The Internet is a global, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks. The networks communicate within themselves and with one another using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet carries various information and services, including email, instant messaging, data sharing, and millions of interlinked HTML web pages which constitute the World Wide Web.

The Birth of the Internet

The first steps towards the creation of the Internet were taken in 1958, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was launched. Subsequently a project was begun to create a computer network, with the first node going live in 1969. After this, various organisations including the British Post Office collaborated to create the first international packet-switching network in 1978. Eventually this network grew to cover parts of Canada, Hong Kong, the US and Australia.

The internet has grown exponentially since 1990, when the World Wide Web project was launched by CERN. The Internet now incorporates the majority of pre-existing public computer networks (with the exception of a few, such as FidoNet). The lack of a central administration and the ability of anyone with a telephone line and a terminal to connect to the Internet have led to growth of 100% per year over the past decade.

Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, responsible for the "www" which appears at the beginning of many domain names, is the system of interlinked html documents which are retrieved and accessed via the internet. Essentially, the World Wide Web was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. Berners-Lee needed a way to interconnect the notes he made during his work for CERN, and in 1980 he wrote a small computer program to help him do this, called ENQUIRE after an encyclopaedia called "Enquire Within Upon Everything" that he remembered from his childhood. ENQUIRE was a sort of hypertext notebook, in which files could be "linked" to one another on Berners-Lee's computer.

The truly inspired move was to share information with other computers, not by moving it all onto a central database, but by connecting these computers directly. He soon realised that a whole network of computers sharing information freely was possible, and that this network could be useful not only for organisations, but globally. Berners-Lee wrote later that "One had to be able to jump from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever."

He went on to invent an easy-to-learn coding system, HyperText Markup Language (html), and a set of rules which permitted documents to be linked together, called HyperText Transfer Protocol (http). Finally, he put together the world's first web browser, which allowed users to view pages and link from one to the next.

The World Wide Web was publicly launched on the Internet in 1991, and in five years, there were 40 million web users. The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic led to more widespread access to the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee's next project is what he calls a Semantic Web. This is a World Wide Web whose entire content and interlinking can be "read" in detail by computers, to cut out the tedious parts of web browsing such as trawling through irrelevant search engine results. He supports the interest in wiki-modelled websites, and believes that the internet should be as easy to edit as it is to browse.

By Natalie Catchpole