[peterska2]

I couldn't wait till morning as it would bug me, so I went and got my files.

Ok, from my university course notes

The Original Internet

The first Internet network was called ARPANET. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), funded by the US Dept of Defense. The network made use of a technique called Packet-Switched Networking. The original network connected 4 western US universities to test the concept. Over time other networks were added and interconnected such as Eunet, BitNet, NSFnet, JANET and so on. The different networks were funded by different bodies, JANET was the UK academic network, NSFnet played the same role in the USA. The original ARPANET itself was decommissioned in 1989 as all its users had more appropriate access through other networks.

History of the World Wide Web

Like all good inventions, the World Wide Web (or just the Web) was developed to fulfil a need. In the late 1980’s, a research scientist called Tim Berners-Lee was working at the European particle physics lab (CERN) in Switzerland. CERN had a large number of researchers working on many separate projects. Researchers need to share information, but they were frequently unable to do so because they used different types of computer system. At that time there was no common format for exchanging documents or even networking different computer systems together.

To succeed in developing a system to share information across the various computer systems, three key problems needed to be solved:

1. Documents needed to be presented in a format which all computers could display
2. A communications protocol was needed to would allow dissimilar computers to exchange information
3. An addressing scheme to allows computers to find resources located elsewhere on another computer was needed

The solutions to these three problems are the foundations on which the web is built. These are HTML, HTTP and URL.

I hope this helps.