– The Internet and the Web are basically the same thing, right?

The way I see it is: The Internet is a giant piece of hardware, distributed all across the world and made up of various pieces of equipment like servers, routers, hubs and switches. The World Wide Web is a giant piece of software that runs on that hardware. Examples of other software systems that use the Internet are: Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming service, Skype and Outlook eMail. It can be difficult to differentiate sometimes though because these systems are often used in conjunction with a web service (eg web-based email like hotmail or gmail). But imagine if you use your desktop email client to send an email to someone else using a desktop email client – no webpages used at all. The same could be said if I’m gaming online, moving around in a 3D environment with other players – I’m using the internet to communicate with servers but no webpages are being used.

There is also some confusion when researching Who invented the Web? as you may come across the various US military projects initiated in the 1970s which resulted in the first hardware of the Internet and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which the machines used to communicate. Or, you may come across Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who first used HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to communicate with an Internet webserver from a local computer. Berners-Lee developed the first Web Browser and put the first website online on 6th August 1991, which provided information to people who wanted to set up their own webserver (a computer open to the Internet that stores webpages and listens for connections).

Most importantly though, Berners-Lee ensured that his technology remained royalty-free, meaning nobody ever has to pay to use the standards which he and the World Wide Web Consortium (of which he is founder) have established. So, you have to pay your ISP to have access to the Internet, but not to browse the web or make a website.

What do you think?