The Internet is the network of computers all around the world, which store and exchange information. It started as a research project commissioned by the U.S. Defense Department in the 1970’s for linking its computers across different bases. As the research progressed, the Internet expanded beyond the control of the U.S. Defense Department, linking many major universities. Slowly, corporate organizations realized the value of Internet and participated in the building of Internet. The major breakthrough came when Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW ( World Wide Web), a user-friendly interface using html (a very easy language used to link web pages). The World Wide Web was formulated to be a free medium for people to interact, gain and share information. The Internet as such refers to the interlinking of computers, but now the Web has become synonymous with the Internet due to its immense popularity.
At first, the corporations used the Internet as an information disseminating platform for their products and their company as such and people-to-people interactions were at the minimum. That period of web technology is called Web 1.0.
More and more people started investing in the Internet; numerous websites opened. Soon, financial transactions started taking place over the Internet. This newer web technology is now termed Web 2.0. But with many developments in application software, hardware upgrades and networking technology, social interactions started, with the e-mails, chat rooms and so on. This created an Internet boom as never before, as almost everybody wanted to be connected to the net.
These technological advances have resulted in making the Internet an unprecedented phenomenon, heralding the concept of the Global Village, as now practically anyone at one end can be connected to the other end of the world in no time.
