History:

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           Research into methods for dividing information into packets and moving them from one computer to another began in the 1960’s.  The U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded a research project the led to the development of APRANET, a packet switching network.  In the 1970’s ARPA had launched two successful but separate satellite networks.  These networks however, weren’t able to communicate with one another.  ARPA focused research into a broad interconnection of networks that would be able to communicate with one another through TCP/IP protocols.  In the 1980’s this was accomplished by a group of computer scientists who created the Computer Science NETwork.  In 1989, after a large commercial interest in the creation of private networks, technologies were combined to create the modern World Wide Web. 

           E-Mail, one of the most widely used forms of communication on the Net, originated in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson.  Previous communication could only be done through multiple users on a single computer.  Using the @ symbol and a domain, Tomlinson changed the way messages could be sent between multiple machines.  Today, E-Mail has evolved from basic text messages to having the ability to send graphics, text, and other attachments, all in the same message.

           Newsgroups, a popular source of information throughout the Internet, originated in 1979 by a group of Duke University students that hooked up a few computers to transfer and share data between UNIX users.  At the University of North Carolina, another student was writing software that would facilitate the distribution of this information.  Eventually, these three students worked together to create a large collection of informative data called Usenet.  Usenet has evolved into a large colloquium of newsgroup topics that are arranged in hierarchical order; each topic is a sub-topic of another topic and therefore follows a specific hierarchy.  As a result of Usenet, and the widespread availability of opinion alongside fact, the creation of a ‘moderator’ became a necessity.  This moderator would check messages and in theory, prevent the newsgroups from displaying incorrect and or harmful material.

            Internet forums of today have evolved from Usenet into a more easily accessible global network of user’s opinions.  Most of these forums can be accessed through any ordinary computer with Internet access without the requirement of a login/password authentication system.  This means that anyone visiting these forums can view anything posted, whether appropriate for their viewing or not.  The ethical issues naturally follow as to who should be able to access the forums, and what sort of verification of identity must be required, if any.