What are the

Internet andWorld

Wide Web?

The Internet began life in 1969 with the aim of providing the US military with a secure distributed communications system.

..The basic design included a method for intelligently routing messages so that if one "node" failed the message would keep searching for a way around the blockage until it got to its destination.

The name recently given by US Vice President Al Gore to the Internet was "the information superhighway." This is a complete misnomer. Rather than imagining the Internet as a 6 lane motorway for information it is more logical to visualise the Internet as a series of "B" roads with the small towns and villages where the B roads intersect representing the computer nodes. However the phrase information superhighway does sound better than the information super byway or, perhaps worse, the information B road.

During the 1970s the Internet grew slowly, with its use being restricted to military, research and scientific use. In 1982 The European Eunet was established with the Japanese equivalent following in 1984. In 1986 the ANSF (American National Science Foundation) linked five supercomputing centres to the system which resulted in substantial growth over a very short period of time. In February 1986 there were just 2000 host computers connected to the Internet, by November of the same year there were 5000 host computers connected.
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The Internet continued to grow as more and more academic and multi-national corporations added links to the system. In 1991 the first commercialisation of the Internet occurred when the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was formed to allow users to communicate with each other regardless of which network provided the originating connection.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee a researcher at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva proposed a hypertext based system which would enable efficient information sharing for the high energy particle physics community world-wide. Based on ideas about non-linear information organisation the important elements of the proposal were as follows:

aA user interface that would be consistent and platform independent

bAn agreed scheme for this interface to access a variety of document and graphics types and use multiple information protocols

cUniversal accessibility allowing any user to access any information, anywhere at any time.

In May of 1991 the first browser interface was available on a CERN machine and interest in this new technology started to grow.