The Internet was first conceived by H.G.Wells in his work the Modern Utopia back in the early part of the 1900's. Wells foretold a time when anyone could access any information allowing society to be perfectly informed leading to the most rational society.
About 50 years later the American research agency ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) decided to create a network spanning America which would eventually enable the control of the US nuclear missile silo's. This remained it's primary function until it began to be used by academia.
In 1990 an Englishman called Dr Tim Berners-Lee created a simple programming language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which enabled everyone to be able to add pages of information to this ever-growing international network.
As more networks are interconnected around the world (internet growth), potentially 6billion minds are able to share their information. Is the H.G. Wells prophecy coming true?
In this unit we will look at the increasingly important role that networks and other communication systems play in modern life.
