Internet vs. World Wide Web

Many people nowadays talk about "the Internet" when they really mean "the World Wide Web". You often hear them talking about the latest sites, blogs and other fads they come across in cyberspace by surfing "the Net" lately. It's as if the Internet is somewhat "distinct" or "different" from e-mail, FTP, chat, ICQ, and even Kazaa and BitTorrent.

Did you know that the Internet has been existing since 1969?!?! At that time, the Beatles were still intact and Elvis Presley was still actively making music.

Well, the fact is, the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different, albeit related, concepts.

Think of the Internet as a highway. If you want to go to some place (i.e., retrieve information from somewhere on the Internet), then you must travel on this highway. But you cannot just travel on this highway; you need a vehicle to do that. As for the vehicle, you have many choices. You can ride a car, get on a bus, ride a bike, and so on.

The World Wide Web is just another vehicle on the highway. In techie speak, the World Wide Web is an Internet service. There are many other Internet services: e-mail, FTP, chat, ICQ, Kazaa and so on. The World Wide Web is one of the most popular Internet services. (But according to many sources I found, e-mail is still the most popular Internet service.)

At the surface, the Internet appears to be a "gigantic supercomputer" where all the computers in the world are connected. But in reality, the Internet is a very large computer network where millions of computers around the world are interconnected. This networking world is actually like a populous city where the computers are the houses and the buildings, and the Internet is a system of roads connecting the houses and the buildings. You will see many vehicles traveling around the city.

But these vehicles cannot just travel around as they wish; they must follow all the traffic rules so that everyone can go to their destination safely and smoothly. They must know on what lane they should travel; they must know how to respond when the traffic light goes red or green; they should slow down upon approaching a pedestrian crossing (the painted "zebra marks" on the road where people cross the street; in the Philippines, it's called "the pedestrian walk"), and so on.

Additionally, the houses and the buildings must have addresses. Addresses must follow the format established by the city's addressing system; it should state the name or unit number of the house or building, followed by the street name, followed by the city name, etc.

This set of rules on traffic and addresses corresponds roughly to a set of "communication rules" (protocols) all computers must follow when communicating with each other on the Internet. This set of rules is called the TCP/IP protocol stack, the soul of the Internet. To assure that every computer can communicate to each other regardless of hardware, operating system, file system formats and so on, they must abide by this set of protocols.

For example, TCP/IP mandates that each computer connected to the Internet must have a unique numeric address called the IP address. This numeric address used to be defined as 16 bits long (the IPv4 addresses) and it's still the dominant type of IP addresses today, but the 128-bit variant (the IPv6 addresses) is very slowly making its way to the Internet, because the world is actually running out of IP addresses. The 128-bit variant allows a very wide range of IP addresses.

Internet services are assigned at least one "transport method" and at least one numeric identifier (ranging from 0 to 65535), called the port, associated with the transport method. The transport method is either the telephone-like communication method called TCP or the postal mail-like communication method called UDP. The World Wide Web is assigned TCP port 80; outgoing e-mail (SMTP) is TCP port 25; BitTorrent owns TCP ports 6881 to 6999; and mIRC owns TCP ports 6660 to 6669 and also UDP port 113. All "snippets" (packets) of information traveling on the network are required to carry with them the IP address and port of the source computer, and the IP address and port of the destination computer.

Internet services themselves have their own communication rules, aside from the Internet itself. The World Wide Web uses HTTP for communication between the Web servers (the "web sites") and the Web clients (the "web browsers"). Each resource such as a web page, an image and a video clip is identified by means of a "Web address" called a URI (e.g., "http://my.server.com/images/hottie.jpg"). The URI of a web page is also called a URL. These URI's are referenced in a web page via hyperlinks. The web page itself is formatted using HTML.

The Internet was born in 1969 as a reaction to the then USSR's launching of the Sputnik I satellite, the world's first artificial satellite, into outer space in 1957. The US feared that the Soviet satellite might drop a bomb to anywhere on earth from outer space. So in 1958, US President Dwight Eisenhower created the ARPA to spearhead the development of technologies that can defend against possible space-based attacks. In particular, the US military wanted a computer network that can withstand nuclear attacks and keep the Pentagon and other defense headquarters connected together. This initiative resulted in the development of the computer network called the ARPANET, which became live in October 1969. By December 1969, three universities and a research center each had a mini-computer connected to the ARPANET. The ARPANET started to grow by that time. In 1971, Ray Tomlimson successfully developed the first e-mail system through his programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL. In 1973, the ARPANET crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic ocean, and development of TCP/IP was started. In 1974, the term "Internet" was first used in a paper on TCP. In 1976, Queen Elizabeth II of England was able to send e-mail. In 1976, the LAN technology called Ethernet was born. In 1979, the USENET news group was born. In 1983, TCP/IP became the standard protocol for the Internet, and DNS was born (enabling people to use names instead of IP addresses for referring to computers on the network). In 1984, the T1 lines was born, and so is the T1 line-based NSFNET. In 1990, the ARPANET was retired and network connections were passed to the NSFNET; also Tim Berners-Lee invented the hypertext system we now know as the World Wide Web for use by the high-energy physics committee in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1993, Marc Andressen developed the first graphical web browser called Mosaic. Later on it will develop into Netscape. In 1994, Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its Web page. In 1996, Microsoft enters the Internet scene.

And the rest is history…