INTERNET VS. the WEB
Is the “Web” and the “Internet” the same thing? They have
been so intertwined that people don’t seem to know that there is a distinction
between them. While there are few that seem to know the difference, even fewer
know of their origins. So are they the same thing? No more than a chicken and
an egg are the same thing… Perhaps a good question is, “Which came first, the
Chicken of the Egg?” Or better yet, the “Web” or the “Internet”?...
According to howstuffworks.com, “… a group of people are
responsible for building the Internet.” In 1945, Vannevar Bush of the Defense
Research Committee (during WWII) wrote, “that information would play a
significantly larger role in all future conflicts”. A “Memex device” was his
solution for storing and managing the mass amounts of data that would be
created daily. “J.C.R. Licklider picked up where Vannevar Bush left off.” His
work “envisioned a network composed of other networks that would create a
computing system more powerful than any in existence.” His name for this
network was, “The Intergalactic Network”. However, this name was never used. (He
might have stood a better chance with a name like, “Death Star”.) Instead, in
the 1960’s “…the next round of engineers and scientists would expand upon (Licklider’s
design) to build the first wide area network: ARPANET.”
ARPAnet laid the foundations for what we know today as the
internet. The development of this project had several technical considerations
and challenges. The System Design, Hardware, and programming all had to work together
as a single system. According to an article by Jonathan Stickland on
howstuffworks.com, Larry Roberts (program manager), Mike Wingfield (Engineer
for the IMP – Internet Message Processor), Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
(Programers of the TCP – Transmission Control Protocol, and IP – Internet Protocol)
were among the key contributors that developed the project. Other notable
contributions came from Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock who
designed the “Packet Switching” system that divides large files into smaller chunks
of information. “Rather than send data as a giant file, computers divide files
up into packets. It’s possible, though not likely, that each packet associated
with a single file could take a different pathway through a network to reach
its destination. Once there, the receiving computer reassembles the file based
on information included with each packet.
While the initial ground work for the internet was laid in
the 60’s, it wasn’t until later in the 1990’s that internet was we now know it
came to be. Al Gore (the then Vice President of the United States) acting as a
political catalyst of sorts, used his influence to support the work that had
been done by programmers, computer scientists, and engineers in creating the
internet. Around the same time (actually a few years earlier) a British
computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee was studying at Oxford University. His
later work at CERN (particle physics laboratory) as a software engineer created
opportunities to work with scientists and other brilliant minds. “Tim noticed
that they were having difficulty sharing information.” In March of 1989, he
drafted a document titled, “Information Management: A Proposal” which was later
build upon while “…he began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’
early products. By October of 1990, Time had written the three fundamental
technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web.” These are HTML
(HyperText Markup Language), URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), and HTTP
(Hypertext Transfer Protocol). These served respectively as a formatting
language, unique address (more commonly a URL), and a way of accessing or
retrieving linked resources. Tim had also created “the first web page editor/browser
(“WorldWideWeb app”)”.
So which came first, The Chicken or the Egg? Perhaps we’ll
never know, but we do know that the Internet preceded the web (world wide web).
While it’s easy to give credit to Al Gore and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, it doesn’t
tell the whole story. While I touched on a few, we have many brilliant minds to
be grateful for from around the world. So who owns the intenet? Well, no single
entity, but that’s a story for another day.
Sources:
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