E-mail is sent and web pages are found through the use of domain names. Statistically, there are now 187 million domain names, with 83 million of them ending with those 3 letters .com. For this to work, your PC connects to a local ISP (Internet Service Provider)'s network. You then have access to his Domain Name System Server - DNS Server for short - software on a computer that translates a host name you send it e.g. www.google.com into a corresponding IP address (72.14.207.99). This Internet Protocol address specifies first the network, and second the host computer (similar to the way a phone number works). If the DNS server doesn't currently know the host name, it then endeavours to connect (within a second or so) to an authoritative DNS Server that does.

Ultimately, that server is one of 800 or so worldwide servers appointed by the Internet's 280 TLD authorities - Top-Level Domains. E.g. if the domain name ends in .au, then the Australian auDA is the authority for that TLD zone. If it ends in .cn, then the China Internet Network Information Center is the authority. If the name ends in .com or .net (and with no 2 letter country suffix) then the US-based Verisign, Inc. is the authority for those 2 TLD zones. And so on. Your request is successful when firstly the name is found, and secondly acknowledged by the nameservers on the network which actually hosts the pages, files & emails sent to that domain. At this point your DNS server caches ("stores") that name and IP address for subsequent requests, for perhaps 48 hours or so. After that, it empties the name & IP address from its cache. This cache minimizes requests made on the authoritative DNS Servers, but also ensures it won't be out of date for more than 48 hours or so on any domain. And of course this only happens if the domain changes hosts.

Now, if a TLD server is unknown, it can be found in a small official root zone file overseen by ICANN, under contract to the US. Dept of Commerce. Any changes to the file are processed by Verisign then published by 12 Root Name Server organizations. And to further reduce Internet traffic, a PC caches a copy of the page in a folder on its hard drive known as "Temporary Internet Files", and normally only downloads a fresh copy if the "Last Update" date on the page is newer than the date in the cache. A proxy server similarly caches copies of pages for PCs on its network. For more reading, click here.

Now, if looking up details for one of the "open" .au domains, you, as an individual, can go to Ausregistry. This database provides the IP addresses of name servers for all the domains within the five "open" 2nd level domain (2LD) space i.e. ones ending in .com.au, .org.au, .net.au, .id.au or .asn.au (asn association). Note - since 2002 when it was appointed, AusRegistry has never dealt directly with the public in registering domains. Commercial registrars carry out this task , thus preventing potential "conflict of interest" situations within AusRegistry. Then, with regard to "closed" government 2LDs, Netregistry is the registrar for .gov.au and Education .au for .edu.au.

Some Background: On Oct 25th 2001, auDA (a Government endorsed body) became the authorized Domain Administrator for the .au TLD. They then appointed AusRegistry in July 2002 on a 4 year term and this was renewed in 2005 for a further 4 year term starting July 1st, 2006. Prior to auDA and AusRegistry, Robert Elz at Melbourne University administered the whole .au TLD at no charge from March 1986. In 1996 he delegated a five year exclusive commercial license for the .com.au 2LD to a startup company, Melbourne IT. Click here for further details.
Click here to view a document with a breakdown of annual fees charged by AusRegistry to authorized registrars.

Example - Stephen Williamson Computing Services
So, by going to AusRegistry, we learn that host computer(s) for the domain swcs.com.au can be found by accessing IP Addresses 202.3.100.8 and 202.3.100.10 — ns1.webmetrix.net.au and ns2.webmetrix.net.au — name servers managed by Greg Smith at Webmetrix — a Brisbane based Fast Ethernet network with its main data centre situated on the AAPT backbone that runs directly between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Next, we learn that the commercial registrar for swcs.com.au is Melbourne IT in Melbourne (who acts on behalf of the owner of the name i.e. Stephen Williamson Computing Services Pty Ltd).

