Key facts

  • ARPANET, first linked in 1969, is the high-yield predecessor of the modern Internet because it demonstrated packet-switched networking.
  • TCP/IP became the standard protocol suite for ARPANET on 1 January 1983, a date often treated as the operational birth of the Internet.
  • Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, adding web pages and hyperlinks on top of the Internet.
  • Ray Tomlinson sent an early network email in 1971 and popularised the @ sign for separating the user name from the host.

Key Points at a Glance

  1. 1

    ARPANET, first linked in 1969, is the high-yield predecessor of the modern Internet because it demonstrated packet-switched networking.

  2. 2

    TCP/IP became the standard protocol suite for ARPANET on 1 January 1983, a date often treated as the operational birth of the Internet.

  3. 3

    Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, adding web pages and hyperlinks on top of the Internet.

  4. 4

    HTTP carries web requests and responses, while HTTPS adds encryption through TLS for safer browsing and online forms.

  5. 5

    DNS converts human-readable domain names such as example.com into numerical IP addresses used by computers and routers.

  6. 6

    Ray Tomlinson sent an early network email in 1971 and popularised the @ sign for separating the user name from the host.

  7. 7

    Email uses To, Cc and Bcc differently: To is for primary recipients, Cc is visible copying, and Bcc hides copied recipients from other receivers.

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Internet, web and basic network ideas

The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks. ARPANET's first host-to-host message was sent in 1969, which is why it is treated as a key starting point in Internet history. Its core function is to move digital data between devices using agreed rules called protocols. A school computer, a mobile phone, a government office server and a cloud data centre can all communicate because the network uses common addressing and routing methods. The Internet is therefore infrastructure: cables, routers, wireless links, satellites, servers, service providers and protocols working together.

The World Wide Web is only one major service that runs on the Internet. The web consists of websites and web pages connected through hyperlinks and accessed mainly through browsers. Email, file transfer, online gaming, video calls, messaging apps and cloud storage also use the Internet, but they are not the same thing as the web. This distinction is a common objective-question trap: Internet is the network of networks; web is a hypertext information system on that network.

Remember this distinction: the Internet is the road system, while the web is one important service travelling on it.

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