Caught Up In The Net

摘要

In the rapidly converging world of telecommunications and computers, few phenomena have so consistently commandeered headlines and ensnared so many people's attention worldwide in recent times as the Internet. The reasons aren't hard to discover. First, the global network of computer networks has proliferated in a truly spectacular manner, with the number of host computers attached to it doubling every year since the late 1980s (Figure 1). Something between 750,000 and 1 million new users are now thought to be getting caught up in using the Internet each month (Figure 2). The worldwide end-of-century Internet host computer population is projected to be in the region of 100 million. No other network has ever grown so rapidly.