A few words about the Internet and the World Wide Web

• The Internet came into being on September 2 ,1969.Throughout most of its development it remained a tool for exchanging text files between government, military and educational institutions.
• Then in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN in Switzerland, developed a protocol for linking documents on one computer with another computer while the location of the computer and the access methods remain invisible to the user. He called this protocol "The World Wide Web" and it went live on May 17 1991. Here is the Original proposal of the World Wide Web. And here is a picture of the original navigation method. (Click the Back button in your browser to come back to this page)
• All this remained in the scientific community until 1993 when at the University of Illinois a young student named Mark Andressen and a team of young programers working for NCSA: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications wrote a program called "Mosaic". They called it a browser, it graphically enabled the user to easily navigate the World Wide Web Mosaic browser.

At that moment the world changed.

• Since then the internet has penetrated all areas of our lives. We can now experience text , video, music, graphics almost instantly from almost anywhere. We can check our bank balance or order a pizza or buy an airline ticket.We can use the internet to make a phone call or instant message a friend. All of this change is not staying constant, the rate of this change is accelerating. It is like the begining of the railroads, except this train isn't just outrunning the laying of the tracks... its outrunning the foundries.