The Internet: Before and After

Once upon a time, back when there weren’t any footprints on the moon, some far-sighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks together. I’ll spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the “mother of all networks,” which we call the Internet.

Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. One such physicist, the now-famous Tim Berners-Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through “hypertext” links. This wasn’t a new idea, but his simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) managed to thrive while more ambitious hypertext projects floundered.

Hypertext originally meant text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages. It is now a broader term that refers to just about any object (text, images, files, and so on) that can be linked to other objects.

Hypertext Markup Language is a language for describing how pages of text, graphics, and other information are organized and linked together.

By 1993, almost 100 computers throughout the world were equipped to serve up HTML pages. Those interlinked pages were dubbed the World Wide Web (WWW), and several web browser programs had been written to allow people to view web pages. Because of the popularity of the Web, a few programmers soon wrote web browsers that could view graphics images along with the text on a web page. One of these programmers was Marc Andressen; he went on to become rich and famous, selling one of the world’s most popular web browsers, Netscape Navigator.

Today, HTML pages are the standard interface to the Internet. They can include animated graphics, sound and video, complete interactive programs, and good old-fashioned text. Millions of web pages are retrieved and viewed each day from thousands of web server computers around the world. Incidentally, the term “web” arose from the fact that web pages are linked together in such a way that they form a massive web of information, roughly akin to a spider’s web. This is also why you sometimes hear the term “crawler,” which refers to a program that wanders around the Web gathering information on web pages.