I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and it occurred to me that she was using “the internet” as a synonym for “the web”. I suspect most people do not know that they are two different things, so I thought I would provide some detail.
The Internet
The Internet is a world-wide network of millions of computers. In the early 1960s, in response to Russian advances in nuclear and rocket technology, The United States Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began researching and developing a network that could link computers in different universities and government locations. A primary goal was to establish a network that would continue to function even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack.
Over the years, functionality was added on top of the network with the addition of thousands of protocols and applications, including those in the Internet Protocol Suite. A protocol is essentially a language that two or more computers use to work together to achieve some functionality.
A Short List of Internet Protocols and Programs
| Protocol/Programs |
Purpose |
~Year |
| Email |
Send disconnected messages |
1972 |
| Telnet |
Log on to remote computers |
1972 |
| File Transfer Protocol (FTP) |
Send files between computers |
1973 |
| Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) |
Enable the Usenet internet discussion system |
1978 |
| Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) |
More flexible communication protocols. Replaced the Network Control Protocol (NCP) |
1982 |
| Domain Name Service Protocol (DNS) |
Map textual names to numeric internet addresses. E.g. MassOnline.com -> 74.81.223.58 |
1984 |
| Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) |
Requests and sends documents written with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) |
1991 |
The World Wide Web
The web is the collection of billions of publicly available HTML documents. Each document can link to others. These links were originally called Hypertext, hence the name of the protocol and the markup language.
As you can see, HTTP and HTML came late in the game. Nevertheless, those two technologies along with a large suite of supporting technologies have dramatically altered The Internet and continue to be one of the two most used technologies; the other being e-mail.
The web is dependent on The Internet. However, The Internet is used for many things besides the viewing of web pages.
Additional Information
