The World Wide Web
J. Terry Fuqua
4 September 2014

Rembember the old tin can telephones?  Vibrations can be transmitted along a taught string or wire.  That's the principle behind them. But vibrations are quickly damped and lost, which is why those devices have such a limited range. 
In the nineteenth century, an appropriate interval after the elucidation of electricity, there was a new idea. You could make  a magnet made by a coiling wire around an iron core. Put the two ends of the wire in contact with the two electrodes of a battery, and, voila!, the coil became an electromagnet.  Now position a strip of iron near the end of the magnet so that it would be attracted to the magnet when current flowed through it and released when the current ceased. This way you could produce an audible click each closing of the circuit. The great idea was that the electromagnet could be turned on and off at a great distance simply by turning an electrical circuit on and off using a switch at one end. There!  You have a simple telegraph.
The telegraph could not be invented until electricity was more or less understood, and the Web awaited the invention of computers hooked up to other computers by telephone lines. Once we had those basic building blocks, we could send bundles of information in more sophisticated ways.

Now information (mostly in the form of letters of the alphabet)  was sent over the telegraph lines by short and long electrical impulses, the dots and dashes of Samuel F. B. Morse. A short burst followed quickly by a long one, dot-dash if you will, was the way to transmit the letter "A". 

In computer technology a whole new system was needed, because data transmission was by simple on-or-off states, called "bits". A spot or "address" on a computer chip is either occupied by a charge or not; it is on or it is off. Each on or off is a bit.  And these bits were combined into groups called "bytes". If one is using an old-fashioned 8-bit computer where there are 8 bits in a "byte", one transmits the number "one" by the byte 00000001, a two by 00000010, a three by 00000011, and so on, thus using a binary system to transmit or store data. Now you still need a way to change these bundles of on-off signals into letters. Thus was born the ASCII system [The American Standard Code for Information Interchange], the computer equivalent of Morse Code. A binary bundle of 65 was defined as representing lower case "A", 66 a "B", 32 a space, and so on. Now one could send messages in typed form from one computer to another. Images, sound, and more complex forms of data transmission would come later.

Next is the problem of getting the message from point A to point B. One initially used a pair of wires, just like the old telephone or telegraph. But in 1980 a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, played with a way of linking data pages together. He invented HTML or the Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language. Then he came up with a way of using HTML links to allow access to data from around the world. He considered several names for his system. These included Information Mesh, The Information Mine (which he rejected since its acronym was TIM, his own name) or Mine of Information (turned down because it comes out MOI which is "Me" in French). He finally settled upon World Wide Web.

Near the end of 1990 he served up his first web page, and the next year people outside his lab were using the network. August 23, 1991 the Web was opened to the public. The first server (data storeage device accessible by multiple users) outside CERN was at Stanford, where Paul Kunz, who had visited CERN, brought the software and installed it on the IBM mainframe there. More importantly, in 1993 it was announced that the WWW would be royalty-free to all users.

In 1994 Berners-Lee set up the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to allow the world's users to establish rules and standards by consensus. Even today, standards are constantly being revised for HTML, the computer language used to "write" web pages. W3C is responsible for those revisions too. With innovations in HTML no longer is the Web limited to static pages of text. One may embody sound, video, or interactive devices to allow one to submit forms or buy and sell items, or to "fill one's shopping cart". And newer developments allowed connections of servers to devices such as remote videocameras, garage door controllers, and the like.


Soon there was a need for browsers. These are software applications that allow one to search for and retrieve information from a large number of servers. They are the window into the Web. Most of us today have the choice of several browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. The first was the Mosaiac web browser, a graphical device developed by the team under Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois.  This was funded by Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, and perhaps  this is the basis for Mr. Gore's claim to have invented the Internet. This early browser had no "back" button. And it was initially an editor and not just a viewer. Andresseen went on to cofound Netscape.     

