Harden Elkington
The internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to communicate with one another.
The origins of the internet can be traced back to research commissioned by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1960s.
The first message sent over the ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, was a test message sent by UCLA student Charley Kline on October 29, 1969.
The first message to be sent between two networked computers was “login”, which was sent from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the SRI International in Menlo Park, California, on September 2, 1969.
The internet began to spread to other universities and research organizations in the 1970s, and commercial use of the internet began in the 1980s.
The internet became widely available to the public in the 1990s.
In 1992, the first web page was published by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN in Switzerland. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.
The first web browser was released in September 1993 and the first web server was introduced in November of that year.
In 1994, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) became available as a form of real-time text communication on the internet, and Yahoo! was founded as one of the first web-based search engines.
The world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch/, went online on August 6, 1991. As of July 2017, there are 1.2 billion websites on the internet.
What was before the web?
Before the worldwide web (WWW) was developed, people accessed data and information on the Internet via electronic mail (email) and USENET discussion forums.
The Internet officially began as a network infrastructure maintained by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and behind this was a foundation of four main technologies:
- Ethernet technology
- Computer networking protocol TCP/IP
- Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
- Internet Protocol Suite (IPS).
ARPANET, the first wide area network (WAN), was initiated in 1969 with mainframes at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
The early ARPANET connected these computers to each other. The traffic between these computers must route via the Network Control Program (NCP) routers that are located at this time in College Park, Maryland.
This routing was accomplished by the use of the ARPANET host-host protocol, designed to provide a flexible and reliable routing algorithm for this growing network.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) further developed the technology from the late 1960s to mid-1970s, but it was constrained by a maximum transmission unit (MTU) limit of about 576 bytes.
In 1973, Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf released as part of their contribution to the DARPA project an initial version of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) – one of the main cornerstones of the TCP/IP suite.
This revision allowed ARPANET to expand beyond its limited MTU size and paved the way for the development of the internet as we know it.
A number of other protocols were also developed during this early time period, including File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in 1971 and Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983.
FTP allowed for the transfer of files between computers on the network, while DNS provided a way to map human-readable hostnames (like “www.wikipedia.org”) to machine-readable IP addresses (like 192.0.2.1).
What purpose does the world wide web serve?
The web is a massive collection of interconnected documents containing information about subjects, organizations, locations and people.
When someone wants to find information on the web, they use a “web browser” or “HTTP client”.
A web browser allows you to see both existing websites as well as ones that have not yet been published on the internet. The server sends the requested website to the browser, which then displays it in the user’s web browser.
HTTP is a communications protocol used by browsers and web servers to send and receive information. HTTP is not the only communications protocol used on the internet, but it is one of the most popular ones.
TCP/IP is a suite of communication protocols that includes the internet and other protocols that are used for things such as local area networks (LANs) and radio communications.
The world wide web also allows users to connect directly with other users for both business and recreational purposes.
With email, you can send messages through the internet to other people. Instant messaging (IM) is a type of online chat that includes real-time text communication between two or more people.
Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to post your thoughts about things that interest you to the internet where anyone can view them.
The web allows companies to market their products directly to consumers through “e-commerce”. E-commerce sites include online stores where you can purchase items such as books, clothing, electronics and even cars.
The web also allows people to communicate with each other in “real time”. This is done by using applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and chat rooms.
The worldwide web has had a significant impact on the way we communicate with each other.
- Related post: How was television invented and developed
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How the web came to be
The web is a global collection of websites where anyone can create a website and upload content on it for free. In other words, the world wide web is a system that enables people to create their own homepages or “websites”.
A site can contain anything from information about an individual, data which might be exported from a database, a picture, a song, or a product that can be purchased.
A site can make money from its content through advertisements. Most of the information on the web is in the form of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and is encoded using UTF-8
Conclusion
The worldwide web has had a significant impact on the way we communicate with each other.
It allows us to connect with each other in a variety of ways, including through email, instant messaging, social media and e-commerce.
It also allows us to communicate in real-time using applications such as VoIP, video conferencing and chat rooms. The web is a global system that enables people to share information with each other for free.
As the use of the web continues to grow, its impact on society will only continue to increase.
