Example #5: improving the laundry experience for college students.

Millions of college students use dorm laundry facilities worldwide. What is their experience?

Old Economy. You run to the laundry room only to find out that all machines are taken. You run to the laundry room only to find out that all machines are taken. You wait for a machine, and when you finally get one, you realize that you are short on coins. You manage to find someone who will make change for you, and now you are set to start. But you do not remember how your mother instructed you to wash the dirty shirts, and now there is no one around to ask. You put everything into the washer, start it, and hope for the best. Rather than hang around the laundry room, you go away to study, and when you come back you find that someone took out your clean stuff and placed it on the dirty counter. You transfer the laundry to the dryer, and go back to study some more. This time you come back before the dryer is finished, so you must wait, wasting more time.

New Economy. Dryers and washers in your college are hooked to the Web. You punch a code into your cell phone or sign in at esuds.net, and you can check for availability of laundry machines. Furthermore, you can pay with your student ID or with a credit card, and you will receive e-mail alerts when your wash and dry cycles are complete. Once in the laundry room, you activate this system by swiping your student ID card (or key in PIN number). The system automatically injects premeasured amounts of detergent and fabric softener, at the right cycle time.

Introduction

By definition the Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected compute networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol. But, how did it come to be this technology that is so popular and so widely used around the world? Was it always so large and extensive, filled with information about just about anything you could possibly think of accessible from almost anywhere, anytime? The answer is no and its important to understand where it all came from to understand how to utilize it to its fullest potential now.

Creation

The Internet origin comes from a military project. The Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program consisted of networked country- wide radar systems together for the first time. This was created around 1958 as part of an attempt to regain the lead in technology from the Soviet Union who had recently launched Sputnik. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the committee which controlled the SAGE project. He envisioned universal networking as a unifying human revolution.

Figure 1sage Computer Room

Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project which implemented a network. Roberts had worked with the U.S. Air Force on a packet switching system as opposed to a circuit switching system. On October 29, 1969, Licklider and Roberts interconnected the first two nodes between UCLA and SPI International at Menlo Park, California. This was the beginning of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which was one of the key networks which our Internet today was based off of. Soon after the first international packet- switched network service was created between U. S. and U. K.

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the first description of the TCP protocols (covered more deeply in the introduction to Networking lesson) in 1973. The term “Internet” was first used in 1974 to describe a single global TCP/IP network detailed in the first full specification of TCP written by Cerf and his colleagues. The first TCP/IP- wide area network was created on January 1, 1983 when hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older protocols to TCP/IP.

In 1984, the United States National Science Foundation (NSP) commissioned the construction of a 1.5 megabit/ second network which became known as NSFNET. In 1989 the US Federal Networking Council approved the interconnection of the NSFNET to the commercial MCI Mail System. Soon after, other commercial e-mail services were soon connected such as OmTyme, Telemail, and Compuserve. Three Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were also created: UUNET, PSINET, and CERFNET. More and more separate networks were created that eventually interconnected with this large, growing network. The ability of TCP/IP to work over virtually any pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth, although the rapid growth of the Internet was due to primarily to the availability of commercial routers from companies such as Cisco Systems, proteon and Juniper, the availability of commercial Ethernet equipment for local-area networking and the widespread implementation of TCP/IP on the UNIX operating system.

Growth

Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost a decade, the network did not gain public face until the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. By 1996 usage of the word “Internet” had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a reference to the World Wide Web. Over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public networks (although some networks have remained separate).