Ceruzzi

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”

As he saw the growing amounts of data on the Internet, Berners-Lee explored a way of porting those concepts to the online world. His invention had three basic components. The first was a uniform resource locator (URL), which took a computer to any location on the Internet—across the globe, down the hall, or even on one’s own hard drive—with equal facility—a “flat” access device. The second was a protocol, called hypertext transfer protocol (http), which rode on top of the Internet protocols and facilitated the exchange of files from a variety of sources, regardless of the machines they were residing on. The third was a simple hypertext markup language (HTML), a subset of a formatting language already in use on IBM mainframes. That HTML was simple to learn made it easy for novices to build Web pages.