The Internet and WWW

The Internet is a global network of private, public, business, academic, and government networks connected using multiple networking technologies, both wired and wireless so that all devices on all networks can seamlessly communicate and exchange data with each other. It can be considered to be a network of almost all networks in the world.

It is therefore a vast network comprising servers, personal computers, and smartphones that exchange data and communicate with each other.

To harness the power of an interconnected network, the Internet offers a wide range of services that applications can leverage to provide a much richer user experience than they could if they did not have access to such a large and global network. Since the day Internet was invented, it is largely being used by human users for exchanging emails, chats, sighting pictures, listening to music, watching videos and movies, reading the news, shops, making travel reservations, conducting banking, and many other transactions.

History

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to build a robust, fault-tolerant communication system between various computer networks. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switching network with distributed control to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet.

ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks, which soon evolved to include commercial networks, which marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, today it is used by almost everyone for personal and work activities.

Dominance

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, have been reshaped, redefined, or even rendered obsolete by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as voice-over-IP (VoIP), music streaming, video streaming, email, and digital newspapers. The Internet has also changed traditional transactional systems, such as banking and shopping, by allowing them to operate over the Internet without the need for any physical interaction. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging and social networking.