Is the Internet the Same Thing as the World Wide Web?

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[transcript]

The World Wide Web and the Internet are the Same Thing? Right?

Nope.

I’m Rob Burgner with Bleeding Edge, welcome to Coffee Break Marketing.

First a little, well, a lot of background.

IN 1958 the United State formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA in response to the USSR launch of Sputnik. Jump forward 7 years to 1965. A dedicated 1200bps phone line linked a TX-2 computer at the MIT Lincoln Lab with an AN/FSQ-32 at System Development Corporation in California. A Digital Equipment Corporation computer at ARPA was added later and formed “The Experimental Network.”

1967 saw the first ARPANET design discussions. (ARPANET is considered by many to be the progenitor of the internet but was NOT an internet. An internet connects two or more computer networks.) 1970 saw the first cross-country links installed between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps, 1971 saw an expansion to 15 nodes and in 1972 Ray Tomlinson modifies an email program for ARPANET – That’s where we got the @ sign. It was picked up from the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype. (Little did he know where that would lead, am I right Ray?) Larry Roberts wrote the first email management program to list, read, file, forward, and respond to messages in July of that year.  Just a year later, in 1973, the number of ARPANET users hit 2,000 with email composing 75% of traffic.

Let’s skip the rest of the 70’s, though it did bring us the Clash, Blondie and Aerosmith, and jump ahead to the early 80’s. Vinton Cerf develops the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). Does that sound familiar? It should, and it’s REALLY important. TCP/IP was a standardization of protocols on the existing network and allowed all the networks to speak to one another through the use of packets of information. Who gets the credit? Probably Xerox PARC labs. Xerox developed the Ethernet in the 70’s, along with the first personal computer, the Alto, and the GUI (graphical user interface).

So why didn’t Xerox rule the world? Xerox was focused on copiers. They thought Ethernet was a big deal because it would allow computers to share a single copier. One thing they did do that was propitious was to invest $1 million in Steve jobs and Apple in 1979 along with handing over all of the PARC research to Steve, who would later say “They had no idea what they had.”  The first Apple Macintosh was released in January 1984. This year, an original Apple 1 computer sold for $374,500. It is one of only 6 remaining working models and was built in 1976.

In 1983 the University of Wisconsin develops the first name server so that users were no longer required to know the exact path to other systems and desktop computers. Remember the IBM 5150 with the big floppy disks? I had one. It cost more than my car.

Things speed up now. In 1984 the Domain Name System (DNS) is developed, resulting in much misery even today as web developers try to untangle and deal with DNS records.

I’m boring myself, so to recap what we have so far,, there was ARPANET in the 70’s, then the development of the internet in the 80’s. To answer one of the questions that initiated this blog, the internet is everything you would consider to be ONLINE. Browsers, email, apps, – in other words some things that use browsers and some that don’t. They all use the TCP/IP from 1982.

Intranets are confined to a geographical space and are not on the internet. These include internal LANs and some other closed networks used by companies or schools. So, to sound intelligent you can talk about the internet when you’re yakking about the global network of interconnected computers or the act of connecting with said computers. If you can’t get online, it’s your internet connection – not your web connection.

The World Wide Web is one app of many that uses the internet, and the one you’re familiar with. It’s pages that connect to one another via links using hypertext transfer protocol. (That’s what the “http” in URLs stands for. Every web page is on the World Wide Web. If it were not for the Web, your home screen would look a lot like the screen on your phone with lots of apps.

Now kids, to recap one more time – ARPANET in the 70’s, the internet in the 80’s, then the World Wide Web was plopped over the top in the 90’s along with usenet, simple mail transport protocol SMTP), fidonet, etcetera, etcetera.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve an award!

If you need a little help developing content for the world wide web, or want to know how to push that content over the internet, check out my digital agency, Bleeding Edge and …. If this video answered your questions like it, share it, and subscribe. Bye for now!