Internet Changes Everything

For those who missed it the first time...

TheStar.com - For those who missed it the first time...

Aug. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM

While the terms Internet and Web tend to be used interchangeably, the Web — like email, videoconferencing, streaming audio and video — travels across the Internet. The Net is a global infrastructure of computer servers, fibre-optic trunk lines, "routers" that direct electronic traffic, and the slender phone and cable lines running into your home. A rough analogy would be the Web as a train and the Internet as the tracks.

"On the Net," Tim Berners-Lee has explained, "you find computers. On the Web you find information — documents, sounds, videos. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the Net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have to know about computers and cables."

Berners-Lee is the son of two mathematicians who worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. At age 25, the erstwhile tiddlywinks league player at Oxford University devised a primitive version of the Web he called ENQUIRE, after a Victorian book, Enquire Within Upon Everything.

ENQUIRE's advanced version, debuting on this date 11 years later, was built on HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and URL (Universal Resource Location) — the last being of the most critical importance.

The HTTP determines how and where Web pages are sent. The HTML is the language by which a Web page is formatted for the Internet. And the URL is the unique address assigned to each Web page, enabling a Web user to retrieve it from its precisely identified location, be it deep in the bowels of an enormous mainframe computer at the Johns Hopkins medical school, a United Nations agency or the University of Tokyo, or on the website of a gun dealer in Birmingham, Ala.

August 6, 2006 at 05:07 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home