30 years of the World Wide Web: what is the difference between the Internet and the Web (and why many confuse them)

Many people confuse the Web with the Internet. But the Internet already existed before the Web.

Normally, when you visit a web page, the address begins with three letters: WWW. These are the abbreviations of World Wide Web (or web).

It has existed since 1989, when a physicist from CERN (European Center for Nuclear Physics), named Tim Berners-Lee, presented his first proposal on the Web, an invention that would completely change the world.

Computers arrived in September 1990 and this year's Christmas, the World Wide Web was already fully active and active.

It was possible thanks to an earlier invention: Internet.

Internet existed before the web

The Internet is a huge network of connected computers around the world.

Instead, the Web (the World Wide Web) is a huge collection of pages that relies on this computer network.

So when you browse your mobile phone or computer, you use the Internet to access the Web.

However, although the Internet already exists before anyone has developed a way to connect it to all the documents and data that it now contains.

Berners-Lee has found an effective system for using these connections by creating web pages to share information.

How and when was the Internet born?

* The origins of the Internet date back to the Cold War. It was part of a research project in a military field.

* In the 1960s, American scientist Licklider Joseph wrote a series of memoranda to develop technology that would establish the first remote connection between computers.

* Licklider Joseph called this concept "galactic network", a globally interconnected set of computers for quick access to programs and data.

* He led the computer research program at DARPA (the US Advanced Defense Project Research Agency), whose activity began in October 1962.

* In 1966, ARPANET was created, which will later become the current Internet.

Sources: Internet Society / Node 50

47 years ago, two computers 600 km apart communicated for the first time

The web needs the internet to work

In a way, the Internet would be equivalent to the infrastructure – to the roads of countries around the world – while the content of the web pages is what moves on this infrastructure – cars, trucks, buses – to transport informations.

Stores, businesses, cafes … that settle on these routes so that citizens (Internet users) can access the web pages would be the servers that host them.

In the absence of the Internet, no one could communicate via the World Wide Web because there would be no way to send this data.

And without the World Wide Web, most of us would find it extremely difficult (and much more expensive) to access all the information we have today.

BBC.