The Internet today, has revolutionized the computer, communications, and related infrastructure like never before. The internet merely means an electronic communications network and organizational computer amenities where users at any one computer can, if they have the authorization, receive information from any other computer and interchange all kinds of information and not limited to text, graphics, voice, video, programs, etc.
Many factors have led to the development of the Internet and as per the book Funding a Revolution (1999) released by National Academies Press, before 1970, individual researchers established the underlying technologies, comprising queuing theory, packet switching, and routing. Through the 1970s, experimental networks, particularly the ARPANET, were built. In the 1980s, networks were widely deployed, originally to support scientific research. In the early 1990s, the invention of the Web made it much easier for users to publish and access information. Not to mention, most of these projects were Government funded.
In March 1989, notable research at CERN (CERN was originally named after its founding body the “Conseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire” and is now called European Laboratory for Particle Physics”) led to the invention of the World Wide Web. “CERN” is a meeting place for physicists from all over the world who collaborate on complex physics, engineering, and information handling projects. Thus the necessity for a Web system arose and in 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee a British computer scientist invented the World Wide Web (WWW).
By October 1990, Tim came up with three fundamental technologies that continue to remain the foundation of today’s web:
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” is unique and used to identify each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.
Although the Internet and WWW are two different concepts technically, today they are used in conjunction. Simply because most of us use the internet to access websites to retrieve or share the information on day to day basis and this routine activity has led the layman to interchangeably use the concept Internet and WWW
Many personalities have played a vital role in the development of the Internet and WWW. To list a few; in 1968 the mother of all demos takes place at the Convention Center in San Francisco by Douglas Engelbart and his team.
In 1969, Paul Baran under the direction of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) pioneered the first connection of a packet-switching network between Stanford and UCLA. This paved the way for the establishment of ARPANET which is the precursor for the Internet today.
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson programmed the first email on the ARPANET system.
In 1975, John Vittal developed the first modern email client called MSG and this led to the transformation of a highly user-friendly email tool today.
In 1982, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) a suite of protocols were designed by Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf. TCP/IP continues to be the language of the Internet.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee writes a proposal that will eventually lead to the World Wide Web.
What fascinates here is that all of these prominent developers wanted to connect people across the globe virtually, by sharing and retrieving the information in a matter of seconds. Today, accessibility and collaboration via the Internet and the WWW has brought the world much closer to humanity.
The world wide web made it much easier for people to share information.