INTRODUCTION TO THE
WORLD WIDE WEB
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WHY WOULD YOU USE THE WORLD
WIDE WEB?
The World Wide Web can be used
to access information on many topics. Special interest groups, educational
institutions, non-profit organizations, commercial entities and private
persons are regularly posting information on the World Wide Web that you
or someone else might be interested in. Increasingly, students are
using the World Wide Web to retrieve information pertinent to the research
they need for terms papers or independent queries.
THE INTERNET
What is the Internet? Simply
stated, it is a worldwide network of computer networks. There are
close to 11,000 computer networks, each consisting of tens of thousands
of computers, with an estimate of 77.5 million users worldwide by the year
2002. By using a combination of phone lines and other special equipment,
each computer can talk to others. This connectivity allows a communication,
collaboration, resource sharing, and information access that has so far
been unmatched.
HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
The Internet traces its birth
to 1969 when the Department of Defense established ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network) an electronic network that was designed to allow
researchers to share computer resources. By 1985, network congestion
and proliferation had reached such a level that NSFNet (National Science
Foundation Network) was established as a high-speed backbone on the Internet.
NSFNet evolved into NREN (National Research and Education Network).
Recently, NREN has been turned over to the private domain.
WHAT IS INTERNET2?
As more and more web sites grew
(now over 3 billion!), the Internet has become very congested. Internet2
is a nationwide initiative among universities, corporations, and government
to provide a second high-speed backbone that is to be restricted to academic
and government research, only. It is as of February, 2001 still in
testing mode, run by a new, separate state-of-the-art backbone called the
Abilene Network.
WHO RUNS THE INTERNET?
No one, and everyone. The
communicating computer networks belong to the governments (federal, state,
and local), educational institutions, and commercial establishments.
Ultimate authority rests with the Internet Society, a voluntary membership
organization whose purpose is to promote global information exchange through
Internet technology. But the philosophy of the Internet prides itself
in functioning through democratic self-government.
(OVER)
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Messages are sent across the Internet,
network to network, ricocheting via computers called routers that serve
as gateways, relaying and managing the information transportation.
Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a set of rules
that define how Internet computers are to communicate with each other.
JUST WHAT IS THE WEB?
It is common to assume that the
World Wide Web and the Internet are synonymous. The World Wide Web
actually is a collection of standards used to access the information available
on the Internet. The Internet, on the other hand, is a physical medium
that transports the data. The World Wide Web serves to "unify" the
data available, by presenting a set of computer software tools that allows
you to navigate and access hypermedia documents. A growing number
of individuals and institutions are creating "home pages" or documents
that can be accessed on the World Wide Web.
