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.
(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
WWW: World Wide Web...............Universe of network-accessible information using the W3 architecture. Internet: Worldwide network of linked networks using the IP protocol. TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol .....Refers to the intermediate layer protocols used on the Internet as well as the suite of protocols at all layers. HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol..Protocol used to connect to WWW Servers. HTML: HyperText Markup Language....The usual format for documents. A SGML DTD. HTML+:HyperText Markup Language....A proposed extension to HTML SGML: Standard Generalized Markup Language...The ISO standard Page Descr. Lang. XML: Extensible Markup Language...A version of SGML for use on the Web DTD: Document Type Definition.....A specific implementation of SGML. TEI: Text Encoding Initiative.....The folks who came up with the guidelines for texts using SGML URL: Uniform Resource Locator.....Hypertext References to files on the Internet. NCSA: National Center for Supercomputing Appl. at the Univ. of Ill. Urbana-Champaign. Hypertext: Text which is not constrained to be linear. ISOC: Internet Society IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force InterNIC: Internet Network Information Center ..Used to assign IP numbers. IANA: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ...The central coordinator for the assignment of unique parameter values for Internet protocols. ISI: Information Sciences Institute .... A research facility at USC (Operates IANA). CIX: Commercial Internet eXchange ..Association of Vendors providing commercial Internet NAPs: Network Access Points .........Interconnection points for nerwork service providers. RA: Routing Arbitrator NSFNET: National Science Foundation Network ..Was primary Internet Backbone AUP: Acceptable/Appropriate Use Policy ICM: International Connections Manager (SprintLink - icm-.icp.net) FIX: Federal Internet eXchanges...Gateways to/from the internet in Maryland and Mountain View, CA NREN: National Research and Education Network NSI: NASA Science Internet MAE-East: Metropolitan Area Ethernet....Part of new Internet backbone in Wash. DC Area MFS Datanet: Metropolitan Fiber Systems High Speed LAN Interconnect (HLI) vBNS: Very High-speed Backbone Network Services (See Also: vBNS at MCI.) ISO: International Organization for Standardization OSI: Open Systems Interconnect (See also OSI reference Model) GOSIP: US Government Open Systems Integration Profile Cyberspace: Wiliam Gibson coined the work in his 1984 book Neuromancer after watching kids in video arcades hunch over their games as if caught up in an imaginary space beyond the screen. NSP: Network Service Provider ISP: Internet Service Provider IWU: Layer 2 Inter-Working Unit Java: A language from Sun which allows browsers to execute code in pages. NMS: Network Management System NMA: Network Management Agent See: Test/Demo Page and Glosssary of Internet Terms for more terms.
Metcalfe's Law (named after Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet standard commonly used in PC networks), the ``value'' of a network --defined as its utility to a population--is roughly proportional to the number of users squared. Moore's Law (after Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel): Computing power and capacity double every 18 months.
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5/21/95.