Pretty soon, by 1990, every major university in the United States and abroad was on the net. But access within the universities were still limited. You could get access if you were doing research related to the Internet or if you were a graduate student and your advisor had a lot of clout. But by 1993 in the United States (1995 in India), every student in most major universities had Internet access. And now in 1999, practically every middle class person has Internet access.
The content on the Internet has changed with the clientile. It used to be a bunch of text files, with ftp (File Transfer Protocol) servers and mailing lists. Then, Mosaic came along with pretty pictures and soon the World Wide Web was truly world wide.
The academic nature of the net's been lost. It's become too democratic and too chaotic for academia's tastes. So, folks are trying to revive things with Internet 2. This will be a separate network. The National Science Foundation will give away research grants to universities and laboratories to join the new network.
But things are different now. Lots and lots of information is on the regular Internet. Dictionaries, stock quotes, scientific journals, Nazi taunts, dirty pictures, everything. There is no way that Internet 2 is going to remain pristine, since everybody is going to have to link to information on the regular Internet. That whole idea is doomed. Instead, what is going to happen is that Internet 1 is going to get faster and broader, thanks to commercial interests and Internet 2 is going to get a lot of funding for esoteric, academic pursuits.
You will soon to be able to go an IEEE conference and see a paper on "Packet Arrival on Internet2 as Third-order Markov processes". In medical journals (every stupid study in medicine is a journal article), you will see papers talking about remote diagnosis of stomach ulcers. To put things mildly, I'm a bit sceptical about this whole Internet2 thing.
