With the increased popularity of the Internet there has been a signifigant amount of misinformation being presented to the general public about how the Internet was started. The story that the Internet grew out of the Department of Defense is false. The media likes to refer to the internet as the Information Superhighway. While today that may seem like a misnomer but during the 1970's it was exactly how e-mail messages were delivered. The Internet started during the 1970's when CB radios became popular. The first e-mail messages were simply passed from one trucker to the next. Channels were set up to act as Chat rooms from subjects ranging from CB message routing to the best truck stops. Alot of information was lost by this crude version of real audio. Frustrated truckers and hobbiest went to Radio Shacks wanting better peformance from their CB's. Truckers needed a way to send a message to any trucker in the nation. So the innovativew engineers at Tandy went to work to develop a product that would allow CB's to use a computer in their truck as long as they had a TV in the bed of their truck. The original modems used signals broadcasted by a CB to transmit a message from one CB to the next. The signals would go back to even more powerful computers in the back of the different radio shacks and the data would be backed up by using state of the art digital 8 track tapes. To this day the fastest internet connections available are through Radio Shack Stores. The closer your internet connection is to a radio shack the faster your connection. The term T1 refers to the speed that is equal to that of one Tandy station or the speed of one radio shack store. A T3 is actually the speed at which you connect to the Internet at the RSEast where all of the other Internet Service Providers hook up to the Tandy network. The first domain names were actually CB handles. The oldest domain name isbandit.com which was registered to a guy who inspired a series of movies during the seventies about his pioneering work on the Internet. The first web site was actually an interactive real time audio site that told you how to avoid Smoky.gov. Another early internet pioner was a guy by the name of BJ and his monkey friend the Bear. They developed a system of routing e-mail messages from one user to the next using big 18 wheelers. You would send an e-mail message and encode using a CB Modem onto a digital 8 track which would then be routed onto an 18 wheeler bound for the closest Radio Shack which would then transmit the audio or text message to you.

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