The Internet & The World Wide Web

Early phases of the Internet were created in the late 1960s. It was originally designed as a medium for academic and military bodies to exchange files in an efficient, secure manner.

Today, the Internet is used for every possible reason you can imagine. If you can think it, then you can find it somewhere online.

What is the Internet?

Quite simply, the Internet is just a bunch of computers connected together to form the world's largest computer network.

If you were to visualize this, you would see computers everywhere with wires connecting them in all different directions. This network would keep expanding outward forming what would resemble a giant spider web; hence the nickname "Web."

Visualizations of the internet have been made in any number of formats, but some of the most impressive have been collected on the Altas of CyberGeography website.

Visualizatin of Network TrafficFor example - This image is a visualization study of inbound traffic measured in billions of bytes on the NSFNET T1 backbone for September 1991. The traffic volume range is depicted from purple (zero bytes) to white (100 billion bytes). It represents data collected by Merit Network, Inc.
  
Copyright NCSA/UIUC, image by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson

The Internet by any other name…

  • The Net
  • The Web
  • The World Wide Web