WWW and Internet Information and Background

Warning: This page was last updated in 1995, so many of the links are broken.

The Internet:

Overview

Summary

The Internet is a network of networks. It consists of between 10,000 and
50,000 autonomous networks, depending on how you count. As of October 1995 it had almost 8 million hosts connecting 30-50 million (1) people in over 90 countries. IDC predicts the number of Web users will double from 34 million in 1996 to 68 M in 1997 and that 80% of the Fortune 500 companies had Public Web Sights by the end of 1996. The number of hosts has been increasing at a rate of 90% per year for the last few years. When you connect to the Internet, your computer becomes part of this world-wide network of computers.

The Internet provides connectivity for a wide range of application processes called network services. You can exchange electronic mail, access and participate in discussion forums, search databases, browse indexes, transfer files, and so forth. The World-Wide Web (See below) is used mainly on the Internet, however they do not mean the same thing. The Web refers to a body of information - an abstract space of knowledge, while the Internet refers to the physical side of the global network, a giant mass of cables and computers.

The Internet was transitioned from the original Network Control Protocol (NCP) to Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the early '80's. Application layer protocols, such as TELNET (Network Terminal), FTP (File Transfer), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), have been added to the TCP/IP suite of protocols to provide specific network services. Speeds have grown from 56Kbs, to T1 (1.5Mbs) (most common now) to T3 (45Mbs) and beyond for most of the backbones. A very-high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) is being developed now to link NSF-supported high-performance computing centers. In 1996 The Internet II Project was started by a group of Universities to work on ways of improving Internet performance over the next three to five years. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative, a goverment sponsored program, was started to among other things improve support for real-time and collaboration applications and provide more bandwidth.

The increased interest in the Internet driven by the popularity of the Web has spawned many new applications. Multimedia applications such as real-time audio/video and Internet telephony are gaining in popularity.

No one runs the internet, however the Internet Society (ISOC) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are voluntary organizations which promote the Internet and address standards issues. The InterNIC Registration Service and Network Solutions Inc. register Domain Names and Network Addresses. They assign IP numbers to Internet Access providers with coordination provided by the IETF (CIDRD) Working Group.

In 1994 and 1995 a number of Internet Access Providers have sprung up and the on-line database services like America Online have started providing Internet access. Rates range from $4.95/mo. for 3 hours to $19.95/mo. for unlimited access.

See the Past, Present and Future of the Internet and Related Networks for more background.

(1) Internet usage estimates range from 9 to 24 million users in the U.S. and Canada at the end of 1995.

See also: An Internet/Hypertext Timeline here , The Internet Text Project at MIT, Zen and the Art of the Internet, Beginner's Guides and History at Yahoo, Guides and Tutorials at Nova Southeastern University Internet MCI, Internet History by H.E.Hardy , The accidental superhighway at The Economist, Internet Backbone, Maps and International links. References: "The Whole Internet" by Krol is a good primer.

The World Wide Web (WWW / W3):

The World Wide Web is a hypermedia architecture originated by CERN (a collective of European high-energy physics researchers), in Switzerland. Initially envisioned as a means of easily sharing papers and data between physicists, the Web has evolved far beyond its original intent and now includes such diverse information as Gaelic texts, art exhibits, movie clips, electronic magazines, home pages for major corporations with service and product ads and electronic shopping malls. It consists of HTTP servers throughout the world.

Proposed and rejected in 1989, a prototype was justified to access the CERN phone book and built in 1990, (It reminds me of Ritchie and Thompson having to write ROFF, a text formatter for Legal, to justify UNIX development) the first servers were put up in 1991 with line mode browsers as clients. The first graphical user interface browsers including Mosaic from NCSA were released in 1993. There were 500 HTTP servers in 1993, 27,000 servers by January 1995 and 100,000 public servers in October 1995. The number is doubling every 3 - 4 months. It is expected that the number of Web users will grow from 7-10 million at the end of 1995 to over 100 million by 2000. (See the Statistics Page.) By the beginning of 1996 there were over 50 Million pages on the Web. See also how W3 compares with WAIS and Gopher , Frequently Asked Questions: WWW FAQs , the WWW Consortium (W3C) and A Guide to Cyberspace
References: WWW books

Web Browsers:

NCSA Mosaic and its new counterparts, Netscape Navigator from Netscape Communications Co. , Internet Explorer from Miscrosft, WinWeb, ... are distributed hypermedia browsers. Netscape seems to be the most popular now. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed for networked information discovery and retrieval (NIDR). It provides a unified interface to the diverse protocols, data formats and information archives used on the Internet around the world. Mosaic is a versatile system, allowing access to text, audio, images, animations and full motion video. To view audio and video, however, Mosaic uses "helpers" or "viewers". Helpers and viewers are simply additional applications which Mosaic invokes when needed.

Browsers are primailry HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) clients that allow you to discover, retrieve and display documents from the World Wide Web (WWW) system. They also serve as a client for many of the other types of servers on the internet such as GOPHER ,FTP, WAIS, ... There are lists of servers by type at W3C and on the Demo Page here.

In general terms, these browsers are similar to Apple's Hypercard program, except that instead of traversing information within a single system, it can link documents throughout the rapidly expanding universe of information on the Internet.

Several Other WWW Browsers have be come available since the summer of '94.

See also the NCSA Mosaic Home Page

WWW/Mosaic

Notes and Documentation