WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web is the most recent and most popular technology of the Internet. The forerunner to the Internet was a large, wide-area network created in the 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA and renamed DARPA in the 1970s) for the free exchange of information between universities and research organizations. The military also used this network for communications. In the 1980s, MILNET, a separate network, was spun off from ARPANET for use by the military. ARPANET was the network from which the Internet evolved.

The current Internet is a world-wide network of computers designed to share "documents." With the development of Internet Service Providers (ISP's) it became possible for anyone with a computer and a modem (telephone communications connection) to become part of that world-wide network. In the years after 1989 a new technology (http protocol and html markup language) developed on the Internet which enabled those shared "documents" to display graphics, sound, video, and other information.  The speed of current computers and broadband connections have made it possible for programs to be written ("browsers") which could interpret these documents and display them on any computer screen in the world. This is what is called the "World Wide Web."

The newest important addition to this technology has been "E-commerce" which can make a web site into an instant point-of-sale.