The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks.  Originally known as ARPAnet, this network was developed in 1969 by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a secure method of exchanging military research data among mainframe computers at universities and military bases in California and Utah.

Today, the Internet is a rapidly growing international network that allows computer users throughout the world to search for and exchange information related to nearly every imaginable topic. Anyone with a computer can use the Internet to search through billions of files stored on millions of computers.
The information available on the Internet includes research documents, news reports, advertisements, stock market quotes, state and federal government resources, weather forecasts, local movie listings, auto dealers’ inventories, restaurant menus, photographs, audio and video clips — if a piece of information exists in print, on film, on videotape or as a computer file, it is probably available via the Internet. Much of the information on the Internet is available free of charge; however, a rapidly increasing number of businesses are using the Internet to sell products and services ranging from auto parts to guided tours of Zanzibar.

In the early years of the Internet, the information and services available via the Internet could only be located by means of a collection of rather arcane utilities and services with such as Gopher, Veronica, Archie, and Jughead.  Today, the World Wide Web is the Internet navigation system used by most travelers of the “Information Super Highway.”

Q. What is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web was developed by physicists at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The Web is a highly interactive, graphics based environment that enables you to locate, view, and download information from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents that are stored on Web servers throughout the world. HTML documents, also known as Web pages, can contain text, pictures, sound clips, video clips, and links to other Web pages.

Each Web page has a unique address, known as its Uniform Resource Locator address (URL).  For example the URL for the University of Iowa Health Care home page is: http://www.uihealthcare.org