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Today more than ever, the Internet has permeated our everyday existence. You hear people on the street, in the bus, and even in your own home how the Internet and the World Wide Web (or the web) provides everything, from the news to entertainment. If you feel like you’re too old to understand and this is all Mumbo-jumbo to you, then read on and discover for yourself what all the fuss is about the World Wide Web.
First things first, whatever people may say, the Internet and the Web are two different things. No matter what your grandchildren say, don’t let them tell you otherwise. You are the elder, and you should know better.
What is the Internet?
The word Internet has two root words, Inter and Net – literally meaning from one network connected to another. That is essentially what the Internet is – many networks around the world that are connected to each other. To make the illustration a lot simpler, let us say you have two computers at home. Now notice how these two computers are connected together by cables going into a box. This box is called a Local Area Network box (Some have a router instead but that’s just small details). This box allows your computers to talk to each other. Since your two computers are linked together, you have what is now called a “Network.”
Now imagine many networks – millions in fact – some as simple as your home network, some as complicated as a thousand individual computers in one network, all connected. It is made up of millions of private networks, public networks, business, and academic and government networks linked by wires, fiber-optic cables, satellites and wireless connections.
That is the Internet. Of course in reality it is much more complicated than that what with all the software, hardware, and protocols of communication in place, but you don’t really need to know that do you?
Now that you know what the Internet is, imagine it as a desk - a platform where many useful things can be placed ready for your use. Some of the useful things that the Internet make possible are services such as electronic mail (email), online chat, online games, and – brace for it - the World Wide Web.
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web, or Web for short, also shortened as “WWW” or “W3” is simply interconnected web pages, or pages of information and documents accessed via the Internet. These pages are stored in millions of different computers around the world called “servers” (imagine someone serving you a page when you ask for it from your computer) and can be access using a Web Browser. A Web browser is a computer program that uses the Internet to locate, and then display the page you want. There are many different web browsers out there such as Microsoft’s “Internet Explorer,” or Mozilla’s “Firefox,” and Google’s “Chrome“ but they essentially all do the same thing – grab web pages from the servers and display it on your screen.
Using a Web browser, you can view pages that may contain text, photos, video clips, audio clips, etc. World Wide Web was born in 1989-1990 when English scientist Tim Berners-Lee he proposed building a network of documents (called web pages) that can be accessed by "browsers" on a network. That vision was released in 1992 and the rest is history.
This World Wide Web of pages or documents is what you view today as the many web pages such as your daughter’s and your grandkids’ Facebook account, or the news pages from CNN that you love to read in the morning.
These days however, because of the interconnectedness of the services running on it, it is now commonplace to use the World Wide Web as a synonym for Internet – but not you, now you know better.
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