Internet Basics

­The Internet is ubiquitous and it's hard to imagine life without it or someplace where "www" isn't included in something we do everyday. The Internet and the World Wide Web are intertwined with each other but aren't really synonymous. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started in 1958 to increase U.S. technological advancements in response to the Russian successes with Sputnik and defense related projects. In 1969 the first ARPANET network connection between two computers was launched and crashed. Subsequent efforts were more successful and the Internet was born. As more computers were added to this "network", the Internet as we know it today was born.

The World Wide Web didn't come about except for the vision of Tim Berners-Lee. The hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) he developed formed the framework for the web and people quickly developed web browsers which supported the use of HTTP protocol. As the popularity of computers skyrocketed the worldwide network grew from four computers to more than 300,000. By 1992, more than a million computers were connected -- only two years after Tim released his first version of the HTTP protocol.

<<< Go Back to Previous Page