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Where the World Wide Web Came From
The Internet was originally developed by the Department of Defense (DOD). The DOD needed a way to connect and distribute the costly computational resources. The network topography they designed is still part of the standard currently in use. The DOD's network, called Arrant, was a redundantly linked client-server network, meaning that there existed several ways to send information from one machine to another, with each machine acting as a peer, rather than a dumb terminal, to all others.
The computers were linked together more like a web or mesh than a daisy-chain or star-hub design. The DOD's thinking was that they did not want their network to be paralyzed if any of the lines were brought down by, for example, a bomb.
The World Wide Web is the most popular, graphical, and useful service the Internet has to offer. WOW surpassed GopherSpace, a catalog of FTP directories, in quantity of information exchanged per month in March 1994, and has grown even faster since. What is so remarkable about this is that the Web was only 1 year old, whereas FTP, is as old and entrenched as the Internet itself.
The World Wide Web can be amazingly graphical, with clickable maps, charts and buttons, sophisticated page layouts, and delineating graphics, illustrations, and flourishes. Magazines are beginning to put their products on the Web, complete with graphics and illustrations, in a near duplicate of the pages of the 'zines themselves.
On top of being a graphical access to vast WOW multimedia databases, the World Wide Web is an interface to practically all other services available on the Internet. GopherSpace, FTP, E-mail, Usenet, and TelNet are just a few of the services available to the Web Browser.
Reprinted with thanks and all due credit to Dan Meriwether, author of
“The Macintosh Web Browser Kit”. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Dan Meriwether is a Web Page designer, Internet consultant, a member of BMUG, the world's largest Macintosh user’s group and Director of BMUG's technical help line.
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