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Introduction

The Internet originated in the United States in the 1960s when the American Department of Defense funded research into reliable computer networks. From the earliest days people on the Net, as the Internet is commonly known, have developed tools to enable themselves to communicate more easily with each other across the network. The earliest such tools were electronic mail and file transfer, and the World Wide Web, commonly referred to as the Web, is the latest and now most popular in the dynasty.

The Web was developed initially by Tim Berners Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, in 1989 and came into common usage in 1993, when the Mosaic browser program was released by the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Its phenomenal popularity stems in large part from the way in which it enables individuals to navigate their own paths through the information jungle and to contribute ideas to a global audience, on an equal footing with some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world.

Until quite recently the Internet was very much the province of academics and researchers. Private individuals found it difficult to gain access, if indeed they had heard about it in the first place, and since the Internet was largely funded by government its use for commercial purposes was strictly taboo. This situation has altered radically in recent years, and many companies now routinely do business on the Internet. The Web offers innovative methods of transacting business for companies, and worldwide opportunities for communication amongst individuals.

• What is the Web?
  • A consistent naming scheme for referring to resources
  • A mechanism for retrieving a resource, given its name
  • A system for describing the logical structure of text
• What the Web has to offer
  • Easy access to a global information service
  • Access to a global community
  • Front-end to existing systems
  • Commercial access to a global market
• History and evolution of the Web
  • Background and historical context
  • Origins of the Web
  • Current mechanisms for the Web's development
• The future of the Web
• The organization of this book

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.