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We are going to begin our free online web design course by covering the history of the great network of knowledge known to mankind as the “Internet” or the “World Wide Web.” I’ll use the expression “the web” throughout this lesson to refer to the Internet. If you already know about how the web came to be or you simply don’t care about it, you may as well just head on to the next lesson – Introduction To HTML. This part of your free online web design course is only going to give you some general knowledge about how the web emerged and how it actually works. It does not contain any information on actual web design.

It all began in 1957 when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite called “Sputnik.” In response, the US formed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a branch of the Department of Defense to acquire the lead position in military technology.

ARPA was looking for a way to decentralize the military network that controlled the nuclear arms the US possessed, in case the grounds for a counter-attack against a possible USSR nuclear attack to this military network came to be. In short, the US wanted to be able to control her nuclear arms remotely. ARPA founded a network of computers called “ARPANET” that had a backbone of 50 Kbps and 4 hosts to make this possible. What was then referred to as ARPANET evolved into the World Wide Web, which is constituted by millions of hosts as well as backbones such as 56Kbps, 1.544Mbps, 45Mpbs, and 155Mpbs lines, plus satellite and radio connections as of today.

The web has greatly altered the communications and computer world. It used the accumulated knowledge of mankind to achieve a higher level of integration of communication technologies such as the printed press, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, and the television. The web can be concieved as a universal ability to broadcast, a perfect system for dissemination of information, and a unique and gigantic platform for interaction between people without regard for physical location. Actually, You ARE one of these people.

What is essential to us, my dear reader, is that the web uses “codes” and “decoders” to achieve this interaction. Every web page contains special markup (codes) that determine how it looks and what it contains; and every web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, Opera, etc.) is a decoder that can read the code and produce an adequate output (i.e. what you are reading right now is an output of the code that constitutes this web page).

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The code that constitutes web pages is called “HTML code”. Head on to the next lesson – Introduction To HTML of this free website design course to learn more!

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