According to Vinton Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google and one of the Internet's founding fathers "The Internet has become too pervasive and too significant on many dimensions to imagine it is still the onetime academic thing it once was,"The internet is in major use everywhere and one gets an easy access to most of the major online services and tons of small startup "on-ramps," by dialling in with modem. But the internet is not another online service or even an extension of one, so people aren't getting the full picture. How does the net go beyond being just a big online service?The online service industry is also pretty old, and dates back to the first BBSs and online services in the late '70s. That world pretty much ignored the networking world of the ARPANET, USENET and the internet until 1992. It was academic and uncontrolled, it was competition and it was perceived as being free. It wasn't free, somebody else was paying for it, but it was actually remarkably cheap per user in terms of what it delivered. Particularly since those online services worked at 2400 bps or even less.The internet is of course very simple. All it really does is provide point to point communications for computers on top of a packet switched network. What people see, though, is the applications that people have put on top of this.The thing that makes the internet different is that it provides permanent virtual connectivity. It gives you the illusion that something far away is on the computer that's on your desk. Because the connection is (when done properly) permanent the wall between "on your computer" and "on somebody else's computer" breaks down. In many cases the connectivity doesn't have to be fast, but for many of the exciting cases it is.Indeed, permanent connectivity isn't everything. A lot of interesting things happen with plain old modems and BBSs and USENET. But the internet can do all those things as well or better, and it can do more.