This means that swcs.com.au is currently hosted on the Webmetrix network, who provide a virtual Web hosting service capable of hosting numerous domains transparently. Thousands of different domains might in fact share the same processor (with pages being published in different folders). If the Internet traffic grows too heavy on the Webmetrix network, the swcs domain may in the future require its own, dedicated network & name servers. (This situation has not yet been reached).
Click here for a web page that will look up the IP address for a specific domain.

Click here to download a free program that will look up any IP address or Host, by accessing the WHOIS section of each of the five regional bodies responsible for IP address registration: ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.

Your PC uses this IP address to form packet headers for routing data to & from the host

It began in 1969, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, working with Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA and Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), built the world's first packet-switching network, the ARPANET. Using four Honeywell computers as gateways (routers), the contracted team of Bolt Beranek and Newman connected 3 university mainframes at 50 Kbps:- first an SDS at UCLA, then an IBM at UCSB and DEC at UU to an SDS at SRI near San Francisco. Telnet in 1969 was followed by Email in 1971, and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in 1973. By then, 40 mainframe hosts were online, including satellite links to Norway & London. That year Robert Kahn & Vinton Cerf started work on a new Internetwork Transmission Control Program using set port numbers for specific uses. Click here for an initial list in December 1972. It built on the concept of a "socket interface" that combined functions (or ports) with network addresses to connect user-hosts to server-hosts. Request for Comments (RFCs) for these TCP/IP standards and issuing of IP address blocks to assignees was overseen by Jon Postel, until his death in 1998, director at Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California in LA. And regular updates of the network with a list of hosts was provided in a standard text file to all parties by the Defense Dept's NIC Network Information Center at Stanford.

With IPv4 in 1980, the National Science Foundation created a core network for institutions without access to the ARPANET. Three Computer Science depts — Wisconsin-Madison, Delaware, Purdue initially joined. Vinton Cerf came up with a plan for an inter-network connection between this CSNET and the ARPANET.

Meanwhile, at the hardware cabling level, Ethernet was rapidly becoming the standard for small and large computer networks over twisted pair copper wire. It identified the unique hardware address of the network interface card inside each computer, then regulated traffic through a variety of switches. This standard was patented in 1977 by Robert Metcalfe at the Xerox Corporation, operating with an initial data rate of 3 Mbps. Success attracted early attention and led in 1980 to the joint development of the 10-Mbps Ethernet Version 1.0 specification by the three-company consortium: Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Xerox Corporation. Today, the IEEE administers these unique Ethernet addresses, sometimes referred to as a media access control (MAC) address. It is 48 bits long and is displayed as 12 hexadecimal digits (six groups of two digits) separated by colons, and thus allows for 280 trillion unique addresses. An example of an Ethernet address is 44:45:53:54:42:00 — note — IEEE designates the first three octets as vendor-specific. To learn the Ethernet address of your own computer in Windows XP, at a Command Line prompt type ipconfig /all.

Back to the Internet. On January 1st 1983, the Defense Communications Agency at Stanford split off the military network — MILNET — from their research based ARPANET network, while mandating TCP/IP protocols on every host. In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in conjunction with DEC and IBM, used TCP/IP to develop a campus-wide model of distributed computing that became known as the client-server model (with PC/Workstations and Servers) as opposed to the mainframe model with all intelligence within the central host computer. Next in August 1983, the University of California in Berkeley included Bill Joy's modified version of TCP/IP in its commercial release of BSD UNIX, a landmark event. With this the ARPANET and CSNET grew, adding gateways for any network anywhere — regardless of that network's internal protocols or hardware cabling — allowing these two original core networks to remain intact. Accordingly defense contractors' networks, Usenet discussion groups, Bitnet's automated mailouts, later large business networks - CompuServe in 1989, MCI Mail in 1990, and AOL in 1994, all of whom used different protocols, established gateways. Many date the true arrival of the Internet as 1983. In this same year, the University of Wisconsin established the first Name Server — a directory service that looked up host names when sending email on the CSNET.

