The World Wide Internet

Surfing the web, getting online and hitting the net are terms that ubiquitous among the verbs that describe how we live our lives. They stopped being technical terms a long time ago and now simply describe daily activities that all generations understand and take part in.

In becoming such commonly used terms they have lost some of their meaning with the web and the internet being interchangeable in most peoples minds. However this isn't the case, they do represent two different if complementary technologies.

Internet vs Web

The Internet is the set of protocols that has allowed computers all over the world to be connected and to exchange data, the so called "network of networks". It is concerned with how data is sent and received not what the data actually represents.

Protocols such the Internet Protocol and the Transmission Control Protocol allow each computer to be addressable and routable to allow the free flowing transmission of data.

The World Wide Web (WWW or W3) is an information system that builds on top of the interconnection between devices that the Internet provides to define a system for how information should be represented, displayed and linked together.

Defined by the concepts of hypermedia and hypertext it provides the means by which we are able to view data online, how we are provided links to that data and that data is visually depicted.

The History of the Internet

As computer science emerged as an academic discipline in the 1950s access to computing resource was scarce. For this reason scientist wanted to develop a way for access to be time shared such that many different teams could take advantage of the emerging technology.

This effort culminated in the development of the first wide are network Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) built by US Department of Defence in 1969.

Initially this interconnected network connected a number of universities including the University of California, Stanford Research Institute and the University of Utah.

In 1973 ARPANET expanded to become international with Norwegian Seismic Array and University College London being brought onboard. Into the 1980s ARPANET continued to grow and started to be referred to as the Internet as short hand for Internetwork.

In 1982 the TCP/IP protocols were standardised and the foundations of what we now know as the Internet were starting to be put in place.

The History of the Web

The Web was the invention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee as part of his work at CERN in Switzerland. The problems he was trying to solve related to the storing, updating and discoverability of documents in large datasets being worked on by large numbers of distributed teams.

In 1989 he submitted his proposal for a system that could solve these problems and in 1990 a working prototype was completed including and HTTP server and the very first browser named after the project and called WorldWideWeb.

Building on top of the network provided by the Internet the project defined the HTTP protocol, the structure of URLs and HTML as the way that the data in documents could be represented.

In 1993 CERN made the decision to make these protocols and the code behind them available royalty free, a decision that would change the world forever and enabled the number of web sites in the world to steadily grow from tens, to hundreds, to thousands, to the vast numbers that we now take for granted.

Many technologies end up having a profound impact on our lives without its terminology becoming understood by those outside technological circles. But the Internet and the web are different, they are so embedded in our lives that URLs, hyperlinks, web address etc are normal everyday words.

In the early days of ARPANET, and probably also for the WWW project, although those teams may have realised they were working on what could be important technologies I think they wouldn't have anticipated quite where their work would lead. But when an idea is a good one, it can go in many unexpected directions.