The Internet & World Wide Web

The Internet

The internet is a massive interconnected collection  of WANs and LANs). It is partly mesh and partly hierarchical in its setup. The is no agreed setup for the Internet, it has just grown organically.

The internet is a massive connected network (WAN) made up of smaller WANs and LANs. A the center of the diagram you can see the central backbone of the internet, a mesh of connected routers.

You can edit your own diagram of the internet and networks at https://www.draw.io/

Just choose New Diagram > Network and pick one of the options.

The World Wide Web

The WWW is a massive distributed application that is hosted on the Internet. The world wide web is made up primarily of web pages, most importantly these pages contain hyperlinks which direct access to other websites, hosted anywhere on the internet. These links join the pages of the internet and therefore form a web of interlinked pages.

Each web-page on the web can be thought of as a joint and each hyperlink on a page is a strand connecting the page to other pages around the web. Because we don’t have to type in the name of each page every time we go to a new page, we can just click on a hyperlink, we are able to browse the web.

Web Browsers

The Internet is a global network of computers. This global network hosts millions of websites, distributed across tens of thousands of servers. When you want to access these web pages you need to use a web browser to access and display the page.

Netscape, the first web browser, long before IE and Chrome!

Internet Service Provider

If you want to connect to the Internet and the WWW then you will need to do so via and Internet Service Provider. If you connect from home then your ISP will be your broadband provider. If you connect via a smart phone then your ISP is your mobile phone network (unless you connect via somebody’s Wifi!)

ISPs are the middle-man between the backbone of the internet and users. They provide connection services and issue your machine with an IP address so that when you request a web page from a server (usually by clicking on a hyperlink) the server knows where to send the data back to across the internet.

Resources

WWW vs Internet Sorting Activity

Presentation (Multiple topics)

Before the WWW

Past Paper Exam Questions

0478/12- Paper 1 Theory May/June 2017 –  Qn11