What is the World Wide Web?

• The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked web pages and other resources of the World Wide Web.

• The first rumblings toward this concept began immediately after World War II, when scientists were desperately seeking ways to organize and share their accumulated wartime research. In 1945, noted scientist Vannevar Bush published an essay in Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think," which proposed a massive information index that people from all over the world could access and search. Although Bush's system was mechanical (and was never developed), his essay had a profound impact on many who would one day help design the Internet and the World Wide Web.
• Given this background, the actual Web was originally conceived as a way for physicists to share their research data. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee led a team at Switzerland's European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in developing the initial World Wide Web standards. Key among these was the use of hypertext or "hot" portions of an online document that, when selected, take the user to a related, or "linked," document.
• Computerized hypertext was pioneered by researcher Ted Nelson in a system called Xanadu, which he created in the early 1960s. Although Xanadu was never fully realized, many Web's developers have cited it as an influence on their work.
• The next great innovation for the Web came in 1992, when programmers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois developed the Mosaic browser, Look it up! a software application that displayed not only the text of a Web document (or page), but embedded graphic elements as well. By bringing multimedia to the Web, Mosaic vested it with enormous potential.
• Today, several Web browsers are available for IBM, Macintosh and UNIX-based computers, and most of the major online services include Web browsers in their standard software packages. The Web is growing at a phenomenal rate. According to Interactive Week magazine, the number of Web servers (computers that store Web pages) surged from fewer than 3,500 in April 1994 to more than 40,000 in July 1995. And in February 1997, the computing firm Network Wizards determined the number of commercial domains alone to be well over 700,000.