What is the internet?

Don't feel silly for asking. A lot of people talk about the internet as if everybody already knows what it is. The internet is basically a spawling international network of computers. Nobody owns it. It was started a few years ago by a bunch of scientists and government-types who needed a quick and easy (easy for scientists and government-types, that is) way to transfer massive amounts of data from one computer to another. The general public (like you and me) never even knew about it until a few things happened that transformed the internet into what it is now.

One important change was that businesses started catching on. They, too, had lots of data to splash around and wanted to jump in. Once the internet was open to commerce, the general public (the unavoidable market for all of this commerce) had to find out about it one way or another.

The other revolutionary change that helped bring the internet to people like you and me was the development of the World Wide Web, or WWW, which is how you are seeing this now. The Web is only a part of the whole internet, but without question its fastest growing part. To understand more about the WWW, it's helpful to understand how the whole internet works. I'll try to keep it simple.

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