Loosely defined, the Internet is n computer systems (with n being a positive integer greater than 1) connected to each other using hardware and software capable of transmitting data to other computer systems using the Internet Protocol (IP), which was first defined in September, 1981 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt ). When a person refers to "The Internet" as a whole, they are referring to the majority of computers connected in such a fashion using IP addressing rules governed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA, http://www.iana.org/ ).