And to all-
Yes the Internet is communicated from country to country by fibre as well as conductors streatched across the bottom of the oceans. There is also communications via satallite as well. It is correct in saying that communication through satellites is slower. Not much though. And bandwidth is not much of an issue anymore either. OUr sky is filled with commsats and we can pump a great deal of information up and back down again.

There is not just a handful of satellites out there. There is literally thousands of sats floating around our planet. There is continued concern in our space programs about clean up in space because we have deposited so many sats in orbit.

"God wants Spiritual fruit not religious nuts"
- Community Fellowship Baptist Church Sign

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One thing on your description. The internet was not conceived as a form of communication. It was conceived as a method for research computers to share information from one location to another. Email came about as bi-product of the exchange and became the most popular use of the newly created network.

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The first recorded description was in 1962 By J.C.R. Licklider of MIT when he discussed his "Galactic Network" concept. Licklider was also the first head of the computer research program at ARPA. Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published his first paper and following a book on Packet switching theory in 1961 and the book in 1964. It was Kleinrock that pushed for packets instead of circuits in the networking concept. In 1965 Lawrence Roberts of MIT and Thomas Merril connected two computers together (the TX-2 in Mass and the Q-32 in Cali) using a dial up connection. The result of this did two things. Made the realization that time-shared computers could work together and that circuit switched phone lines were inadequate.

In 1966 Roberts then went to ARPA to develop network concepts and begin to develop ARPANET. There was also work going on in the UK in the organization of NPL, the RAND group was also working on networking as well (primarily for the military). All of these groups were developing things pretty much in parallel and without the reasearchers knowing what the others were doing. "Packet" was adopted from the work at NPL.

There is some other trivial things that happen but in 1969 the first node was placed on ARPANET at UCLA. The second notde was SRI (Stanford Research Institute). The first web page so to speak was in NLS (an early hypertext system) and was titled "Augmentation of Human Intellect". More nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and Univ of Utah.

Now the military was also getting a network developed for it as well. However the Internet grew from ARPANET and not the military network. And the idea was simply to get multiple computers to be able to share information, share workloads, and to communicate with each other.

There are tons of references to this, doing a search on "History of the Internet" will net you tons of links in reference to it. One is http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

I knew that I-net+ course could pay off for something...LOL

"God wants Spiritual fruit not religious nuts"
- Community Fellowship Baptist Church Sign

1) Copper lines
2) Fiber lines
3) Satellite
4) Radio transmission - mostly microwave, but all forms are possible.

Did you know ethernet was first designed to overcome the problem with communications in Hawaii? They didn't want to lay cable between the islands, so they used radio transceivers and passed the "net" through the "ether" so to speak.

Ethernet is simply a logical topology, specifically, IEEE 802.3. Wireless communication that you refer to is the IEEE 802.11 standard. Ethernet can be used through any number of mediums, originally on 10base5 (Thicknet) and 10base2 (Thinnet) or coaxial cable. As of recent years most ethernet topology's use CAT 5 STP or UTP (Shielded or Unsheilded twisted pair) wire. which transfers at 100 Mb/s. Ethernet is pretty much the standard. Other choices of logical topologys are Token Sharing such as token ring or token bus. These are how networks were originally setup. Using a MAU (Multistation Access Unit) which ever computer was turned on first would generate a 3 kb packet refered to as a token. As other computers connected, it informed the MAU of the MAC Address of each pc's nic card. So you at computer 1 wanted to send a message to computer 10 on your token network. You would send the message, and it would call the token, and when you recieved the token, it would transmit the date from your pc to the intended pc. The only good thing about Token is your message is certain to make it.

Ethernet uses what is known as collision detection or collision avoidance, which is basically the same concept. As you want to send a msg out, it starts cramming the data out your nic card into the network. If it collides with other data, it is instantly sent out again, until it reaches its destination. Thanks to ethernet, we are able to have multiple access to net resources at any pc on the network at the same time.

Ethernet is typically attributed to PARC, Xerox & Intel from Bob Metcalfe's PhD thesis.

I believe Alohanet was the first to really use CSMA/CD (at least the CD part), but I could be mistaken.

Unless, of course, the ring or bus is broken (wire disconnected,) then your token "falls out onto the floor" so to speak... and the network becomes a net-not-work.

Another piece of triva (one of my network professors told me btw) is that token-bus networks were developed by (I think, maybe "for" is more accurate) GM for their automobile assembly lines. Care to verify?