In September 1984, taking this to the next logical step, Stanford replaced the HOSTS.TXT file with the Domain Name System, establishing the first of the Top Level Domains — .arpa .mil .gov .org .edu .net and .com. In 1985, with 100 autonomous networks now connected — click here to see a 1985 primary gateway diagram, registration within these TLDs commenced. Click Here for a list of the first domains. Country code TLDs were then appointed shortly afterwards. Stanford now administered a small centralized Root Zone file providing authoritative IP addresses for each TLD — as well as Name Registries providing IP addresses of name servers for each domain in the generic TLDs — with Jon Postel administering the .edu TLD & the .us TLD. These generic domains .com, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu and .net were given out for free, along with free IP address blocks.

In 1986, there was major expansion when the National Science Foundation built a third network, the NSFnet, having high speed links to university networks right around the country. In 1987, the first email from China to Germany occurred, via the CSNET. In 1988, IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority overseen by Jon Postel at the Institute entered into a formal funding contract with the Defense Dept. This same year, a non-profit company in Ann Arbor Michigan called Merit Network, partnering with IBM and MCI, upgraded the NSFnet from 56Kbps to 1.5Mbps. As over 170 campus networks came online, it took over backbone duties from the ARPANET, which was then decommissioned and dismantled in 1990.

ISP's and World Wide Web

Over in Europe in February 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, programming a NeXTcube workstation in the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, had held a Seminar for a World-Wide Web, then with the help of Paul Kunz at Stanford, demonstrated in France on Jan 15, 1992 the first web browser and offsite server. The server downloaded file(s) using a new protocol he called HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, forming a page that was formatted by the browser using a Markup Language called HTML. This allowed Hyper Text on a page to link to another page on a computer running his protocol anywhere in the world, by including in the markup language the linked page's URL - Uniform Resource Locator or web address, i.e. its domain name, path & filename. Thus the user could upload a request for that new page by simply selecting the link. And for Paul Kunz, the standout feature was that the user could also type in and upload a query string to a database hosted on that remote computer, a feature that Yahoo, and then Google would utilize on their database servers with great effect. Click here for further background.
But back in this year, Jean Polly now published the phrase 'Surfing the INTERNET'.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, Holland, Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) in 1992 received the first allocation of a block of IP addresses from IANA that enabled it to become a regional IP registry, independently responsible for the physical location of each network.
And in Australia, the AARNet who had linked all the universities in April-May 1990, now "applied to IANA for a large block of addresses on behalf of the Australian network community .... because allocations from the US were taking weeks .... The address space allocated in 1993 was large enough for over 4 million individual host addresses .... The Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) then started as an experimental project in late 1993 (in Tokyo), based on volunteer labour and donated facilities from a number of countries. It evolved into an independent IP address registry ... that operates out of Brisbane" - R.Clarke's Internet in Australia

Back in the U.S.
The Dept of Defense now ceased all funding of the Internet apart from the .mil domain. On January 1st 1993 the National Science Foundation set up the Internet Network Information Center - InterNIC, awarding Network Solutions the contract for ongoing registration services, working co-operatively with AT&T for directory, database & (later) information services.

This same year 1993, students and staff working at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, launched Mosaic, a free web browser with versions for UNIX, Windows & Mac. As a graphical browser, it provided home users a much richer experience than running a command line shell. Initial costs for these dial-up SLIP / PPP connections were $US175 per month. But competition between ISPs & new technology meant that over the next two years prices plummeted rapidly. Although Mosaic was a fairly basic program by today's standards, its graphical nature introduced huge numbers of "unskilled" users to the web. At the end of 1993 there were 20,000 separate networks, involving over 2 million host computers and 20 million individual users. Click here to see year by year growth.

