What is the Web?

Is the Web the same as the Internet?

No, and yes. The Internet owes its origin to the US Department of Defence, which realized that it could construct a powerful data network by linking large computers in universities and other organisations. They developed the software and handed it out. 

The academic community was handed a superb way of sending data round the world. The US DoD wanted a robust system that would withstand enormous destruction in the event of global war. They wrote the necessary software and gave it more or less to anybody who wanted to wire in their computer to the communication system.

The trick was the way the system sought out and passed messages between participating computers. The software looked for a path from sender to receiver. Then it packed, and repacked, everyone's message which they insist on calling a packet.  What they produced was a system that was brilliant and delivering messages - sorry - packets.

It was not long before people started to send email. Then they created newsgroups where ideas could be shared. Then the clever people working at CERN evolved the idea of the web. In quick succession a language was written to enable images and text to share a screen and Netscape produced a popular browser to let users surf through the pages on their ridiculously small computers. 

Happily, Microsoft played no part as a midwife in this process and their treatment of Netscape eventually landed them in Court. The result was a simple, open system that would run on unsophisticated machines.

Browsers allow ordinary people, rather than the atomic physicists at CERN, to use the Web. They do all sorts of fancy things but basically they just decode the HTML code to arrange the text, pictures and graphics in the screen space provided.

Once browsers escaped from the laboratory, their potential was rapidly taken up and the World Wide Web began to run using the Internet. It continues to run alongside the file transfer system (FTP) and all the emails (POP, IMAP, SMTP etc) using the hypertext markup language to deliver the components that hopefully fill your screen when you request a page.   

So, without the Internet there would be no World Wide Web. There was email before the Internet but it was rubbish. In 1985 I could only send messages to Australia, Saudi Arabia and the UK on my email system. Now we all use the same system that links us all together.  

Isn't it wonderful? 

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