The Internet/World Wide Web (WWW)

Abstract

The Internet was first implemented in the late 1960s as a United States Department of Defense initiative called the ARPAnet. The ARPAnet originally was formed primarily to support military research on how to build networks that could withstand outages and continue to function properly in the event a single connection or location on the network was rendered out of commission. The network design approach assumed that the network itself was not unreliable, which is a very realistic approach if one considers the stability in the design of these computer elements and barring an act of nature or a bomb attack. Since the original ARPAnet model mandated that all communications occur between two computers directly, any segment of the network could suffer downtime, but communication between the other computers on the network would still continue via alternate routes across the network. What was needed for two computers to communicate was a message that was enclosed in a standard format, which was then and still is called the Internet Protocol (IP) packet, along with the address of the destination computer.