In February 1994, the NSF awarded contracts to four NAPs (Network Access Points) or, as they are now known, IXPs (Internet Exchange Points), operating at 155Mbps — one in New York operated by Sprint, one in Washington D.C. operated by MFS, one in Chicago operated by Ameritech, and one in California operated by Pacific Bell. These new Tier 1 networks now formed a mesh rather than a single backbone network, having mutual peering agreements to allow network traffic exchange to occur without cost. Over the following year, all the regional NSFnet networks migrated their connections to commercial network providers connected to one (or more) of these NAPs. In late 1994, America Online (AOL) purchased ANSnet's assets and operations. Also this year, the immensely successful web directory Yahoo was created. Southwest Airlines offered the first e-tickets for passengers. And at the end of 1994, with 30,000 web sites now online, the Netscape browser, a predecessor of the open source browser, Mozilla Firefox, was released. Click here to read one programmer's diary account. Netscape cost non-academic users just $US39 and soon gained over 80% market share.

On April 30 1995, the NSFnet was dissolved. Click here for more technical background. The Internet Service Providers had now taken over — internetMCI, ANSnet (now owned by AOL), SprintLink, UUNET and PSINet. Click here to see a diagram. There was a massive surge in registrations for the .com domain space. In August, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 free in a Windows 95 add-on pack. On September 14th, the NSF imposed a yearly fee of $50 per domain name, payable through Network Solutions. In December, Netscape added support for Javascript as a brand new web language. The first search engine to allow natural language queries, Alta Vista, was released. VocalTec released the first real-time VoIP.

In 1996, the first cable modems lifted download speeds on the Internet from 56Kbps over telephone wire to 1.5Mbps over fibre optic cable (i.e. over 25 fold). In 1997, DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) technology which used high frequency signalling over telephone wire was retooled for Internet access, offering initial download speeds of 768Kbps.

ARIN and ICANN: In December 1997, ARIN - American Registry of Internet Numbers - a nonprofit corporation - was given the task of registering the IP address allocations of all U.S. ISP's, a task previously handled by Jon Postel/InterNIC/Network Solutions. Meanwhile, since Sep 1995, there had been widespread dissatisfaction at the $50 per annum domain name fees for the five generic TLDs .com .net .org .gov .edu, and back in 1996 Jon Postel had proposed the creating of a number of new, competing TLDs. With this in mind, on January 28 1998, he authorized the switching over of 8 of the 12 root servers to a new IANA root zone file, thus, in effect, setting up two Internets. Within the day, a furious Ira Magaziner, Bill Clinton's senior science advisor, insisted it be switched back. Within the week, the US Govt had formally taken over responsibility for the DNS root zone file. On September 30 1998, ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - was formed to oversee InterNIC for names and IANA for numbers under a contract with the US. Dept of Commerce. ICANN is a nonprofit corporation based at the Information Sciences Institute. Two weeks later, Jon Postel passed away, following complications after heart valve replacement surgery.

In December 1998, the movie "You've Got Mail" was released with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and featuring AOL as their ISP. In June 1999, with ICANN's decision to allow multiple registrars of those generic domain names, .com .org and .net, Network Solutions lost its monopoly as sole domain name registrar. And with competition, registration costs for generic .com domain names dropped from $50 to $10 per annum. As mentioned previously, this .com domain name registry, by far the largest TLD with 80 million names, is now operated by Verisign who purchased Network Solutions in 2000. Around the same time, search engines became an essential part. Click Here for an article on How Search Engines Work.

