Unit One starts here.

At the moment you are researching the origins and history of the web. To get an idea of the different kind of sites that exist, have a look at some of the sites in Links for Comparison.

A (very) Short History of the Web

The Internet is not the Web.
The Internet is a global network of linked computers – a mess of cables and wires and microprocessors stretching round the world. It was originally developed as part of a US military experiment in 1969. The idea was to preserve military intelligence beyond a nuclear attack, by parceling out information to different computers across a wide geographical area.

By 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Khan had developed a Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), which allowed information to be put into a ‘packet’ and flow from computer to computer. Academics and scientists were able to use the resulting network after 1983.

The Web was devised as a new way to access the Internet, developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990/91, to enable users to move more easily through the network by using hyperlinks. This method of using the Internet gained wider popularity after 1993, when a browser program, called Mosaic (later to become Netscape Navigator), was written by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

The dream of Berners-Lee was that information could be stored on Web servers around the world so that anyone who wanted to could bring it up on a computer screen anywhere in the world. Furthermore, that information could then be added to or altered in some appropriate way. In this respect the Internet, unlike most other communications media such as film, radio or TV, would become a two-way process, a global collaboration medium where web pages could be both read and created by users.

If you want more information on this go to the Students’ Reading List or Links for Comparison and visit some of the web page addresses (or URLs) provided.

When you have had a look at the Links for Comparison and familiarised yourself with the History of the Web you will be ready to move on to the next section of Unit One - Who Uses the Web