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weaving the web

The solution was to communicate indirectly over a network. The Internet is a network of networks. Its essence, though, is a set of standardized protocols—conventions by which computers send data to each other. The data are transmitted over various carriers, such as telephone lines, cable TV wires, and satellite channels. The data can be text, an e-mail message, a sound, an image, a software program—whatever. When a computer is ready to send its data, it uses special software to break the data into packets that will conform to two Internet protocols that govern how the packets will be shipped: IP (Internet Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). The software labels each packet with a unique number. It sends the packets out over the phone or cable wire, and the receiving computer uses its own Internet software to put them back together according to the labels.

The Internet was up and running by the 1970s, but transferring information was too much of a hassle for a noncomputer expert. One would run one program to connect to another computer, and then in conversation (in a different language) with the other computer, run a different program to access the information. Even when data had been transferred back to one's own computer, decoding it might be impossible.

Then electronic mail was invented. E-mail allowed messages to be sent from one person to another, but it did not form a space in which information could permanently exist and be referred to. Messages were transient. (When the World Wide Web arrived, riding on top of the Internet, it would give information a place to persist.)

CERN's lateness in adopting the Internet was surprising, because the laboratory had been very much on the leading edge of networking and telecommunications. It had developed CERNnet, its own home-brewed network, for lack of commercial networks. It had its own e-mail systems. And it was at the forefront of gatewaying between different proprietary mail and file systems.