There are many ways of connection to Internet. You can dial-up by modem. It is the cheapest way to get Internet. But it’s the slowest solution. Much faster services are hard link, ISDN, satellite connection… But they’re more expensive too. For example – for night dial-up now you pay 99 Sk per month (and you must add payments for telephone impulses), and the cheapest hard link costs about 10,000 – 15,000 Sk per month (but you mustn’t pay impulses).

In these days Internet celebrates his 30th birthdays. The first computer net has connected universities in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Stanford on 20th October 1969. One of the Internet fathers Leonard Kleinrock in this day sent a message to his friend to Research centre in Stratford near San Francisco. It consisted of only two letters – L and O – the first two alphabets of word LOG. ““Did you got L?” “Yes, I got it.” “Did you got O?” “Yes, I got it.” “Did you got G?” Answer didn’t come back. The connection was interrupted.“ By these words professor Kleinrock comments this historical-epochal moment. Internet was born.

Internet boom wasn’t always very fast, as we know it today. Only four computers in the world were registered with Internet address in 1969. After next ten years it was about 100 computers. In 1989 it was over 100,000 and in present it’s more than 65,000,000 computers. 200,000,000 people a day surf on Internet and more than 1,000,000 new documents are added on the net. In 2002 it’ll be more than 8,000,000,000 documents published on the web.

If we combine all pluses and minuses, verdict will be surely good for Internet. We can forget all bad things, because pluses, which Internet provides, are much, much more. If you don’t believe me, remember my words, when you will be writing the next e-mail to your sons and grandsons in New Zealand….