It would be impossible to conduct modern business without the use of communication technology. Telecommunications are nothing new; from the first use of signal fires, people have communicated over a long distance for many centuries. The use of electrical communication became widespread in the 19th Century, causing a major revolution in business practices.

Communication systems today are inextricably linked to computers. Your mobile telephone has a computer in it. We will look at how computers are connected together to form and integral part of telecommunication:

- The Internet originally connected military and research computers in the US. Now it is not a single network, but many thousands of networks that have grown like Topsy.

- The World Wide Web originated from the computers set up at a vast Particle Physics laboratory called CERN, located near Geneva. The experiments were too vast, complex and expensive to be borne by a single university, so the resources were shared. The language of the net, hypertext mark-up language (HTML) was developed by a British computer expert, Timothy Berners-Lee, for this purpose. The World Wide Web is a collection of pages stored on computers, joined by hyperlinks. You can click on these and they will take you to other web pages. Each page has a unique address called a URL (uniform resource locator). Nowadays the two terms are interchangeable. We surf the net, or browse the web.

NEXT: The Internet