving images on a flat surface, a cyber-spatial environment would convey realistic details in three dimensions and to all five senses. It would also allow for a degree of face-to-face intimacy between people in remote places.
`Internet’, the network of computers linked through telephone lines, was developed in 1970s to assist the US military and academic research. As recently as 1990, the Internet was almost unknown to the general public. By the end of 1995, however, the network had absorbed millions of users with no affiliations to defence institutions or universities. The volume of exchange between these users who numbered atleast 20-30 million in 1995, surpassed 30 terabytes, per month, or enough information to fill 30 million books of 700 pages each. Cyberspace and Internet have become nearly synonymous terms for many involved in these exchanges. The Internet have become nearly synonymous terms for many involved in these exchanges.
The Internet is a hybrid medium combining aspects of the printing press, the telephone, the public bulletin board and the private letter. It also permits crude video and television transmission without the physical plant required for conventional broadcasting. (Internet will eventually absorb the functions of television, telephone and conventional publishing … the “Information Superway” a term which means a unified interacting system of electronic communication).
Since resource sharing and mutual aid are age-old traits of successful social groupings, the Internet may help repair a social fabric badly wrecked by television.
