According to Kaye and Medoff (2001), the Internet means "a global system of networked computers that share information, comprised of as many as 45,000 interconnected sub networks worldwide with no single owner" (p.144). They define WWW as "an Internet resource that presents information in text, graphic, video, and audio formats" (p.146).

Although the Internet is commonly thought of as a 1990s phenomenon, it was actually envisioned in the early 1960s. RAND Paul Baran of Rand Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the US Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the US were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counterattack (The History of the Internet). Baran released in August <On Distributed Communications> to marks the real birth of the Internet. In this paper, Baran proposes a computer network whose structure would imitate a complex natural system such as a coral reef. It must "have no central authority" and "be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters." Stanford University was one of a few sites of early Internet development where Vincent Cerf and his colleagues researched and developed the communication protocols that would later be used for transmitting information across the Internet. Cerf's pioneering contributions to network technology earned him the title, "Father of the Internet" (Time Computing: News and Features)

The first e-mail message was transmitted in 1972, and it immediately began to dominate network use as it still does today. E-mail also transformed and humanized the concept of networking. Where networking was once thought of as a computer-to-computer connection after e-mail it was considered a connection between one person and another (Johnson, 1999). The National Science Foundation (NSF) was eventually instrumental in designing an expanded network that became the basis of the Internet as it is known today - millions of computers worldwide connected via a vast network that consists of tens of thousands of interconnected sub networks with no signal owner(Kaye and Medoff, 2001).

While the Internet was in the later stage of development, in late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and a group of scientists in the European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) were developing a system for worldwide interconnectivity that later became known as the World Wide Web (WWW) (Kaye and Medoff, 2001). They said that the WWW "was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project" (Shiva, 1997, p.10). Berners-Lee's effort in Web development gave him the tile "Father of the World Wide Web" (Kaye and Medoff, 2001, p.3)".

1994 really was the year of new media. The world's First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. This event was heavily oversubscribed. It was attended by 400 users and developers, and was hailed as the . As 1994 progressed, Web stories got into all the media. By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 are commercial, and 10 million users. The technology of the Web is continually extended to cater for new needs. Security, authoring, multimedia, access by session and billing are the most important features now being added" (CERN, History and Growth). In 1996, nearly 10 million hosts online. The Internet covers the globe. Approximately 40 million people are connected to the Internet. More than $1 billion per year changes hands at Internet shopping malls, and Internet related companies like Netscape are the darlings of high-tech investors.

Users in almost 150 countries around the world are now connected to the Internet. The number of computer hosts approaches 10 million. Within 30 years, the Internet has grown from a Cold War concept for controlling the tattered remains of a post-nuclear society to the Information Superhighway. Just as the railroads of the 19th century enabled the Machine Age, and revolutionized the society of the time. The Internet took us into the Information Age, and profoundly affected the world in which we live. As a new generation grows up as accustomed to communicating through a keyboard as in person, life on the Internet will become an increasingly important part of life on Earth (Life on the Internet Timeline).