We learnt something of its history, how during the cold war with the USSR, the US defence department set up a research foundation called ARPA (advanced research project agency) to look into all kinds of research. One of these projects was a network to connect the ARPA funded laboratories, this was called ARPANET. The main architects of this were JCR Licklider, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts. As successful as this was the military needed it to be a survivable network. Paul Baran from Rand designed a distributed network were each link connects with lots other links.

The analogue system was not up to the task of successfully transmitting data across this network. Paul Baran and Donald Watts Davies came up with a digital system of chopping data into sections (called packet switching).

The laboratories in the different universities all had differing computer systems so a set of protocols (rules governing communication) had to be established; these were agreed by the online community. This way of working is referred to as open source.
The people using this system were academics and most of the information was of a technical nature. Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear Research) wanted to make this information more accessible across networks and to be able to have live links that could be changed. So he designed what became the World Wide Web.
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina programmed a browser called Mosaic that brought the web to the masses.
 
 

References.

• Naughton, J. (1999) A Brief History of the Future, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

• Herman C. Taylor E. Robinson L. (2002) T171 Module 2 [online] The Open University. Available from:   http://t171.open.ac.uk/t171/module2 [Accessed 25 September 2002]