Why the Internet and the World Wide Web aren’t the same

In the past few days, you can have seen a host of tributes to the Internet, celebrating 30 years because of its inception on 12 March 1989. Well-that means although these can be, they’re technically wrong, as it’s the World Wide Web that became conceived three many years in the past: now not the net.

While we have a tendency to apply the two interchangeably in modern-day language, the Internet and the Web are separate entities. The Internet actually predates the sector extensive net with the aid of a decade and a half of, and the Web couldn’t exist without it, in step with computing icon and Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Okay, so what is the Internet?

Essentially, the net is a network of networks which connects computers. MIT pupil Leonard Kleinrock published a thesis in 1961 on how computer systems may want to speak with one another the usage of packets of facts (transmitting statistics in small chunks), an idea he explored with MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts in a series of assessments in California.

Having proved the benefits of packet communications over circuit-switched telephone systems, Roberts took the concept to the US navy’s intel arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He announced his plan for the ARPAnet in 1967 in the course of a convention in Tennessee wherein UK researchers Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of National Physical Laboratory (NPL) additionally presented a paper on a packet networking idea – evolved absolutely independently.

The NPL network becomes later interconnected with the ARPAnet in 1973, after laptop scientists, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn evolved the modern internet protocols (IP) for records shared among computer systems – resulting in their broadly-held reputation as the fathers of the internet.

How does the Internet work?

In Sir Tim’s words: “As Vint factors out, a packet is a chunk like a postcard with an easy deal with on it. If you put the proper cope with on a packet and gave it to any computer that is related as a part of the Net, each pc could determine out which cable to send it down subsequent in order that it would get to its vacation spot. That’s what the Internet does. It provides packets – everywhere inside the world, generally properly under a 2d.

“Lots of various type of programs use the Internet: e-mail, for instance, become round long before the global hypertext system I invented and referred to as the World Wide Web (‘Web). Now, video conferencing and streamed audio channels are among different matters which, just like the Web, encode data in unique ways and use exclusive languages among computer systems (“protocols”) to provide a carrier.”

So what is the World Wide Web, then?

If the Internet is a series of networks, the Web is your portal to having access to the one’s networks – the Internet’s connections consist of computers and cables, the Web’s connections are hypertext links, or, a call for all of the data you can access online.

Enter the father of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Sir Tim invented the Web and first web browser in 1989 at the same time as operating at particle physics lab CERN in Switzerland and evolved the arena’s first publicly available website in 1991.

While running as a pc research fellow, he proposed the creation of a global hypertext area wherein any network-on hand facts might be mentioned via a single “Universal Document Identifier” in 1989. The notion revolved round an automatic machine through which customers may want to write, layout and link to content material through hypertext links.

With the permission of boss Mike Sendall, Sir Tim wrote WorldWideWeb.app the sector’s first-web page editor/browser, a point and click on hypertext editor which ran on a NeXT laptop (the corporation based by using Steve Jobs all through his wilderness years from Apple).

As Sir Tim places it: “The Web exists because of programs which talk among computer systems at the Net. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the Net beneficial because people are surely interested by records (now not to mention know-how and information!) and don’t actually need to should recognize approximately computer systems and cables.

“The dream in the back of the Web is of a common facts space wherein we speak via sharing facts. Its universality is essential: the reality that a hypertext hyperlink can point to anything, be it non-public, nearby or worldwide, be it draft or surprisingly polished.

“There becomes a 2d part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so normally used that it has become a sensible reflect (or in truth the number one embodiment) of the methods in which we paintings and play and socialize. That turned into that when the nation of our interactions become online, we could then use computer systems to assist us to examine it, make the experience of what we’re doing, in which we personally healthy in, and how we are able to better paintings together.”

He wrote the world’s first net server (“httpd”)and browser patron at some point of 1990, and through October of that 12 months had written three cornerstones of the Web as it nonetheless exists these days. These were HTML (HyperText Markup Language, or the markup – formatting – a language for the web), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which allows the retrieval of linked assets from throughout the internet) and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier, a unique address used to perceive sources on the net.)

Sir Tim announced the WWW software in August 1991 and the first US Web server went online in December, allowing the first human beings out of doors of CERN to start the usage of it. By the end of 1994, the Web had 10m users global, and Sir Tim left CERN to sign up for MIT and located the International World Wide Web Consortium.

To commemorate the Web’s thirtieth anniversary, Sir Tim wrote an open letter to the general public and politicians calling on them to “come collectively and give up its misuse”.

While the web has created opportunities for the top, it has also come to be a space used by “scammers” and “given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all styles of crime less difficult to dedicate,” he wrote.

“The fight for the net is one of the maximum critical causes of our time. Today, half of-of the arena is online. It is more pressing than ever to make sure the other 1/2 aren’t left in the back of offline, and that everybody contributes to an internet that drives equality, possibility, and creativity.

“The web is for everybody and collectively we preserve the energy to change it. It won’t be clean. But if we dream a bit and paintings loads, we can get the web we need.”