The Internet, a global computer network, which embraces millions of users all over the world, appeared in the USA in the 1969 as a military experiment. It was designed to survive the nuclear war. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another,. Because of this any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out, information will just route around them. One such packet switching network, which has already survived a war, is the Iraqian computer network, which was not knocked out during the Gulf War.

Most of the Internet host computers are in the USA, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions worldwide, and their number is growing by thousands each month.

The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people who have access to the Internet use the network only for sending and receiving e- mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET news, using the World Wide Web, telnet, FTP and etc.

In many developing countries the Internet may provide businesspeople with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunication systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate cheaply over the Internet with the rest of the world. When they send e-mail messages they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays for sending e-mail messages over the Internet for long distances? The answer is very simple: users pay their service provider a monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its coast to connect to a larger service provider and part of the fee received by the larger provider goes to cover its coast of running a worldwide network of wires and wireless stations.

But saving money is only the first step. If people see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of the network will drastically increase. For example, some western architecture companies and garment centers already transmit their basic designs and concepts over the Internet into China where they are reworked and refined by skilled – but inexpensive – Chinese computer-aided design specialists.

However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data is constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. However, because of this, it is possible to get into any of the computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. In spite of that fact that there are many good encoding programs available, nearly all the information being sent over the Internet is transmitted without any form of encoding. But when it becomes necessary to send important information over the network, these encoding programs may be useful.