The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) was conceived as a project of

Virginia Tech The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus 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

sociologists This list of sociologists includes people who have made notable contributions to sociological theory or to research in one or more areas of sociology. A * Peter Abell, British sociologist * Andrew Abbott, American sociologist * Margaret ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

s on this project. Some believe that this is one of the most important assets that Blacksburg has besides Virginia Tech itself. In 1995, around 30,000 out of the 70,000 residents had access to the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. Two-thirds of users used the university's

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

s. That means that approximately 42.86% of the town's population was on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. The BEV was so thoroughly integrated in the Blacksburg community, that in 1998, the town was chosen by

Guinness World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a British reference book published annually, list ...

as the "Most Wired Community."

External links

Official siteComputer Center Franchise

References

Blacksburg, Virginia {{compu-network-stub