Wireless: In August 1999 the Wi-Fi™ (IEEE 802.11) alliance was formed to provide a high-speed wireless local area networking standard covering short distances, 30-100 metres maximum. In June 2001, this was followed by the WiMax™ (IEEE 802.16) Forum covering much greater distances, currently up to 50 kms. Next in 2002, the mobile wireless standards body 3GPP — 3rd Generation Partnership Project released 3GPP R5, a framework for the Internet on mobile phones & Smartphones using GPRS — General Packet Radio Service. GPRS had been commercially launched on a UK mobile phone network in June 2000, then on Nokia in China in August 2000. With GPRS, SGSNs Serving G(PRS) Support Nodes are responsible for delivering data packets from and to the base stations and converting mobile data to and from IP. A GGSN Gateway G(PRS) Support Node at the network provider then connects the user to the appropriate site on the Internet, known as an APN Access Point Name. If the user is in their car, there may be more than one SGSN serving the user as they drive between base stations. Note, the maximum range of a mobile phone to a base station, dependent on factors such as the number of hills and the height of the mast, can be anywhere from 5 to 70 kms. If the user drives near a base station not coverered by current SGSN, it hands off automatically to the new SGSN, with any lost packets retransmitted. So, Mobile phone→Base station→sgsn→ggsn→Internet

Foreign Characters in Domain Names
The Domain Name System service had been originally designed to only support 37 ASCII characters i.e. the 26 letters "a - z", the 10 digits "0 - 9", and the "-" character. Although domain names could be generated in English using upper case or lower case characters, the system itself was case-insensitive — it always ignored the case used when resolving the IP address of the host. Then, in 2003 a system was released to allow domain names to contain foreign characters. A special syntax called Punycode was developed to employ the prefix "xn--" in the domain label and encode any foreign characters within the label from Unicode into a unique ASCII address — e.g. www.中.com would thus find itself encoded as www.xn--fiq.com. In 2008, with a view to also having TLDs in foreign scripts, ICANN released 11 new TLDs using the word for "test" in 11 different languages, and letting DNS Servers confirm that they were able to handle a .test TLD in each of the scripts. Click here to view the results. Click here for further recent news.

Internet in Australia. Now that we have some background, let's learn more about IP address allocation in Australia.
Firstly, some statistics. ABS data shows Australia had 8.4 million active internet subscribers as at the end of June 2009. While the number of dial-up subscribers continued to fall, down from 1.56 million in June 2008 to 1.1 million in June 2009, the faster types of connection increased from 5.6 million to 7.3 million over the same period.
Secondly, mobile wireless subscriber numbers are skyrocketing, up 51 per cent between December 2008 and June 2009. The ABS figures show mobile subscriptions climbed from 1.3 million to 1.96 million in that six-month period, giving mobile wireless 27 per cent of the broadband market compared with 20 per cent in December.

Stephen Williamson Computing Services 202.3.100.8 and 202.3.100.10
By clicking on www.iana.org, or ipindex.homelinux.net we learn that 202.0.0.0 - 202.255.255.255 i.e. 16 million addresses were allocated to APNIC Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre. And by clicking on APNIC we learn that IP Addresses 202.3.96 - 202.3.111 (which is 4000 addresses) were allocated to WebMetrix in Brisbane.

APNIC is a nonprofit organization based in Milton, Brisbane, since 1998, having started as a pilot project in Tokyo in late 1993. Today the majority of its members are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the Asia-Pacific region. Naturally, China is involved. In Australia, Telstra (who had purchased the AARNet's commercial businesses in 1995) and Optus are two national ISPs. In 1999, Optus introduced Cable modems offering high speed connections using on/off light pulses transmitted over fibre optic (television) cable. In 2000, Telstra introduced ADSL modems providing broadband (high-frequency) signals over copper (telephone) wire. With both cable and ADSL, both companies allocate one permanent or "static" IP address that is linked to the MAC hardware address of the network adapter on the customer's PC or on their router. For customers with slower Dial-up modems that utilize the voice-frequency range over telephone wire, they both have a pool of IP addresses which get temporarily / "dynamically" linked to the customer's telephone number as required.

Click here for an interesting article on commercial peering in Australia, the establishment of the so called "Gang of Four" in 1998, Telstra, Optus, Connect (AAPT), and Ozemail (sold to iiNet in 2005).

