orld. New words such as "hacker," "cracker," and "electronic break-in" are created. These new worries are dramatically demonstrated on November 1, 1988 when a malicious program called the "Internet Worm" temporarily disables approximately 6,000 of the 60,000 Internet hosts. System administrator turned author, Clifford Stoll, catches a group of Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. First Things First First Things First Cyberspies and writes the best-seller, The Cuckoo's Egg. The number of Internet hosts exceeds 100,000. A happy victim of its own unplanned, unexpected success, the ARPANET is decommissioned, leaving only the vast network-of-networks called the Internet. The number of hosts exceeds 300,000. 1991 The World Wide Web is born! 1991-1993 Corporations wishing to use the Internet face a serious problem: Commercial network traffic is banned from the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, the backbone of the Internet. In 1991 the NSF lifts the restriction on commercial use, clearing the way for the age of electronic commerce. At the University of Minnesota, a team led by computer programmer Mark MaCahill releases "gopher" in 1991; it is the first point-and-click way of navigating the files of the Internet. Originally designed to ease campus communications, gopher is freely distributed on the Internet. MaCahill calls it "the first Internet application my mom can use." 1991 is also the year in which Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, posts the first computer code of the World Wide Web in a relatively innocuous newsgroup, "alt.hypertext." The ability to combine words, pictures, and sounds on Web pages excites many computer programmers who see the potential for publishing information on the Internet in a way that can be as easy as using a word processor. Marc Andreessen and a group of student programmers at NCSA (locat