About The Internet Computers & The Web

Although the use of computers and the internet has increased dramatically around the world, not much is known or understood by many users about the technology, infrastructure and working components of these new innovations that we use and depend on in our every day lives.

What Is the Internet?

For example: Most people think that the Internet and the (WWW) World Wide Web is the same thing. Actually, there is a difference. The Internet is a network of powerful computers around the world interconnected together that can receive and transmit information from each other.

There's no individual owner, group, organization or centralized management of the internet. It is made up of thousands of organizations and individual networks across the globe all operated and paid for on their own. To allow the free flow of information, the networks communicate and corporate with each other to direct internet traffic and information passing through them.

Various groups work behind the scene to help guide the growth of the internet by establishing standards and developing tools to educate people on how to use the internet. One of the groups responcible for overseeing the evolution of the internet TCP/IP protocol, is the Internet Engineering Task force. You can find them at the IETF website.

Local individual networks make up the backbone of the internet. They are mostly found in universities, government agencies, private companies and a host of online services. These networks get funding from various sources and in different ways like users fees, goverment grants, corporatr support and taxes.

What Is The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a variety of Html documents and files residing on the internet that can be accessed via a (URL) Uniform Resources Locator that locates Web servers and files. The first part of the URL is a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (http://) or  "Schema"used for communications between browsers and web servers. The next part is the (server) computer on the internet where the files are located.

The last part of the schema is the name of the resources (file) to be fetched. There is also another term called (URI) which is an acronym for Uniform Resource Indicator. Practically, a URI and a URL is the same thing. They are both used to perform the same function; that is, they identify and locate the same resource on the web.