What is the Internet?

What is the

Internet

a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.

, exactly? To some of us, the Internet is where we stay in touch with friends, get the news, shop, and play games. To some others, the Internet can mean their local broadband providers, or the underground wires and fiber-optic cables that carry data back and forth across cities and oceans. Who is right? A helpful place to start is near the Very Beginning: 1974. That was the year that a few smart computer researchers invented something What is the Internet? or, “You Say Tomato, I Say TCP/IP” Thing 1 31334_20Things_book_v2_20101119.indd 4 11/19/10 9:28 AM 5 called the Internet Protocol Suite, or TCP/IP for short. TCP/IP created a set of rules that allowed computers to “talk” to each other and send information back and forth.

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Cloud Computing

Modern

relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past.

computing in the age of the Internet

is quite a strange, remarkable thing. As you sit hunched over your laptop at home watching a YouTube video or using a search engine, you’re actually plugging into the collective power of thousands of computers that serve all this information to you from far-away rooms distributed around the world. It’s almost like having a massive supercomputer at your beck and call, thanks to the Internet.

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Web Apps

I f you play online games, use an online

Photo

a picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused onto film or other light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment, or stored digitally

Maps, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube or Facebook, then you’re an active resident in the wonderful world of web apps.

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HTML, JavaScript, CSS and more

Web pages are written in

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages.

, the web programming language that tells web browsers how to structure and present content on a web page. In other words, HTML provides the basic building blocks for the web. And for a long time, those building blocks were pretty simple and static: lines of text, links and images.

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HTML5

More than two decades after HTML was introduced, we’re still asking questions about what the web is, and what it might become. What kinds of features and applications would we, as users, find fun, useful or even indispensable? What tools do developers need in order to create these great sites and apps? And finally, how can all this goodness be delivered inside a web browser?

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Internet

a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.

Modern

relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past.

Photo

a picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused onto film or other light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment, or stored digitally.

Javascript

an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages.