Web Basics

Internet Beginnings

Did you know that the Internet came before the World Wide Web?

 All of these smaller networks use a variety of message formats and protocols so the ISPs convert these formats so the various networks can communicate with each other.

The Internet evolved from a secret feasibility study conceived by the U.S. Dept. of Defense in 1969 to test methods of having computer networks survive military attacks, by means of the dynamic rerouting of messages. 

It began by connecting three networks in California with one in Utah.  They communicated with each other by a set of rules called the Internet Protocol (IP). When this project was revealed to the public in 1972 it had grown to include about 50 universities and research organizations with defense contracts.  About ten years later, the Internet Protocol was enhanced with a set of communication protocols, the Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), that supported both local and wide-area networks.

Soon thereafter, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a network to link five supercomputer centers, and this, with TCP/IP, became the backbone of the Internet.  However, in 1995, the private sector assumed responsibility for the Internet.

Now there are over six million hosts on the Internet which are mainframes, minicomputers and workstations that support the Internet Protocol.  These hosts provide data and other services for other computers on the networks.

The Internet Administrative Bodies

1. The main body which is the Internet Society (ISOC), which develops and sets the Internet technology standards.  It is a professional membership society that provides leadership on Internet issues and is the organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards.
2. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
3. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)
4. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
5. the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG)
6. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
7. The Internet RFC Editor
8. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which ensure the stability of the Internet's system of assigned names and numbers
9. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

The World Wide Web

The growth of the Internet was enhanced by the increasing popularity of personal computers, e-mail, and the World Wide Web which was introduced in 1991 and saw explosive growth beginning in 1993.  By 2000 it was estimated that the number of adults using the Internet exceeded 100 million in the United States alone.

The Web is the collection of globally distributed text,  multimedia files, documents and other network services that are linked to create an immense worldwide electronic library.  It is called the Web because it is made of many interconnected sites, so it is somewhat like a spider web. 

The Web consists of three main parts:

1. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which comprises the programming codes, or tags, that define fonts, layouts, embedded graphics, and links (hyperlinks) to other documents accessible via the Web.
2. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which defines a set of standards for transmitting Web pages across the Internet.
3. The Universal Resource Locator (URL) which is a standardized naming convention for identifying a Web document or file, (the address of a link).

The most popular features of the Internet are:

• E-mail (electronic mail)
• Discussion Groups (called bulletin boards or newsgroups where users can post messages or questions and get answers)
• Chats or Chat rooms (on-line live conversations)
• Blogs (web logs)
• Games
• Information Accessing
• Social networks (places where people can "connect" using a variety of tools and can set up their own Web page)
• E-commerce or shopping (electronic commerce).

A Few Additional Web Facts:

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides standards, specifications, and guidelines for technologies that are commonly used on the Internet. Many major software companies are members of the W3C and work together to develop these standards and technologies, which enable Web developers, Web designers, and software companies to develop Web sites and Web-based products.  W3C issues the standards for the HTML used on the Web.  HTML version 4.01 was published in 1999.
• Ted Nelson, an American computer consultant, promoted the idea of linking documents using hypertext during the 1960s, but the technology required was not yet available and wouldn't be  for another 20 years.
• The foundation of what we now think of as the Web originated with work done on the retrieval of information from distributed systems by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN is the French term) during the 1980s. Tim's work culminated in the introduction of a text-only interface, or browser, for the scientific community in 1990 and opened to the public in 1991. Because this text interface was so difficult to use, acceptance outside the scientific and academic communities was slow.
• Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate student working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), developed a graphical browser for the Web and introduced a UNIX version in 1993. Versions for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems followed in 1994, and acceptance of the World Wide Web exploded from there.

In the next section on Web Addresses, I'll talk about Internet Addresses and Domain Names.