ABSTRACT
DURING 1995, THE USE OF THE INTERNET EXPANDED CONSIDERABLY, with tens of thousands of corporations, universities, government agencies, and individuals creating home pages on servers, while tens of millions of users surfed the World Wide Web. As corporations began to recognize the value of the Internet for building software applications, promoting products and services, and locating as well as disseminating information, the addition of graphics to World Wide Web home pages literally slowed Web surfing operations to a crawl, adversely affecting user productivity. Whereas the replacement of 14.4K bps modem by state-of-the-art 28.8K bps devices has assisted many users in speeding up their Internet search operations, even at that operating rate the display of a typical Web page containing one or two graphic images can result in a delay of 10 to 15 seconds as the picture is “painted” on a monitor.
