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Chapter 21
The Internet and the World Wide Web

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
—Marshall McLuhan

The Internet

The Internet is a vast international network of electronic systems that links host computers and users in a digital web.
It grew out of the ARPANET, a computer network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
and other related U.S. government agencies in the 1960s. Becoming operational in 1969, the ARPANET allowed
scientists and researchers working on government projects to communicate electronically from remote sites.
ARPANET users could call up files stored on the network and collaborate with colleagues across the country.
Universities were among the earliest nodes in this large computer network.

As the ARPANET grew in size, its architects recognized the need to communicate with other computer networks that
were being developed. In 1983, the ARPANET was split into two separate but interconnected networks that together
formed the Internet. Linkups of other networks to the original Internet grew rapidly, far beyond the links originally
provided by the government. By 1985, over 100 networks were connected to the system; by 1990, when the original
ARPANET system was decommissioned, the number of networks linked to the Internet had

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grown to over 2,000. Universities and autonomous programmers were instrumental in adding new linkups and
functions to increase the Internet's power and services and to take it well beyond its original function as an electronic
communication system for government scientists and academics. In the late 1990s, the Internet continues to grow at a
rapid pace, offering e-mail connections, links to individual sites, file transfers, news groups, and search engines to an
ever wider range of users.

The World Wide Web

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland, introduced
the first computer code for hypertext, thus beginning the World Wide Web (WWW). Through the use of hypertext
links, the Web allows its users the ability to link words, pictures, and sounds. Besides hypertext connections between
related topics, the Web can make use of color, graphics, animation, and more varied typefaces. Scientists around the
world can use the Web to communicate with each other as they did with the old ARPANET. Files can be placed on
one host site and can then be downloaded from anywhere. E-mail can also include links to other sites on the Web,
along with text files and graphics attached to the e-mail message. By 1995, the Web comprised the bulk of Internet
traffic.

The Web is accessed by a browser—an application that resides on your computer or on a server. The browser lets you
access information available on the Web from anywhere in the world. Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser,
became available in 1993. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer are the two most popular browsers in use today,
and their functions overlap about 90% of the time. A function unique to one browser has usually been duplicated by
the other in short order. Explorer and Navigator each have their own individual design, and although these browsers
look similar, some differences in appearance occur when viewing them on different platforms. Color is slightly darker
on Windows platforms but is otherwise the same as long as the color references stay within the color palette shared by

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