World Wide Web | Internet History

The Internet started life as a report written by the Rand Corporation for the US government in the 60s. This outlined very much the modern view of Information supplanting material goods as the commodity of the coming century.

The U.S. government agency ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency, invested several billion dollars in developing "Packet Switching Networks" through the early 70s. Initially, the customer for these was the US Department of Defense. However, many of the researchers contracted to carry out the work were academics. They became enamoured of the test systems they built, initially the research network was called the ARPANET, and later the Internet.

By the very early 80s, two other important pieces of technology had emerged. Firstly the workstation/server system was starting to emerge as the way to provide cost effective computing to the desktop. Secondly, the Ethernet Local Area Network was accepted broadly as the way of providing communications between the desktop and server computers in the same organization.

The United States government funded most of the initial implementations of the Internet technology on the basis that it would be made freely available to others.

By the late eighties, a large proportion of universities and research labs in Europe and the US had access to the Internet through largely government subsidized network links leased from the Public Network Operators. However this changed rapidly, so that now many Internet connections are paid for directly by the subscribing organization.

The Internet, as described above became what most people today refer to as the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (known as "WWW', "Web" or "W3") is the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge.

The World Wide Web began as a networked information project at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], developed a vision of the project.

The Web has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions. Through the use hypertext and multimedia techniques, the web is easy for anyone to roam, browse, and contribute to.