RFC 1935 (rfc1935) - Page 2 of 11
What is the Internet, Anyway?
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
heart of much confusion and contention about sizes: what is the
Internet, anyway?
Starting at the Center
For real confusion, start trying to get agreement on what is part of
the Internet: NSFNET? CIX? Your company's internal network?
Prodigy? FidoNet? The mainframe in accounting? Some people would
include all of the above, and perhaps even consider excluding
anything politically incorrect. Others have cast doubts on each of
the above.
Let's start some place almost everyone would agree is on the
Internet. Take RIPE, for example. The acronym stands for European
IP Networks. RIPE is a coordinating group for IP networking in
Europe. (IP is the Internet protocol, which is the basis of the
Internet. IP has a suite of associated protocols, including the
Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and the name IP, or sometimes
TCP/IP, is often used to refer to the whole protocol suite.) RIPE's
computers are physically located in Amsterdam. The important feature
of RIPE for our purposes is that you can reach RIPE (usually by using
its domain, ripe.net) from just about anywhere anyone would agree is
on the Internet.
Reach it with what? Well, just about any service anyone would agree
is related to the Internet. RIPE has a WWW (World Wide Web) server,
a Gopher server, and an anonymous FTP server. So they provide
documents and other resources by hypertext, menu browsing, and file
retrieval. Their personnel use client programs such as Mosaic and
Lynx to access other people's servers, too, so RIPE is a both
distributor and a consumer of resources via WWW, Gopher, and FTP.
They support TELNET interfaces to some of their services, and of
course they can TELNET out and log in remotely anywhere they have
personal login accounts or someone else has an anonymous TELNET
service such a library catalog available. They also have electronic
mail, they run some mailing lists, and some of their people read and
post news articles to USENET newsgroups.
WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, mail, lists, and news: that's a pretty
characteristic set of major Internet services. There are many more
obscure Internet services, but it's pretty safe to say that an
organization like RIPE that is reachable with all these services is
on the Internet.
Reachable from where? Russia first connected to the Internet in
1992. For a while it was reachable from networks in the Commercial
Internet Exchange (CIX) and from various other networks, but not from
NSFNET, the U.S. National Science Foundation network. At the time,
Quarterman & Carl-Mitchell Informational