ABSTRACT

An information revolution, perhaps only matched by the development of writing (around 3500 BC), and by the invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany (about AD 1439), has swept our planet in the last 30 years. Loosely referred to as the “Internet”, this revolutionary communication and data-exchange system had its origins in the development of a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) network called CSNET linking academic and governmental computers in the USA in the early 1980s, its extension to the so-called “developed” world, and the commercialization of the system in the 1990s.