Growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW)
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The Internet
- a network of networks of computers physically connected by landlines (copper and fibre), microwave and/or satellites. All these computers speak a common language which allows them to exchange data regardless of their hardware or operating systems.
- originated in the early 1960s and the Cold War.
- involved 37 interconnected computers by 1972, while today there are around 12 million computers connected.
- a truly global network, mostly unregulated by any government or institutional body.
The WWW
- a kind of protocol that runs on the Internet.
- the result of a 1989 research project intended to help astronomers transfer information more easily between different computers.
- the system devised was a marriage between hypertext (clickable links between documents) and the Internet File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that facilitated the exchange of files between networked machines.
- WWW computers (called 'servers') run software programs that receive requests from other computers (usually by means of WWW browsers such as Netscape Navigator) and supply the requested files.
- had only 50 operational WWW servers by January 1993, while today there are more than 627,000.
The number of computers connected to the Internet, estimated from the number of current computer "addresses" (data available at http://www.nw.com/) and the number of WWW servers (data provided by Matthew Gray of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Although the number of WWW servers is much smaller than the number of machines connected to the Internet, their growth rate is much higher.
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