INTERNET AND WORLD WIDE WEB...

HISTORY OF INTERNET

The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network that ultimately evolved into what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was a great success but membership was limited to certain academic and research organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing.

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the Internet. All networks could now be connected by a universal language.....

 

......

WEB BROWSER:

Definition

A browser, short for web browser, is the software application (a program) that you're using right now to search for, reach and explore websites. Whereas Excel® is a program for spreadsheets and Word® a program for writing documents, a browser is a program for Internet exploring (which is where that name came from).

Browsers don't get talked about much. A lot of people simply click on the "icon" on our computers that take us to the Internet—and that's as far as it goes. And in a way, that's enough. Most of us simply get in a car and turn the key...we don't know what kind of engine we have or what features it has...it takes us where we want to go. That's why when it comes to computers:

FIRE FOX

Firefox is a Web browser that is smaller, faster, and in some ways more secure than the Mozilla browser from which much of its code was originally derived. Compared to Internet Explorer, the most popular Web browser, Firefox gives users a cleaner interface and faster download speeds. As of November 2008, Firefox had about 20% of the market share for browsers, worldwide. Internet Explorer had about 70%.

Firefox includes most of the features with which users of other browsers are familiar. The first iteration of the browser also included several new features other browsers did not have at the time, such as a bookmarks toolbar and tabbed browsing that allow a user to quickly switch back and forth between several Web sites. Other browsers have since adopted many of these features, though Firefox's substantial developer base continues to create new plug-ins that offer increased usability and functionality

INTERNET EXPLORER:

Internet Explorer (IE) is a World Wide Web browser that comes bundled with the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS).
 The browser was deprecated in Windows 10 in favor of Microsoft's new Edge Browser. 

It remains a part of the operating system even though it is no longer the default browser

As of August 2016, Internet Explorer was the second-most widely used web browser on desktop operating systems, with 29.6% of the market, compared to 50.9% for the Google Chrome browser, according to Net Market Share. IE was the most popular browser from 1999, when it overtook Netscape Navigator, until 2012, when Chrome took the lead. Other competitors include Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser developed using the code from Netscape Navigator, and Apple's Safari.

 HOME PAGE:

A home page or a start page is the initial or main web page of a website or a browser. The initial page of a website is sometimes called main page as well.
A home page is generally the main page a visitor navigating to a website from a web search engine will see, and it may also serve as a landing page to attract visitors. The home page is used to facilitate navigation to other pages on the site by providing links to prioritized and recent articles and pages, and possibly a search box. For example, a news website may present headlines and first paragraphs of top stories, with links to full articles, in a dynamic web page that reflects the popularity and recentness of stories. Meanwhile, other websites utilize the homepage to attract users to create an account. Once they are logged in, the homepage may be redirected to their profile page. This may in turn be referred to as the "personal home page

              A Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

commonly informally termed a web address (a term which is not defined identically is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. A URL implies the means to access an indicated resource, which is not true of every URI, URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (http), but are also used for file transfer (ftp), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.

                  
                                   INTERNET SERVICES

What's the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is an Internet service, based on a common set of protocols, which allows a particularly configured server computer to distribute documents across the Internet in a standard way. This Web standard allows programs on many different computer platforms (such as UNIX, Windows 95, and the Mac OS) to properly format and display the information served. These programs are called Web browsers.

The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet. Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, audio, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher or interactive where users contribute content or the content depends upon the user or their actions.