World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, more often referred to as ‘the web’, is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘the Internet’, but mistakenly so. The World Wide Web is not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet came first, long before the World Wide Web. The internet is simply a global network of interlinked computer systems, which started way back in the 1960s, but was only successfully established during the 1970s. The word ‘Internet’, often abbreviated to ‘the Net’, is first recorded from the early 1980s and in turn is an abbreviation of ‘inter-network’ i.e. an interlinking of computer networks. The World Wide Web, on the other hand uses the Internet to disseminate information via a system of interlinked websites and web pages that all begin with its acronym ‘www’, which are accessed by web browsers, which in turn contain search engines that enable us to ‘browse’ or ‘surf’ the World Wide Web. These websites and web pages can all be found on the Internet, and they all use the protocol ‘http’ which is an acronym for ‘hypertext transfer protocol’. The phrase ‘World Wide Web’ was coined by the British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in November 1990 in a proposal to launch such a service, first put forward at a conference in Berne, Switzerland on 12 November 1990. See also Internet and Surfing the Internet.