Although the roots of the Internet can be dated as far back as the ARPANET project of the 1960s and email to the early 1970s, the World Wide Web is what made these technologies really useful and readily available to the general public.

The World Wide Web is the set of standards and protocols which allows the machines connected by the internet to effectively communicate and exchange information with one another. This means that the information stored on an internet server anywhere in the world can then be corectly interpreted by your computer.

The internet is simply a network of interconnected computers, not necessarily able to communicate directly with one another. It was not until 1989, when the World Wide Web project was begun, that a system was put into place that allowed the different interconnected machines to "speak" a common language.

The World Wide Web project was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who at the time was working at CERN- a large nuclear research facility. He found that lots of information he needed was kept on hundreds of different computers. Although they were all within the same CERN facility, they used many different systems- which meant that to access information on them all, you had to learn lots of different programming languages.

The goal of the World Wide Web project was to cut out this unnecessary complication and have a system where the information that is stored on the network of interconnected machines could be shared in such a way that it was all accessible from a single machine, regardless of what sort of machine you were using, what operating system it was running and what software you wished to use.