This volume gives a comprehensive coverage of Internet technologies. It provides both a contemporary and extensive review of developments in the field and also gives details of research. Areas covered include: developments in the network protocols on which the Internet is based; the evolving capability of the Internet to carry audio and video traffic; and the development in security and payment technologies which are opening up a wide range of commercial electronic applications. As the importance of the Internet continues to increase, this book should be of interest to businesses. Several case studies of on-line services are included. The text should prove useful not only to researchers in the communications and computing sectors working directly in the development of the technology, but also to people working in banking and finance. Business users of the Internet should also find the book to be useful in the development of such applications as Internet trading and corporate intranets.

We live in exciting times. We have over the last few years seen the birth of a new telecommunications service which will fundamentally change the way we live, much as the telephone has over the last 100 years. The birth of the Internet can be traced back to a conference on computer communications held in 1972. As a result of that conference a working group was set up, under the chairmanship of Vint Cerf, to propose new protocols to facilitate computer communications. In 1974 the working group published the transmission control protocol (fCP) and the Interworking protocol (lP). These were rapidly adopted and the number of computers linked using these protocols has almost doubled every year since. Thus the Internet was born. Another major step happened in 1990. Tim Berners Lee, a Scottish nuclear physicist working at CERN, created some higher level protocols. These still used TCP/IP for the networking, but defined how computers could communicate multimedia information and be linked together to form a World Wide Web of information. A number of computer databases adopted these protocols and things really took off in 1993 when Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois developed Mosaic, the first client software (a browser) that gave a windows-style interface to these databases.