The Internet

The word internet (lower-case "i") is short for internetwork, which simply means two or more sets of connected computers, which are in turn connected to each other, so that the computers on each network are capable of communicating with the computers on the other network.

What is The Internet?

The Internet (upper-case "I") is the big mama of internetworks. It consists of a worldwide group of more than 100,000 commercial, academic, scientific, government, and other networks that use a protocol called TCP/IP, and which are publicly accessible. The Internet evolved mainly from something called Arpanet, which was a U.S. Military project in the 1960's and 1970's.

So basically, The Internet is just a bunch of machines connected together with cables and via satellites, in such a way that they can communicate with each other. And until fairly recently, only geeks, government types, and academics had any idea that it even existed.

And then along came Sir Tim

Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- he was recently knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth -- was a young physicist working at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) in the late 1980's when he invented something called hypertext. (That's what the "h" in "http" or "HTML" stands for, by the way.)

In a nutshell, early hypertext allowed words or phrases (and later on, images) to be linked to other documents. It didn't matter whether those documents were on the same computer or around the world, as long as they resided on computers that were connected to a common network or internetwork. Hypertext allowed scientists and other Internet users to easily share, access, and organize information.

To appreciate the magnitude of Sir Tim's invention, you have to understand that prior to the invention of hypertext, individuals wanting to access information on The Internet had to know -- and type -- long strings of numbers and letters to access information on another computer. Hypertext changed all that. It made the Internet and all of its vast resources accessible to ordinary people. And so was born what Sir Tim christened the World Wide Web.

Using the Internet

Today's Internet offers a rich variety of services and resources, and a some dangers. For the sake of clarity, we've divided this section into the following pages:

• Accessing The Internet
• The World Wide Web
• Using a Search Engine
• Usenet and Newsgroups
• Email
• Perils of The Internet

But to get the whole picture, we suggest you start by clicking the "Next" link below (thanks again, Sir Tim) to start reading these pages in order.