What is the internet?

The internet is a global network of computers that works much like the postal system, only at sub-second speeds.

How it works

When you send a letter, you don’t need to know about the vans, trains and planes that carry it to its destination, or how many post offices it passes through on the way. 

When you put an envelope in the post, it can contain many different types of data: a love letter, an invoice, a photograph, and so on.

Origins of the net

The internet traces its origins to the ARPAnet, created by the US Defence Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960s.Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed TCP/IP, ’A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection’ (in 1974), to connect different networks.

Global domination

The main reasons for this massive increase were the opening of what had been an academic and government network to commercial users, and its rapid spread from the US to the rest of the world.

How does the web work?

The web is a system for publishing pages of information on the internet, and for linking pages together using links.Anyone can publish a page by uploading it to a web server. Anyone can read that page by typing its address into a web browser. This makes it very easy for people to share documents even if they are using what would otherwise be incompatible computers.