Next idea: how does one fin d something on the web without knowing its address or server location? Simple! Just Google it! We take for granted the devices like Google known as search engines. Others besides Google are Yahoo, Bing, etc. These search engines pile up data in organized bins for users gain access. Each company's search engine stores data on that company's set of servers.

But how do search engines themselves find these data to store. Well, they employ robot software called crawlers that crawl around the web looking for terms of interest to catalog into the databases for the search engine servers.  Got all of that?

Now back to the bundles of data sent over the Internet, the "packets" as they are called. Every transmission over the web is sent in packets, E-mail, stock market reports, New York Times headlines, all in packets. One might think that would be simple. Just send the stream of packets from point A to point B like a telegraph, from server to user  But 'taint the way it works!

The typical packet contains some 1,000 to 1,500 bytes. Each packet (in addition to its data content, that is what information one wants transmitted) must also carry the information that will help it get to its destination -- the sender's IP address (every computer whether sender or receiver is assigned a unique number or IP address), the intended receiver's IP address, something that tells the network how many packets this e-mail message has been broken down into, and a number showing where this particular packet goes into the completed message.

Now how does the computer at one end tell the other computer in what language the packets must be sent, I mean computer language and not national tongue? Well, there are various file transfer protocols (FTP) or set formats, and the header of the transmission includes that information.
Now look what happens: maybe all the packets in the message go the same route, most simply go from server or source to receiver. But maybe traffic is heavy over that route, so the packets may go by any number of different routes and then be reassembled in proper order at the receiving end. This near-instantaneous re-routing allows packets to circumvent disabled computer nodes (a node is where several messaging routes converge, rather like an airport hub). Picture all the communication lines interwoven from node to node, and you'll have the picture of a giant spiderweb, a world wide web. This huge conglomeration of nodes and routes is what we call "the Internet". But a purist would say the Web is only one of the services that runs on this conglomeration, the Internet. In a sense the Web is an application or program that runs on the Internet. There are all sorts of Internet services besides the World Wide Web, including e-mail services, online gaming, and even my reading EKGs at home from the server at Jennie Stuart Hospital.
Before I conclude, I should mention a few vital components of the Internet. The most vital and the one taken for granted is the mouse. Several of us doubtless remember the pre-mouse computer. Games were played by typing in instructions such as "walk left 10 feet", and so on. The mouse allowed us a sense of freedom. It actually is a simple trackball, invented after World War II for radar plotting, turned upside down so the desk or mousepad contacted the ball rather than the fingers.  It was kept secret for years. Then in 1963 Douglas Englebart at Stanford invented a prototype they named the mouse, a term inspired by the long tail or wire connecting the device to the computer. The patent expired before it was ever used on personal computers. Rather than a trackball it had two wheels at right angles to each other. And in 1982 Micerosoft made its MS-DOS operating system mouse-compatible. In 1984 the Macintosh 128K introduced the mouse to a wide audience. 
And what about "The Cloud"? The Cloud is simply a server or bunch of servers whose location and control are unknown to the user. It is like having a hard drive that you can access from any computer hooked up to the Internet, often at no cost to you. But unless you use fool-proof encryption, others may have access to your data.
Now let's return to the early history of computing. Once you had a practical pointing device, the Graphical User Interface or GUI allowed the popular "point and shoot" approach to computing. This made possible windows, icons, and all sorts of navigation using menus. Then HTML evolved to allow "mouse-over" effects and button-down or button up effects. So rather than having to learn a whole lexicon of typed commands you can simply "intuit" what you want to do.
Where has all this taken us?
According to "Distribution of languages on the Internet",  July 27, 2009, the most Web content was in English: 56.4%; next were German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). 
On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs, a URL or Universal Resource Locater being the address you type into your web browser. It is the readable-language form of the website's IP or number address.
In 2013 there were 7.1 billion people in the world, and 39% used the Internet. This huge and increasing volume put a strain on hardware resources. Streaming video a la Netflix eats up huge amounts of transmission capability, meaning governmental regulation will probably determine who gets to drive in the fast lane.
To quote Shakespeare: Ah, what a tangled web we weave....