The Internet vs. The Web
Have you ever used the Internet and the Web interchangeably? This is a common mistake that many have made, me included. While, it may be tempting to bundle the world of computers under one umbrella understanding how each component works allows the possibility of leveraging its full potential. We will go over a brief overview of computers and how they became the interconnected devices we use today.
In the 1950’s computers would take up the size of a room but contained exponentially less computing power than even the computer you’re using to view this article. Starting as standalone systems there was no way to transfer information between them even if they were set up in the same room. In the 1960’s the Advanced Research Project Agency also known as ARPA started to fund projects with the goal of connecting these stand-alone systems. By 1969, the Arpanet was created which would be the first version of what we would call the Internet. This allowed a computer at the University of California to communicate to a computer at Stanford. It’s important to note that some parts of the message were lost in transmission, but the receipt of even a partial message gave those involved hope for more.
To simplify things the internet is a combination of the physical hardware and protocols that allow for data transmission. The physical hardware includes things such as the computer themselves, routers, modems, switches, coaxial cables, telephones cables, amongst other things that keep the systems connected. However, with the advent of wireless not all these connections are technically physical. Protocols are agreements on how data should be sent over these connections to ensure that they are broken down and restructured properly at the right location. This includes protocols such as IP/TCP, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, VOIP; which we will go more in depth on in a later article. However, it was the creation of the internet that made the web possible.
In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web. The web is a collection of linked hypertext documents that uses uniformed resource locators (URL’s) to navigate between the documents. Starting off with a request from a web browser typically in the form of a domain name; to be sent to a special computer called a web server. Once the web server receives the request it constructs a response to send back to the web browser or what we would call the client. If successful, the requested page will be rendered to your web browser for viewing. In-between the request and response are one of more pieces of software that use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to ensure the proper routing of information.
To summarize the Internet is all the hardware and protocols that allow for the interconnectivity of these systems to exist, while the web leverages the internet to send a specific type of content. You could say the web is apart of the internet, but the web is not the internet. This would be equivalent to saying that a room inside of your house is a part of your house, but not a house in itself. Th