What Is the Internet?

Lesson 1: The World Wide Web

Right now, you’re using a specific part of the internet. It’s called the World Wide Web (or just the web, for short). Until the web was created, the internet was made up of pages that only had text. It didn’t have color or fun graphics of any kind. It was great for scientific reports, government images, or school projects. Consequently, the internet was used primarily by scientists and engineers.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, an Oxford-trained computer scientist, had an idea for a “global hypertext project.” To make his idea a reality, he developed new ways to navigate the internet with a computer language called hypertext markup language, or HTML.

Hypertext is a different way of moving through information. Instead of reading text from beginning to end, you interact with it. You click a link, and suddenly you’re not moving through text from start to finish like you would in a book or magazine article. Instead, you’re making a quick side trip or jump to a new page.

HTML is more than just hypertext though. It’s also a markup language—a system of codes for how a computer should display text and images on a screen. Markup languages also determine how a computer should react to actions you make, such as pressing a key or clicking a mouse button. What made HTML such a perfect markup language for the web is that it can be read by many types of computers and is very economical. It allows web designers to create graphically rich web pages that are small in file size. Small file sizes are important on a network like the web because they are faster and easier to exchange over the thousands of miles often separating computers.

With the creation of HTML, the web was born. HTML made it easy to create websites like this one that have images, videos, and even sound. The small file size allowed them to be quickly shared over the internet. Suddenly, everyone saw the potential of the web as a global communications system and wanted to get on it. The web grew rapidly. Today, billions of people access the web daily for news, entertainment, shopping, education, and business.

Lesson 3: How Information Travels on the Internet Through an ISP

When you connect to a website through an ISP and start exchanging information, there isn’t a fixed connection between your computer and the web server computer that the website is on. Instead, information is exchanged using the best possible path at that particular time. Routers are computers that determine these paths, avoiding slow links and favoring fast ones.

See an example of how information travels on the internet.

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Lesson 5: Why Bandwidth Is Important

Have you waited a few seconds for a web page to finish loading onto your screen? That could be caused by a combination of many things. First, the file size of the web page may have been very big and there might have been a lot of information to get through. Second, the computer you were using may have a slow microprocessor, a device that processes incoming information in your computer. Third, your connection to the internet may have been slow. For better performance, the connection you were using needed more bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass through a particular connection in a set amount of time. It can differ depending on what type of connection your computer has to the internet. The greater the bandwidth of the connection, the faster a web page loads on your screen. Faster bandwidth means files can download faster and videos can play quicker and more smoothly. The more bandwidth your computer has, the better.

See an example of bandwidth.

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When the internet was mostly text and fewer people used it, bandwidth wasn’t as important because text pages have small file sizes. But today there are billions more people on the internet, and we use it to exchange photographs, download software, listen to music, and stream movies and videos online. These kinds of files are much larger and require a bigger connection to your computer to perform properly, which is why bandwidth is so important.

Lesson 7: Information on the Internet

One reason the internet has so quickly become a part of our daily lives is you can do practically everything on it. You can listen to music, play games, send messages, shop, and of course, use it to do research and homework.

But how accurate is the information on the internet? While the internet connects us to a boundless amount of fun, enticing, and informative content, there are plenty of cyberthreats, online scams, and unreliable sources out there too.

Anyone can put up a website on the internet. That’s why you have to be careful. There is no editorial review board, no information fact-checker, no quality-control expert. You have to be your own judge on the quality and validity of the information you receive.

You must also be careful when using a search engine like Google or Yahoo!. When you search for something online, every word you type into the search engine is considered a keyword. Additionally, the internet doesn’t show you the pages in an order based on the quality of information, but primarily by where and how often the words in your search appear. Some search engines give extra visibility to pages that have lots of links to them from other web pages. Some give extra visibility to pages frequently clicked on by people doing similar searches. Some search engines even put websites that pay fees in the list of results shown to you.

Search engines are useful, but they may also miss a lot of information. Most have access to less than 1 percent of the content that exists on the web. Billions of pages are not even considered. New, specialized search engines are popping up that focus on specific areas such as news, law, or even shopping. By specializing in a specific area, these search engines answer queries with many pages that traditional search engines would miss.

It’s also important to pay close attention to the source of any information you find on the internet. For example, if you were looking up facts on ancient Egypt, a website created by National Geographic Magazine will be more reliable than a person’s opinion on ancient Egypt or their latest visit to the pyramids. Also make sure to look up multiple sources so you know which facts are correct.

Lesson 9: Connecting to a Wireless Network

Wireless devices are technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, and notebook computers that do not need to be plugged in with a network cable to access the internet. These types of devices connect to the internet either using a cellular service, often referred to as an LTE connection, or through Wi-Fi at home or in a store.

Wi-Fi is a wireless network that connects computers, tablets, mobile phones, and other devices to the internet. LTE, short for Long Term Evolution, is a type of cell phone service that lets you connect to the internet—for example, to download a game, watch a show, or listen to music—without having to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

The speed at which you connect can vary greatly depending on how close you are to the network antennae or other factors that can interfere with the signal (like walls). Many LTE cellular connections may charge a fee for how much bandwidth you use.