What is the Internet?
Internet is a network of networks. It is a single switch that allows machines to alternatively be clients or servers or peers to communicate with one another. Based on a set of protocols know as the TCP/IP protocol suit, the Internet uses a system of packet switching for data transfer. Growing from research originally funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Internet was designed to be highly robust in case one section of the network (or a computer host in the network) became inoperable: Packets could simply be transmitted over another route through the network, because no one network path was essential.
What is The World Wide Web?
The WWW is a very distinct system from the Internet. The WWW is not a network, but an application system (a set of woftware programs). The WWW can be deployed and used on many different kinds of networks or it could even be used on no network at all. History of WWW
- Vannevar Bush described a system for associatively linking information in his article in The Atlantic Monthly, "As We May Think" - July 1945.
- In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext to describe text that is not constrained to be sequential. Hypertext, as described by Nelson, links documents to form a web of relationships that draws on the possibilities for extending and augmenting the meaning of a "flat" piece of text with links to other texts. He also coined the hypermedia, which is hypertext not constrained to be text. Hypertext can include multimedia - pictures, graphics, sound, and movies.
- In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, proposed a hypertext system to enable efficient information sharing for members time software, and communications, and had previously developed a hepertext sytem that he called Enquire in 1980.
- By late 1990, an operating prototype of the WWW ran on a NeXT computer, and a line-mode user interface (called www) was completed. The essential pieces of the Web were in place, although no widely available for network use.
- In March 1991, the www interface was used on a network, and by May of that year it was made available on central CERN machines. CERN annouced the availability of the files in the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext on August 1991. In October 1991, a gateway from the Web to Wide-Area Information Server (WAIS) software was completed.
- During 1992, the Web continued to develop, and interest in it grew. On January 15th, the www interface became publicly available from CERN.
- In February 1993, Mosaic was released. Mosaic is a browser for the Web ran on X Window System developed by a team in National Center for Supercomputing Applications led by a young undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named Marc Andreessen.
- (to be continue)