Summing up. Now, to summarize. IP addresses are used to deliver packets of data across a network and have what is termed end-to-end significance. This means that the source and destination IP address remains constant as the packet traverses a network. Each time a packet travels through a router, the router will reference its routing table to see if it can match the network number of the destination IP address with an entry in its routing table. If a match is found, the packet is forwarded to the next hop router for the destination network in question (note that a router does not necessarily know the complete path from source to destination — it just knows the MAC hardware address of the next hop router to go to). If a match is not found, one of two things happens. The packet is forwarded to the router defined as the default gateway, or the packet is dropped by the router. IP101: All about IP Addresses. To see a diagram of a packet showing its separate Transport, Internet, and Ethernet layers, click here. To view an example of router "hops", click here.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language: When pages have a .html or .htm extension, it means they are simple text files (that can be created in Notepad or Wordpad and then saved with a .htm extension). Hypertext comes from the Greek preposition hyper meaning over, above, beyond. It is text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders. especially text and graphics ... which are interconnected in such a way that a reader of the material (as displayed at a computer terminal, etc.) can discontinue reading one document at certain points in order to consult other related matter.

You specify markup commands in HTML by enclosing them within < and > characters.
E.g. <a href="http://www.swcs.com.au/about us.htm" target="_blank"> Load SWCS Page</a>
This is a markup command and text.

• <a href means to anchor a hyper reference (or start drawing an underline under the words Load SWCS Page indicating a linked section of text).
• </a> means to stop drawing the underline for the link.
• http:// is the access method - it means to use the hyper text transfer protocol built into the computer's web browser program. It sends a request to the web server (on the Internet) that hosts the www.swcs.com.au domain, tells it to go to the aboutus.htm file, download it to the client computer, then the browser will display it as a web page.
• target="_blank" means the target for displaying this page is a new, blank page (on the client computer). Otherwise the page will simply replace the current page and you will need to press the BACK button to return to it.

Other Examples:
 
<img src="steveandyve2.jpg" align=left> will load the jpg file (in this example it is stored in the same folder as the web page) and align it on the left so that the text that follows will flow around it (on the right). If the align command is omitted, the text will start underneath it (instead).

Note, only a few thousand characters are generally involved in each transfer packet of data. If many transfers are necessary to transfer all the information, the program on the sender's machine needs to ensure that each packet's arrival is successfully acknowledged. This is an important point: in packet switching, the sender, not the network, is responsible for each transfer. After an initial connection is established, packets can be simply resent if that acknowledgement is not received.

• <H1>(or <H2> or <H3>) cause the Heading characters that follow to be large and bold (1 is highest, 5 is lowest). Close with </H1>(or </H2> or </H3>)
• Normally all text wraps within the window. <br> breaks or starts a new line. <p> starts a new paragraph.
• <b> starts bold. </b> closes bold. <i> starts italic. </i> closes italic.
• Multiple spaces are ignored. Enter &nbsp; to enter a non-breakable space (not to be ignored, and not to be used as a place to wrap text).
• <ul> Start indenting an unordered list. Use <li> for each point (a dot as you see in these points). Use </ul> to end.
• <ol> Start indenting an ordered list. Use <li> for each point (a sequential number). Use </ol> to end.
• The individual characters used to specify markup commands require their own group of characters when displaying themselves on a page. E.g. &lt; displays a "<" character. &gt; displays a ">" character. And &amp; displays a "&" character. Click here for a full list of other special characters.

Most of these examples can be seen on this page that you are viewing. To see the text file that is the source of this page, right click on the mouse, then click View Source.

References:
1. Gilster, Paul (1995). The New Internet Navigator. (3rd ed.) John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2. Roger Clarke's Brief History of the Internet in Australia - 2001, 2004
3. Goralski, Walter (2002). Juniper and Cisco Routing. John Wiley - The Internet and the Router - excerpt
4. History of Computing (with photo links) and the Internet - 2005
5. History of the Internet - Wikipedia - 2009