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What is The World Wide Web

The Internet

• In 1970, the parent of the Internet was ARPANet, implemented at UCLA by the Department Of Defense as a prototype of a communications network that would be resilient in the event of a nuclear attack.
• The network is based on tcp/ip, information broken into packets that are routed dynamically through the network.
• Email is born.
• In 1987 the National Science Foundation created NSFNet, a TCP/IP network, to connect its supercomputing centers with universities
• The military goals and educational usage of the Internet defined its character: It is controlled by no entity and governed only by a consensus of standards.
• Today the Internet is international and consists of 100s of millions of networked computers on mostly privately owned, but publicly available networks.
• A few of the different activities conducted on the Internet include: email, ftp, telnet, gopher, irc (chats), MUDs, netnews, ph (phone directory), finger, ntp (time services), and WWW.

Hypertext

• In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext to describe text that is not constrained to be sequential. Hypertext, as described by Nelson in project Xanadu (once described as the, longest running unfinished software project) links documents to form a web of relationships.
• In 1987, the Macintosh HyperCard is introduced, one of the first hypercard systems implemented. All linked documents had to reside on the same computer.

Origins of "The Web"

• In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at (CERN) European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, created the first implementation of the WWW, a distributed hypertext system to enable efficient information sharing for members of the high-energy physics community.
• A platform-independent, standard protocol for transferring information.
• A command-line interface using HTML, HTTP, and a client software program (www)
• In early 1993 an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named Marc Andreessen, working on a project for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), led a team that developed an X Window System browser for the Web called Mosaic, which was among the first graphical interfaces to the Web
• 1995, Internet becomes commercial
• Today the Web is the primary use of the Internet and has brought both millions of people and thousands of commercial enterprises to the Internet.

W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium

• In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the MIT, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission.
• The purpose of W3C is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. W3C has over 350 Member organizations from all over the world.

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"Mastering a Web Site" online course Created and maintained by Lorna Schmid and David Boldt. http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/training/webmaster/www.html     Last modified: Wed Nov 12 17:34:13 EST 2003