LECTURE 1 • Introduction to the World Wide Web 
The World Wide Web and the Internet are not the same thing.
The Internet is a worldwide computer network that links thousands of smaller networks; whereas, the World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers that support specially formulated documents that give a graphical interface
The Internet started in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense as a way to communicate with its contractors and researchers at large universities. The government laid cables between its contractors and created a protocol, which is a set of rules that allow computers on a network to talk to one another. E-mail and Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board system that contains newsgroups, were among the first services developed for the Internet.
In the 1980s, Bitnet, DNS, and NNTP were developed. Bitnet, started as a cooperative effort at City University of New York, is especially important in Internet history because it is the first time a part of the Internet was specifically set aside for activities not specific to military or academic goals.
In 1984, the Domain Name Server (DNS) was introduced, which maps Internet domain names to IP addresses. Toward the end of the 1980s, parts of the Internet became available as community or commercial venues. Technologies such as Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) were designed to enhance existing news performance.
The 1990s will always be known as the decade where the Internet showed tremendous growth because the first graphical browser (Mosaic) was introduced and the government allowed, for the first time, commercial access to the Internet.