Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
Although I progressed from my childhood into my teens in the 90s, l don’t retain much memory of the internet back then as l had no exposure to it.
Biggest change was there use to be more internet than web.
What does this mean ?
People used other protocols to communicate on the internet (FTP, Gopher, Usenet, telnet, etc…). The web (http) came later, and grew pretty slowly in the beginning, though some were smart enough to see where the web was headed and started domain squatting from get go.
FTP was in its heyday for obtaining files. Usenet was the place to be for grouped content.
Old Gopher information services were mostly dead by '99 but there were still a few holdouts.
E-mail in actual mail clients reigned supreme.
Also, depending of what you think of as “web” these days, most old web stuff was basically just nice-looking text with graphics thrown in and maybe a little JavaScript here and there, not full blown interactive experiences and applications like we have now.
I remember Gmail being revolutionary for being able to load new content without reloading the whole page. Also a lot of people thought it was fake because 1gb of storage was a ridiculous amount - hot mail offered lined 5mb total or something at the time. And that was a few years after 2000
The world wide web isn’t the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of computer networks, allowing your home network to INTERcommunicate (pls be a word so I don’t look stupid) with your ISP’s NETwork and in turn a globally interconnected network of computers. The world wide web is specifically a type of thing communicated over the internet. Don’t 100% remember what counts as a webpage but I’m going to guess the wikipedia url and if I got it right then I’ll have saved you looking it up yourself. IIRC it’s just meant to be human-readable HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML) pages that you can view in your browser without having to download a file to your computer. Downloading a file is something you might do on an FileTransportProtocol website (ftp.example.com vs www.example.com).
The thing is, after everything I’ve said, it basically doesn’t matter because in case you haven’t noticed, lots of, if not most, websites omit the www. subdomain from their url. The reason for this is just because almost everyone who used the internet only cares about the web. Only very specific domains and users will communicate using an ftp, imap, git, etc subdomain. Not to say these types of sites and protocols aren’t widely used, just that for eg imap, you’re much more likely to go to a website like gmail.com, outlook.com, proton.me, etc (all of which are websites but ommit the www.) and then you will access the imap part of those sites via the website.
The only part of this comment that I’m reasonably confident I didn’t get wrong is how little the difference between internet and web matters today, because almost every single time I went to talk about a non www site, I started writing “website” (instead of domain, site, url etc) and had to delete it to write something else instead.
Did you mean this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb ?
Probably a reference to there being more than just HTTP. There was protocols like Gopher and tech like Usenet which were kinda precursors to HTTP and the WWW for information sharing/reading/communicating.