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A Brief History of the Internet

In the 60's and 70's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) started doing research on how to connect computers through networking. Different "styles" of networking were developed, such as LAN and WAN. LAN, local area networking, was used to connect computers in close proximity to each other. These close proximity standards meant as long as they could be physically attached to each other with the use of cables. WAN, wide area networking, provided transmission of information on telephone like cables over greater distances than LAN. Although these solutions were fine for sharing information between system in reasonably close proximity, a better way to handle long distance data transmissions was needed thus the birth of the INTERNET.

The INTERNET is the term describing the connection between different computer systems regardless of their operating systems. What made this possible was the creation of a common 'language' to enable the transferring of information. This 'language' that was developed is called TCP/IP

TCP/IP is the acronym for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. Put simply it is the common 'language' that all of the computers will understand and will execute the commands to transmit information upon request.

Well now that a way was developed for all of these different systems to talk to each other, how do you know what system to call on the INTERNET? A simple solution was developed where each computer has it's own number referred to as an IP ADDRESS. This number follows all of the information that is passed from the computer that it resides on to the computer that it is destined for so each system knows where to pass the requested information to. Pretty slick!

In the early 90's the WORLD WIDE WEB was developed in Geneva Switzerland. Bet you thought that the INTERNET and the WORLD WIDE WEB were the same, but they're not! The WORLD WIDE WEB is the collection of 'pages' written in a language call HTML, HyperText Markup Language, that allows text, graphics, animations, music and other things to be displayed in a browser. The page that you are looking at right now is done in HTML.