Internet

The World Wide Web

Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, the Internet is not the same as the World Wide Web (or simply the web). The Internet is actually the platform on top of which the web transmits and shares information. An immense electronic library of globally distributed text and multimedia documents, the web functions as a ubiquitous platform for storing and retrieving data. The web consists of three main elements: (1) HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which comprises the programming codes, or tags, that define fonts, layouts, embedded graphics, and links; (2) HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), which defines a set of standards for enabling applications to communicate and share information; (3) URL (Universal Resource Locator), which functions as a web address by standardizing the naming conventions for identifying a web document or file. Taken as a whole, the web is a system of Internet servers that support documents formatted in HTML. Using HTML, documents are linked together allowing users to navigate between documents and computers distributed anywhere. The World Wide Web is just one way that information is circulated over the Internet, however. Email, for example, can be transmitted over the Internet using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), and files can be transferred using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

The History of the Internet

The origins of the Internet reach back to government-funded military research in the 1950s. In 1957, the U.S. government created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under the Department of Defense. Charged with the mission of advancing U.S. military technology, ARPA was established in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik I into Earth's orbit. Under the guidance of J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990), a one-time MIT professor of experimental psychology, ARPA endeavored to develop augmented intelligence via distributed computing. Successively connecting three networks in California with one in Utah, the ARPANET (ARPA network) was designed to dynamically reroute messages through a set of rules called the Internet Protocol (IP). The first large-scale “network of networks” using a common set of mechanisms, ARPANET grew exponentially, expanding to include more than 50 universities and research organizations.

Introduced to the public at the first International Conference on Computer Communication, ARPANET was quickly adopted and transformed by students and professors at universities across the United States. By 1973, the first international connection was developed with the University College of London. By the mid-1980s, ARPANET would move beyond its military origins, evolving into NSFNET (the National Science Foundation's network). As the first network available to researchers on campuses across the country, the value of NSFNET as a research and communication infrastructure was substantial. Originally, launched by the National Science Foundation in 1986, NSFNET had been designed to link the research community to five supercomputing centers across the United States: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. By the end of the decade, however, NSFNET had become the backbone of an emergent Internet and had laid the foundations for the Internet's rapid growth in the 1990s (Waldrop, 2008, p. 85).

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