World Wide Web (V3)

By 1984, the Internet had grown to include 1,000 host computers. The National Science Foundation was one of the first outside institutions hoping to connect to this body of information. Other government, non-profit, and educational institutions followed. Initial attempts to catalogue this rapidly expanding system of networks were simple. Among the first was Archie, a list of FTP information created by Peter Deutsch at McGill University in Montreal. But the greatest innovation on the Internet was still to come, brewing in an MIT laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. The World Wide Web, or the Web, is often confused with the Internet. In fact, it is just one part of the Internet, along with email, video conferencing, and streaming audio channels. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, now a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, introduced a new system of communication on the Internet that used hyperlinks and a user-friendly graphical interface; his slice of the Internet pie came to be known as the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee says, -The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you find computers on the Web, you find documents, sounds, videos, and information. On the Net, connections are cables between computers; on the web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs that communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not exist without the Net. The Web made the Net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to know about computers and cables.