HTML History: The Birth of the World Wide Web

Contrary to what the media would have you believe, the World Wide Web did not spring into being overnight. Though relatively new in human terms, the Web has a venerable genealogy for a computing technology. It can trace its roots back over 35 years, which is more than half the distance back to the primordial dawn of the electronic computing age.

The World Wide Web is actually just one of many applications that run on the Internet, a worldwide network of computer networks (or internetwork) that has been around in one form or another since 1961.

By the mid-1970s, many government agencies, research facilities, and universities were on this internetwork (which was then called ARPAnet), but each was running on its own internal network developed by the lowest bidder for their specific project. For example, the Army's system was built by DEC, the Air Force's by IBM, and the Navy's by Unisys. All were capable networks, but all spoke different languages. What was clearly needed to make things work smoothly was a set of networking protocols that would tie together disparate networks and enable them to communicate with each other.

In 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" that detailed a design that would solve the problem. In 1982, this solution was implemented as TCP/IP. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol; IP is the abbreviation for Internet Protocol. With the advent of TCP/IP, the word Internet--which is a portmanteau word for interconnected networks--entered the language.

The Department of Defense quickly declared the TCP/IP suite the standard protocol for internetworking military computers. TCP/IP has been ported to most computer systems, including personal computers, and has become the new standard in internetworking. It is the TCP/IP protocol set that provides the infrastructure for the Internet today.

TCP/IP comprises over 100 different protocols. It includes services for remote logon, file transfers, and data indexing and retrieval, among others.