How the Internet Works

The internet has revolutionized the modern world like no other invention has before, except perhaps, electricity. The internet allows sharing and collaboration to take place between people on opposite sides of the globe. Vinton G. Cerf, often called the “Father of the Internet”, admits that when the original idea of an “intranet” was in its infancy, there was no possible way to imagine all of the ways we would come to use it (NDTV, 2013).

It is important to know the history of the internet. The internet is a worldwide network of computer systems that are connected to each other by cables (Howe, 2012). The internet first started out as a military experiment. In 1957, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created by the United States department of Defense (Computer History Museum, 2004). The project was started after the Russians launched a satellite into space for communication reasons. The satellite was called SPUTNIK (Computer History Museum, 2004). It was rumored that President Eisenhower got worried and decided to get the United States to launch its own satellite. They recruited Dr. Joseph C. Licklider of MIT, was made head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)(Computer History Museum, 2004). Their purpose of the project was to focus on improving the military use of computer information.

Information in today 's world seems vast and often times limitless yet acquiring that information has become almost an effortless task since the arrival of the Internet. In the past 20 years this global system of interconnected computer networks has grown by leaps and bounds. The Internet has managed to provide the masses with an informational platform that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It delivers whatever we may need, desire or want to know about with just a few simple clicks or keystrokes. A technological medium that has become quite instrumental in our daily lives.

In the 1990’s, an invention was created that is now used in everyday life, The World Wide Web also known as the WWW. In the year of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.It was invented in the United States and was later released to the public in 1991. The World Wide Web has become very important and people could not imagine a life without it. Overall, the World Wide Web has become very important to the world (Tim Berners-Lee).

The Internet influenced the United States more than anything else in the 20th century. The Internet first technically started in 1969, when the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA connected networks at the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). From there, just three years later the creation of the Email was born by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. With many other novelties of the Internet coming soon after, such as the Domain Name System (DNS) establishing .edu and .com, and the first web browser, World Wide Web by CERN. As the Internet flourished in the late 1990s it became more usable to the public and soon became routine to use, making great changes in society. The Internet was integrated

Soon after, the World Wide Web was created as a system for organizing and linking documents so they could be viewed over the internet. Individuals could post their digital content so it could be accessed by almost anyone from any part of the globe. The commercial web browser was kicked off by Netscape. Netscape was a huge flattening force for many reasons. The Netscape browser not only brought the internet alive but also made it accessible to everyone. Individuals immediately found themselves hooked with anybody's website on the internet, and in no time, they were able to interact and be in touch with virtually anyone.

In this day and age you can find almost anything online. You can access the web from your laptop, your phone, even your game consoles and televisions. We were born in a time where the web was always there for our convenience, but how many of us actually know where it all started? The biggest tool in our society was created in 1989 by the man known as Tim Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an British physicist,who is also known for his invention that changed the history of computers and our life: The World Wide Web. Until 1990, people were using Internet only for e-mail because information on the Internet was spread and there was not a way to access it all.All that changed with the invention of the World Wide Web. The whole idea of World Wide Web was simple thought on Berners Lee’s mind that it would be great idea for researchers to be able find the documents they needed from any computer in the world.In 1980, he made his first attempt to create resource by writing a program called Enquire to organize documents, lists of people, and the projects on his computer.The hypertext program on his computer would

We are increasingly consolidating our information sources, forcing the Internet to be “our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (Carr).

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Weaving the Web to chronicle the creation and purpose of his major invention—a revolutionary piece of engineering that reinvented the modern world itself: The World Wide Web. In his book, he explained “the Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy”. Berners-Lee went on to say “the ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world,” and then described how humans fall into groups, form bonds, and interact with each other. Ultimately, he believed that human interests are “representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web” (Berners-Lee 123). When Berners-Lee launched his invention, he intended that it be a new medium to assist human socialization—a new platform for people to build communities on the Internet. Twenty-five years after the advent of Web 2.0, referred to as The Social Web, this dream can be regarded as a

What was to ultimately turned out to be known as ‘The Internet' was developed in the 1960s through funding by the US military so as to discover a means of making possible communication in the event of nuclear conflict . Until the beginning of 1990s, though, the Internet was the sphere of influence of academics as well as researchers as commercial use was proscribed. A process of commercialization began in the late 1980s and the wider use this encouraged was to be given an additional heightening with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the beginning of 1990s. The progress of browsers in the early 1990s which facilitated web pages to be viewed in a graphical format in color after that brought the benefits of the Internet to a wider

Compare with the original World Wide Web, the evolved Web 2.0 is named by its ability for users to interact with each others. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who described Web 2.0 as: "a place where we could all meet and read and write." He said, "When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text " . Web 2.0 starts to make networked world "virtualized" through its handy and approachable feature.

Tim Berners-Lee is a famous computer scientist from England who is famous for being known as the inventor of the Web. During his many presentations, he points out numerous key ideas based on how he developed the web and the main components behind operating the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee begins his presentation by discussing how he began in the world of technology by working as a software engineer working with data systems during this time. He mentions how frustrating and incompatible it was to simply figure out how to build something because of the long process it took to do such a thing instead of just “clicking” something on the web like we know today. He also mentioned how difficult it was to truly explain to someone what the web was.

It was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee, used as world wide web address. Now it has been complied as internet standard RFC1738 by the World Wide Web consortium.

HyperText Mark-up Language, better known as HTML, was developed from a prototype by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. However, Tim first developed a hypertext system called Enquire, which was made for his own personal use. He was working “at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland” (2 - A History of HTML.), and wanted a way to collaborate easily with other people across the world on the work he was doing. He thought of using a hypertext system to link together documents, thus creating Enquire.