History of the Internet and How the Web Works

The Internet started out as a project called ARPANET, done by the United States government's Department of Defense, as a means of communication for organizations engaged in defense-related research in the 1960’s. In the 1970’s Internet Protocol, or IP, technology was developed as a means to transfer data or documents, such as email, over a network in order to make the communication more global. Shortly after, the standard protocol was invented, called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which allowed users to link other branches of complex networks directly to the Internet. When the National Science Foundation took over much of the TCP/IP technology from ARPANET they established a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic. In 1985, the National Science Foundation began a program to establish Internet access across the United States and ARPANET was shut down by the Defense Communications Agency in 1989 due to limited funding and support from the military. After the Internet was established across the U.S. it began to grow rapidly.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, along with his partner, Robert Cailliau, created a prototype called the  World Wide Web as a management system that used a “hypertext” process to link related documents over a network. The Web is just one of the ways information can be shared over the Internet. It works by allowing documents to be linked to one another using hypertext links. All the linked documents form the Web. The prototype the Web uses is called HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which are the first four letters of the majority of websites. For a computer to be able to be a part of the Web it has to be running special web server software that allows it to handle HTTP. When actually using the Web, the browser makes the request for documents and the server returns the documents for the browser to display. This is just a brief summary of how the Web works as a prototype for the Internet.

Sources:

• http://wdvl.internet.com/Internet/History/
•  Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (3^rd Edition)