3 Key Things You Probably Never Knew About The World Wide Web

Hooray! It has officially been 30 years since the world wide web went up just a year after the Berlin wall came down.

Here are 3 things you may not probably consider much:

Number 1: The World Wide Web is not the same as the internet.

It's so common the use of the words “internet” and “web” interchangeably. They actually refer to different things.

The internet is the global network of computers that are able to communicate with one another and dates back to the US military’s ARPANET developed in the 1960s.

The web, on the other hand, is the public’s main way of accessing this network, and was proposed by Berners-Lee in the late 80s. It is one of the ways that information can be shared over the internet. The internet, not the web, is also used for email, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP.

So clearly, the internet is a huge network of computers all over the world, which are connected together. The web is a collection of (web) pages found on this network of computers. So, as you are on your desktop or mobile device now, you are using the internet (connection) in order to access the web. These two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

Number 2: The internet pre-existed the World Wide Web

As clearly explained above, the internet (network of computers around the world) already existed before the World Wide Web came along. But up until the introduction of the World Wide Web, nobody had thought of a way to link up all the internet and all of the documents and data on it. Then on March 11th, 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web.

Number 3: There are over 1.6 billion websites on the World Wide Web

Of the over 1.6 billion websites, less than 200 million are active. The milestone of 1 billion websites was first reached in September of 2014, as confirmed by NetCraft in its October 2014 Web Server Survey and first estimated and announced by Internet Live Stats

Written by Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor aka Digital Mawuli

A Digital Marketing Strategist who thrives in the nexus of design, business and technology

edited by Rex Krampa, Modern Ghana