An Economic and therefore Governmental Issue While the digital divide might bring up the idea that enterprises will be able to sell more and more computers during the next years another truth looks as if there was no hope for a certain percentage of the population to get out of their marginalization, their position of being "have nots". Studies show that the issue of different colors of skin play a role in this, but more than "racial" issues it is income, age and education that decides about the have and have nots. There exist ~ 103 million households in the USA. ~6 million do not even have telephone access. Why should they care about computers? The digital divide cuts the world into centers and peripheries, not into nations, as it runs through the boarder between the North and the South as well as through nations. http://www.digitaldivide.gov/ http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/ http://www.pbs.org/digitaldivide/ http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-344552.html http://racerelations.about.com/newsissues/racerelations/msubdigdivide.htm http://www.techweek.com/articles/11-1-99/divide.htm http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/falling.html The most different institutions with various interests in their background work in that field; not rarely paid by governments, which are interested in inhabitants, connected to the net and economy. see also: http://www.washington.edu/wto/digital/ Searching information about the digital divide one will find informations saying that it is growing all the time whereas other studies suggest the contrary, like this one http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-341054.html

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ARPAnet ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research. In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute. But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972. Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net. In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994. Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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