The Internet

Intial Creation

The Internet was created during the 1960's. Contrary to what he claims, Al Gore did not create the Internet. Neither did Microsoft. The Internet was actually created by many different people and it slowly evolved to what we have today. And yes, Al Gore did in fact claim he created the Internet. Here is his exact quote:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.It was not until the World Wide Web came out that the Internet was really used by more than a few enthusiasts and those in banks, universities, and the government.

World Wide Web

Throughout the history of the Internet, many people tried (and ultimately failed) to create a decent system of organizing information. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, managed this with the creation of the “WorldWideWeb.” The World Wide Web (henceforth WWW), as it is called today, is a system of retrieving information. Programs that are used to access the WWW are called web browsers. Some of the first web browsers include Lynx, Mosaic, and Netscape. The most common web browsers today are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Opera has the distinction of being available on a large variety of platforms, including cell phones (Opera Mini), game systems (a version of Opera is available for Nintendo's DS and Wii), and multiple operating system on standard PCs.

The aforementioned Mosaic and Netscape web browsers brought about a large change in the World Wide Web.mi Before Mosaic was created in the mid-nineties, the WWW was mostly text based. There were no graphics available. Also, The WWW was restricted mainly to Unix and Unix-like platforms, such as the environment that Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first client application for the WWW for. Mosaic brought graphics to the web, as well as support for the Windows and Macintosh platforms. Netscape continued this innovation for the most part. After Mosaic was made by the National Center for Supercomputers, there began to be problems. These problems led to no further development of the Mosaic software. Thus, Netscape was founded with many developers that had worked on the old Mosaic. Netscape Navigator was able to make the ideas of Mosaic work even better. Two modern web browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, started from Mosaic as well—Internet Explorer started off from Mosaic code directly and Firefox started off from Netscape code.

The WWW has exploded with popularity in its short history. Acording to analytics website Netcraft, in April 2008 there were 165 million distinct web sites. The number may even be much larger.