The
Blacksburg Electronic Village or BEV was conceived as a project of
Virginia TechVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech, is a public land grant polytechnic university in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States...
in 1991 and officially born in 1993. The goal of the project was to develop an online community linking the entire town. Extensive outside research had been done by
sociologistsSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
and
computer scientistA computer scientist is a person who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
s on this project. It has been noted as one of the most important assets that
BlacksburgBlacksburg is an incorporated town located in Montgomery County, Virginia, United States, with a population of 39,284 at the 2000 census, with an estimated increase to 41,796 in 2008...
has besides Virginia Tech itself and was what most people considered the town to be famous for in its pre-
4/16The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place April 16, 2007 on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and...
days.
In 1995, around 30,000 out of the 70,000 residents had access to the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
.
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The
Blacksburg Electronic Village or BEV was conceived as a project of
Virginia TechVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech, is a public land grant polytechnic university in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States...
in 1991 and officially born in 1993. The goal of the project was to develop an online community linking the entire town. Extensive outside research had been done by
sociologistsSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
and
computer scientistA computer scientist is a person who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
s on this project. It has been noted as one of the most important assets that
BlacksburgBlacksburg is an incorporated town located in Montgomery County, Virginia, United States, with a population of 39,284 at the 2000 census, with an estimated increase to 41,796 in 2008...
has besides Virginia Tech itself and was what most people considered the town to be famous for in its pre-
4/16The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place April 16, 2007 on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and...
days.
In 1995, around 30,000 out of the 70,000 residents had access to the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. Two-thirds of users used the university's
web serverThe term web server or webserver can mean one of two things:# A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients , and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects .# A computer that...
s. That means that approximately 42.86% of the town's population was on the
World Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
. The BEV was so thoroughly integrated in the Blacksburg community, that in 1998, the town was chosen by
Guinness World RecordsGuinness World Records, known until 2000 as The Guinness Book of Records , is a reference book published annually, containing an internationally recognised...
as the "Most Wired Community." If it were not for the BEV, it would be doubtful that the town could have achieved such a record.
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