Blog #4 The World Wide Web

 In all honesty, I was excited to research the world wide web (www) and discover how and when it originated, especially because our culture is so immersed with technology today. I was also extremely interested to learn that there is in fact a large difference between the world wide web and the internet. The world wide web’s main goal was to bring information from across the world and make it accessible within one platform of technology.  It was created based on a positive experiment held by CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In 1991, Sir Tim Bernes-Lee created the technology of the world wide web. 

When Lee was asked what made him think of creating the world wide web, he responded with, “Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.” Once Lee created the world wide web, it took a few years of further development to become easily accessible. Two years after the creation, it became slightly more accessible with the development of the Mosaic web browser. Yet this browser came at a price to download, and thus still leaving a barrier. While the popularity grew, Lee realized the true potential the web had if it were accessible to the general public, leading to it becoming free and accessible in April of 1993.  Following the world wide web's public release, it became the most popular system on the internet in 1995. Within the first few months of that year, it was recorded that 18 million people within the United States and Canada were utilizing the web.  

Lee himself created three distinguishable technologies that are the main facets of the world wide web which are still used today. The first consists of HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language. This basically is the formatting that was created to run the web, otherwise it would not process correctly. The second technology is URI which stands for Uniform Resource Identifier. This is used to process each resource that is embedded within the web.  It is now commonly referred to as URL. The last technology is HTTP, which stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol which basically creates links across the web. This technology enhanced features within the web that were not previously available to keep track of sources scattered across the platform. 

Although the internet and the world wide web are quite different, they actually rely on one another to run properly. The internet is essentially a network of different devices running on a platform, one of which is the world wide web. The www is a specific software that runs on the internet. These two terms commonly get confused with one another, or mistaken for the same thing due to the popularity of the world wide web. 

Overall, I believe it was extremely interesting to learn the history of the world wide web and the internet, especially since it is so influential within our lives today, and something that we take for granted and do not often consider its origins. Our common use of these platforms have been enhanced from years of research and progression. We should be thankful for such a historical scientific creation that is easily accessible at a moment's notice today.