What is the Internet?
How the
WWW Works
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The Internet as a physical 'thing' is simply a set of cables (usually Optical Fibers) laid from city to city, country to country and now covering the entire globe. These cables are much like telephone cables, or Pay TV cables, they are owned by different companies in different areas and connect to each other, but no single company owns all the cables. These cables are called the Internet Backbone. Individuals can have a direct connection to the Backbone, just like Cable TV, however this is very expensive. Most people connect via an ISP (Internet Service Provider). For this you use the telephone lines to connect your computer to the ISP who then transfer you to the Internet Backbone.
We've all heard of the Information Super Highway. The Highway metaphor is very apt. A highway connects cities and allows various forms of traffic, cars, trucks, buses etc to move along the same highway. The Internet is similar, allowing various forms of traffic to flow in both directions between different computers. The traffic consists of E-mail, Newsgroups, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the most common, the WWW (World Wide Web)
The World Wide Web may well rank with the seven wonders of the world. Once you spend time on the Web, you will begin to feel like there is no limit to the amount of information you can find. You'll spend hours entertained by the sheer variety of things people post on their websites. So just what is this miraculous creation? Think of it as a system of electronic information linked together across the globe. The Web allows us to communicate in a rich way, by displaying text, full color graphics, photos, sounds and even video.
Web pages are actually electronic files stored on computers located all over the world. The Internet is known as a client-server system. Your computer is the client, and the remote computer which stores the data is the server. When you're looking at the Louvre's website, your computer has requested the web page from a server located in Paris. The Louvre's server sends the data you've requested over the Internet to your computer. Your web browser interprets the data and displays it on your computer screen. The Louvre's website has links to the websites of other museums, such as the Vatican Museum, so with a click of your mouse, you're now accessing a server computer in Rome.
The glue that holds the Web together is called hypertext and hyperlinks. These features allow files on the Web to be connected in a way that lets you easily jump between them. On the Web, you get to be the captain of your own ship, navigating through sites, based on what interests you the most at that particular moment. This is commonly known as "browsing" or "surfing" the Net.
To be able to access the Web you need software, such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer, known as web browsers, that understands hypertext. How does your browser distinguish between web pages and other files on the Net? Web pages are written in a computer language called HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language.
The World Wide Web (WWW) was originally developed in 1990 at
CERN , the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It is now managed but not owned by The World Wide Web Consortium , also known as the World Wide Web Initiative.
The WWW Consortium is funded by a large number of corporate members, including AT&T, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems Inc. Its purpose is to promote the growth of the Web by developing specifications and reference software that will be freely available to everyone. The Consortium is run by MIT with INRIA (The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science) acting as European host, in collaboration with CERN.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was instrumental in the development of early graphical software utilizing the World Wide Web features created by CERN. NCSA focuses on improving the productivity of researchers by providing software for scientific
modeling, analysis, and visualization. The World Wide Web was an obvious way to fulfill that mission. NCSA Mosaic was one of the earliest web browsers, distributed free to the public. It led directly to the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web.
For a more detailed discussion of the Web, read Thomas Boutell's World Wide Web FAQ -- an A to Z for the World Wide Web.
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