Think of the web as the illustrated version of the
Internet. It began in the late 1980's when physicist Dr. Berners-Lee wrote a
small computer program for his own personal use. This program allowed pages,
within his computer, to be linked together using keywords. It soon became
possible to link documents in different computers, as long as they were
connected to the Internet. The document formatting language used to link
documents is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language.)
The Web remained primarily text based until 1992. Two events occurred that year that would forever change the way the Web looked. Marc Andreesen developed a new computer program called the NCSA Mosaic (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois) and gave it away! The NCSA Mosaic was the first Web browser. The browser made it easier to access the different Web sites that had started to appear. Soon Web sites contained more than just text, they also had sound and video files.
Even with the multimedia excitement of the Web,
Electronic Mail (email) is the most frequently used application of the
Internet. Many people who have access to the Internet at school, home,
and work, use the Internet for no other purpose than to send and receive
email.
The message then remains in the recipient's mail server until he requests it by "checking his mail."
Each email address you send is made up of certain components that help route it to the proper recipient:
The benefits of email are obvious...mostly it's quick. Also, many people feel that the rules for regular mail don't apply to email*, making it less formal, which in turn makes email easier to compose and send.
(For all
this and much more, go to
www.internet101.org )
Sometime in the mid 1960's, during the Cold War, it
became apparent that there was a need for a bombproof communications system.
A concept was devised to link computers
together throughout the country.
With such a system in place large sections of the country could be nuked and
messages could still get through.
In the beginning, only government "think tanks" and a few universities were linked. Basically the Internet was an emergency military communications system operated by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The whole operation was referred to as ARPANET.
In time, ARPANET computers were installed at every university in the United States that had defense related funding. Gradually, the Internet had gone from a military pipeline to a communications tool for scientists. As more scholars came online, the administration of the system transferred from ARPA to the National Science Foundation.
Years later, businesses began using the Internet and the administrative responsibilities were once again transferred.
At this time no one party "operates" the Internet, there are several entities that "oversee" the system and the protocols that are involved.
The speed of the Internet has changed the way people receive information. It combines the immediacy of broadcast with the in-depth coverage of newspapers...making it a perfect source for news and weather information.
Internet usage is at an all time high. Almost 100 million U.S. adults are now going online every month, according to New York-based Mediamark Research. That's half of American adults and a 27 percent increase over 1999 in the number who surf the Web. There also appears to be a continuing gender shift in the number of American adults going online. In early 2000, Mediamark reported the milestone that women for the first time ever accounted for half of the online adult population. Now 51 percent of U.S. surfers - some 50.6 million - are women.
These pages, written in the hyper-text markup language, have "links" that allow the user to quickly move from one document to another...even when the documents are stored in different computers.
Web browsers "read" the html text and convert it into a page like the one you are now looking at.
Each web site has an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The URL contains a set of instructions that are read by the browser.
The beginning of the URL contains the protocol. This is usually "http" (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or "ftp" (File Transfer Protocol). The second section of the URL reveals the domain. Directories follow the domain. Lastly is the name of the document. (If no document is named the browser will automatically open any document in the directory named "default" or "index."
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), on an average day in the year 2000, 5.1 billion emails are sent in the US and 8.2 billion worldwide. By 2005, 11.5 billion emails will be sent each day on average in the US and 26.1 billion worldwide. (This includes emails sent by individuals for business and personal purposes, but not mass emails sent to large lists.)
It's all very easy. You create the message, log onto the Internet, and send it. The message first goes to your Internet Service Provider's mail server, which in turn sends it to the recipient's mail server. On the way your message may go through several servers, each reading the domain name in order to route it to the appropriate server.
It's not just friends and coworkers that are receiving email. Wherever you look, the Web is providing email addresses. This has made communication between strangers easier than ever. When you visit a Web site, click on the Web masters email address to let them know what you think. You can read an interesting article online and immediately send the author an email.