Many people get confused by the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web. The early internet development was carried out largely by the Department of Defence in the USA, while the World Wide Web (WWW) was invented by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee some 20 years later.
They are different entities, and the way to explain the difference is to take the telephone as an analogy. If your computer is the analogue of your telephone set, then your IP address is your telephone number, specific to your telephone, the World Wide Web consists of all file addresses that can publicly be connected to each other (e.g. equiv. to conversations that you have by telephone) and the internet is the means by which they are connected – the telephone cables and wireless connections.
Thus, the web consists of all the files, that can be text, images, videos and so on that can be accessed by means of hyperlinks from one IP address to the specific file location on another IP address, and passed between IP addresses using the internet.
Although the World Wide Web started in 1990, we can trace the roots of the Internet to as early as the 1950s to 1960s. It was actually started after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, and the American military became afraid of the conquest of space by the Russians. They became conscious of the need for swift computer communication round the world in the interest of defence.
It was in 1962 that the DARPA or Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency was formed, and in 1969 the first internet officially went live, referred to as the ARPANET. It was the idea of a man who is aptly called the father of the internet, J.C.R. Licklider. His idea, that he called the Galactic Network, is considered to be the seed of the Internet.
Who knew back then that internet business would flourish as it did? Aside from Licklider, Vinton Gray Cerf is considered to be one of the forefathers of the Internet. Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocols needed for the transfer of packetized files, and in doing that, he played a key role in the development of the internet.
The first long distance connection was also developed in the 1960s, by MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts and Thomas Merrill in 1965. They connected the TX-2 computer from Massachusetts to a Q-32 computer in California. However, the phone lines during that time could not handle internet technology and it was some time before such technology was commonplace.
Many familiar names can be thrown into the pot, one of which is Al Gore. Many people mistake him as the inventor of the Internet. While it is not true, he actively promoted it, making him a key player in its growth. Al Gore popularized the term "information superhighway" which was coined back in 1974 by Nam June Paik.
While the Internet grew over the decades, it was only in the 1990s that the World Wide Web provided the resource by which ordinary people could have easy access to the internet. Home computers were common by then, but internet access was still in its infancy.
It was in 1993 that the first known web browser, Mosaic, was released. The radio media took 38 years for them to have 50 million users or listeners. The television took 13 years while the Internet only needed 5 years to achieve the same volume of usage. Much of that had to do with reduced costs, of course, but it was a significant achievement nevertheless.
A little known fact is that only about a third of internet communication is in English, the most common of the other two thirds being in Chinese and Spanish. North America has the largest continental concentration at 70%. On the other hand, the country with highest percentage of Internet users is Sweden at 75%. Another interesting fact about the Internet business is the number of pages or indices there are today. According to Google, their index now contains over 8 billion pages and it is still growing rapidly each day.
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