Online! The Book

Background

Originally, the Internet was conceived of as a way for people to share research data. Not just any people, but research types, government agencies and universities. These researchers, being clever people, decided to try to share much more than just text. It wasn't long before people devised methods for sharing other types of digital information, such as graphics, photos, and audio files. As the Internet became a “common man's” tool and access was shared with the masses, these methods of sharing images had some drawbacks. The fundamental problem was in the size of the files. The images people wanted to share were many times larger than text files. These large files took a long time to upload and download. In some cases, the files were ...