The Internet and the World Wide Web

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The Internet is a worldwide collection of networks. The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is a graphical interface that utilizes the Internet to distribute and retrieve information (Kosteba, 2006: 2-3).

The history of the Internet began in the cold war in 1950s for encrypting messages for military purposes. The message sent is divided into packets. The software that took care of the packeting and reassembling of the packets is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) where the TCP handles the packeting and the IP handles the addressing. Afterwards, academic institutions and research centers joined the network for military research purposes. Access was limited to limited group of people with technical expertise. The Internet was not popular until the access and use was made easy by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at a laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. He saw the set of links from computer to computer as a spider’s web; hence the name Web. Later on, the first browser was invented. The first web browser was named Mosaic (Capron, 2000: 211-212). It is a software for browsing the web. Nowadays there are many popular web browsers such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, Mozilla Firefox and Mosaic. With the web and the browser, the Internet and the World Wide Web has become gradually popular since then.

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