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Text 2. Internet

The Internet is a network of networks. A computer network is a group of computers that have been connected so they can communicate with each other. They can send messages to each other and can share information in the form of computer files. The Internet connects more than 18,000 of these networks, and more are being added all the time. On those networks are millions of computers, computer terminals and users – about two million computers and as many as 30 million users, according to some estimates. And it's growing by around 1,000 computers a day. It's no wonder that the president of ISOC (the Internet Society) recently suggested that the Internet could reach 1 billion people in the not-too-distant future.

There’s nothing astounding about computer networks. Many companies have networks that connect anywhere from two or three computers to thousands of them.

But the Internet isn’t just a network. It’s a network of networks. Lots of different networks have been joined to produce the world’s largest group of connected computers. Some of the networks are run by government bodies, some by universities, some by businesses, some by local community library systems, and some are even run by schools. Most are in the US, but many are overseas, in countries ranging from Australia to Zimbabwe. The Internet might make it possible for you to communicate with all these people on all these computer networks through

electronic ‘mail’.

When you connect to the Internet, you have the opportunity to connect to thousands of different systems. Those computers contain government archives, university databases, local-community com­puting resources, library catalogs, messages about any subject you can imagine, and millions of computer files (over two million at last count) containing photographs, documents, sound clips, video, and whatever else you can put into digital form.

When you log on or log in to a computer system, you tell the system who you are, and it decides if it wants to let you use its services. A log-on (or log-in) procedure entails providing some kind of account name and a secret password.