INTERNET.. the new Piazza Del Popolu

(Warning – this blog may be didactic and void of humor)

If you think women talk only about shoes and jewelry…guys.. you are sadly mistaken. Last night a routine chat with my intelligent neighbor (named after Goddess of Wealth and in her case also Goddess of Inquisitiviteness)  and her more intelligent Saggi son… well ... was on Tim Berners Lee and his invention. The conversation led to various questions

Are Internet and the Web synonymous?

Who invented Internet and the web?

And who made e-mails possible?

The Internet is basically an interconnection of computer networks. It connects millions of computers globally using something called ‘protocols’.  The internet and Transmission Control Protocols TCP/IP were initially developed in 1973 by an American computer scientist Vinton Cerf for the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). It was called ARPANET before it came to be called internet.

Today, no government owns Internet. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN,) a non profit corporation headquartered in California is responsible for managing the IP address spaces

Decades later the World Wide Web was invented by a British Physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) Switzerland. In 1990, he developed the backbone of the Web -- the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and thereby the first web browser. In his own words "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol idea and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web”

Both Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf are called internet daddies (Father of the Internet!)  

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet and hence it is just a portion of the Internet. To put it in a simple way, if Internet is a menu, then the web is the most popular dish.

The Internet, not the Web, is also used for Email which relies on SMTP as against HTTP. Email was invented by Ray Tomlinson an American computer engineer  in 1971 on the ARPANET. Ray used @ symbol to tell which user was "at" what computer. The first email was sent between two computers that were actually beside each other.

The most interesting part is that Tim Berners Lee and his co- inventors Robert Caillau of CERN did not make any money through their invention of www. They refused to patent it. They feared that by doing so, the usage will become prohibitively expensive and thus passed up a fortune so that the world could learn for free.

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow”  ~Bill Gates

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Piazza del Popolo  (meaning People Square in latin) is a large urban square in Rome designed in 1811 for people to meet and discuss.          More over to 2011.. you know where people are meeting.