The Blacksburg Electronic Village or BEV was conceived as a project of

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six re ...

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 is a list of sociologists. It is intended to cover those who have made substantive contributions to social theory and research, including any sociological subfield. Scientists in other fields and philosophers are not included, unless at least ...

and computer scientists 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 system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. Two-thirds of users used the university's web servers. That means that approximately 42.86% of the town's population was on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. 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 reference book published annually, listing world ...

as the "Most Wired Community."

External links

Official siteComputer Center Franchise

References

Blacksburg, Virginia {{compu-network-stub