A bit of history

We briefly introduced in the first two chapters the birth, development, and history of the Internet network, but mainly as an access and connectivity “tool” (corresponding also to the goal of the telephone network). But connectivity and voice are not the only applications, and the Internet is not the only network of interest. The cable (television) network is another example. Now, the Internet is providing a lot of different types of interactions and access to whatever type of data, tool, or software one requires for leisure, at work, and in daily life; the possibilities seem limited only by our imagination.

The Internet was initiated by the Defense Department in the USA in order to share research data. For security reasons, i.e., to make it less vulnerable to attacks, the network was designed to be decentralized, a key characteristic that actually, albeit unintentionally, became a reason for its economic development and success.

While the infrastructure was developing, there was an increasing demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. The World Wide Web (WWW) was released on August 6, 1991, by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and designed to meet that demand. We remark that the terms World Wide Web and Internet are often used indiscriminately, but the Internet is usually more about the communications infrastructure, while the World Wide Web is about the mass of documents that can be found on the network, connected by hyperlinks. To better navigate on the World Wide Web, the first web browser, Mosaic (which later became Netscape), was released in 1993.