The Internet began with the ARPANET in the United States in 1969.

It is a huge network connected between networks. These networks are connected by a set of common protocols to form a logically single huge international network. Usually internet refers to the Internet in general, while Internet refers to the Internet specifically.

This method of connecting computer networks to each other can be called "network interconnection". On this basis, a global Internet network covering the whole world is developed called the Internet, which is a network that is connected to each other. structure.

The Internet is not the same as the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is just a global system based on hypertext links and is one of the services that the Internet can provide.

Extended information:

Development of the Internet

In the 1950s, communication researchers recognized the need to allow regular communication between different computer users and communication networks . This prompted research on decentralized networks, queuing theory, and packet switching. In 1960, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense created the ARPAnet out of Cold War considerations, triggering technological progress and making it the center of the development of the Internet.

In 1973, the ARPA network expanded into the Internet, and the first batch of computers connected to it were British and Norwegian computers. In 1974, Robert Kahn of ARPA and Vinton Cerf of Stanford proposed the TCP/IP protocol, which defined a method for transmitting messages between computer networks (for which they won the Turing Award in 2004).

On January 1, 1983, the ARPA network changed its core network protocol from NCP to TCP/IP. In 1986, the National Science Foundation created NSFNET, the backbone network for interconnection between universities. This was an important step in the history of the Internet. In 1994, NSFNET transitioned to commercial operations.

With the opening of the Internet to business in 1995, other important networks successfully connected to the Internet include Usenet, Bitnet and various commercial X.25 networks. In the 1990s, the entire web was opened to the public. In August 1991, two years after he created HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee began touting his World Wide Web project.

In late 1994, public interest in the pre-academic and technical Internet was growing steadily. In 1996, the term "Internet" was widely circulated, but it referred to almost the entire World Wide Web. In the meantime, after a decade, the Internet successfully accommodated most of the original computer networks (although some networks, like FidoNet, remained independent).

This rapid development is due to the lack of central control of the Internet and the non-proprietary nature of Internet protocols. The former has caused the organic growth of the Internet, while the latter has encouraged compatibility between manufacturers and prevented certain One company dominates the Internet. The success of the Internet can be glimpsed from the upper and lower case differentiation of the term "Internet".

Initially, the term Internet represented those networks established using the IP protocol. Today, it has been extended to refer to various types of networks and is no longer limited to IP networks. Therefore, the lowercase Internet (the "i" at the beginning is a lowercase letter) is a collection of any separate entity networks. These networks are connected by a common set of protocols to form a logical single network.

The capital Internet (the "I" at the beginning is a capital letter) specifically refers to the former ARPA network, which later used the IP protocol to link various physical networks into this single logical network. Uppercase Internet is a form of lowercase Internet, but not vice versa.

Since 2002, some scholars have begun to propose that the word "internet" should be expressed in lowercase, on the grounds that the Internet has become a part of human life and has lost its exclusive meaning.

In 2016, the Associated Press believed that "Internet" had become a general thing like "telephone" and did not have the significance of an exclusive trademark, so it began to stipulate the terms "internet" and " The word "web" is all lowercase, and the New York Times followed suit, but at the same time, some media also expressed different opinions.

Baidu Encyclopedia—Internet