The Birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web

     The internet began as a connection between two computers, located at UCLA and Stanford.  This first connection did not come about without much work done before its creation.  In 1958 the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was an initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War.  The ARPANET was built and after some time it had four computers connected that could send data.  Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn are credited as the fathers of the internet because of there work on the creation of internet protocols that still are in use to this day.

      The World Wide Web is not the same as the internet despite common belief.  The World Wide Web, or just the Web, was designed by Tim Berners-Lee as a means to share his research documents with other researchers.  With the help of Robert Cailliau, the first web browser was developed in 1991, it was very primitive and could only support text.  Two years after this the Mosaic Browser was released which could support graphics as well as text.  This later evolved into the Netscape Browser which grew in popularity and help to increase the size of the Web.  This remained as the most widely used web browser until 1999 when Windows Internet Explorer took the lead.  Since then  many other web browsers have been released and updated into smoothing running programs but the protocols that run them remain the same.

Reference:

http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm

Picture From:

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/invention-of-the-internet