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 was introduced and the government allowed, for the first time, commercial access to the Internet.
The World Wide Web is just one of the services available through the Internet. Like other Internet services, the World Wide Web is not a network. Instead, it is a way of organizing information so that any computer around the world that operates according to certain rules can access it. The rules that specify how to access and transfer files over the web are called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Protocols will be discussed later in this chapter. .
The researcher who is mainly responsible for creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, developed a system for linking information which comprised three critical elements: a way of giving everything a uniform address, a protocol for transmitting these linked bits of information, and a language for encoding the information. .
Since a basic document format was required for passing information back and forth between computer systems, Berners-Lee developed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) based on an existing language, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).