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Dr. Philip Emeagwali, who has been called the "Bill Gates of Africa," was born in Nigeria in 1954. Like many African schoolchildren, he dropped out of school at age 14 because his father could not continue paying Emeagwali's school fees. However, his father continued teaching him at home, and everyday Emeagwali performed mental exercises such as solving 100 math problems in one hour. His father taught him until Philip "knew more than he did." Growing up in a country torn by civil war, Emeagwali lived in a building crumbled by rocket shells. He believed his intellect was a way out of the line of fire. So he studied hard and eventually received a scholarship to Oregon State University when he was 17 where he obtained a BS in mathematics. He also earned three other degrees – a Ph.D. in Scientific computing from the University of Michigan and two Masters degrees from George Washington Univ...

The Internet as we know it may not have taken shape until the 1990s, well after Bill Gates revealed his first PC. So who invented the Internet? The timeline of the Internet actually traces all the way back to the Vietnam War era: 1969, to be exact. In that year, a team of defense engineers at the University of Los Angeles-California (UCLA) sent the first-ever instant message via computer to another team thousands of miles away at Stanford University. From their work station in 3420 Boelter Hall, on the UCLA campus, the defense engineers had just set up the first node of Arpanet, a system funded by the Department of Defense’s Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA’s vision was for a system that would connect large computers at the Department of Defense’s various facilities so that they could share software, information, and storage space. UCLA would be one of its four main hubs—the University of Utah, SRI International, and UC-Santa Barbara would be the others. In i...

The Internet is similar in some ways to the global telephone system: Each allows the establishment almost instantly of 2-way connections between sites anywhere in the world. However, unlike a telephone conversation, the Internet allows us to communicate in a variety of ways. Most importantly, we are not limited to verbal interactions with other people--in many cases, it is possible to gain access to information stored in their computers. The basic facilities available over the Internet are described below and include e-mail, list servers, USNET/Newsgroups, File Transfer Protocol, Internet Relay Chat, Gopher facility, and the WWW. E-mail E-mail, the Internet equivalent of postal mail, is the most widely used facility on the Internet. E-mail messages routed across the Internet can reach an overseas destination in seconds. You never receive a busy signal and you never play “telephone tag.” A variety of e-mail programs offer features allowing you to print, forward, save, and/o...