Internet

Often erroneously confused with the World Wide Web (a service of the Internet), the Internet is a huge network of hardware and software infrastructure that connects computers all over the world and allows them to exchange information. Over ¼ of the earth's population uses the Internet. Critical to the development of the Internet was the creation of a standardized communication protocol in 1973, TCP/IP, which enabled computers on different networks to understand each other and communicate.

The World Wide Web (WWW) was released in 1992. The World Wide Web is one of the more popular web services offered over the Internet platform, offering easy-to-find websites containing hypertext content. A web browser helps users navigate the World Wide Web, and a search engine helps WWW users find websites, relevant web pages, and the information they are seeking.

All computers connected to the Internet operate on a standardized computer communication protocol, TCP/IP (Internet Protocol Suite). Other standardized protocols used on the Internet are Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and the Domain Name System (DNS). SMTP allows e-mail communication between computers. The Domain Name System (DNS), created in 1983, allowed people to find a website by using a string of words rather than a long IP address made up of numbers. The Internet Society was created in the early 1990s to set international policies and procedures relating to the Internet.

The Internet is really a network of networked computers. Computers and networks are connected to the Internet via cables, wires, and wireless connections. The major backbone networks on the Internet are university or educational networks (such as .edu or .ac), commercial networks (including .com or .co), and research networks (like .net and .org).

The Internet began as a project that would facilitate and protect military and academic research. Early research in the 1960s by The US government agency RAND helped contribute to the development of the Internet. The US Government's initial computer network (called ARPANET, which connected about 50 mainframe computers by the mid 1970s) eventually became the Internet by the 1980s.