The Internet was started by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969 as a network of four computers called ARPANET. Its goal was to link a set of computers operated by several universities doing military research.
The Internet is a worldwide network of networks that is broken into a series of:

  • The Web
  • E-mail
  • FTP
  • Telnet

The Web, developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, is one of the fastest-growing Internet application. (For Web development timeline, please refer to the Class Presentation - Power point slides).

The Web enables the display of rich graphical images, pictures, full-motion video, and sound. The Web is the most common way of businesses to establish a presence on the Internet. The Web has two application software packages:

  1. A Web browser on the client, and
  2. A Web server on the server.

Web browsers and servers communicate with each other using a standard called HTTP. Most Web pages are written in HTML, but many also use other formats.

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History research was done using cnet.com. Special thanks to these web sites for the information they provided.