If you ask a dozen people this question, you will get a dozen different answers, possibly all of them correct. The World Wide Web is so difficult to pin down because it exists on so many levels. On one hand is the physical Internet upon which the World Wide Web operates…What the web is. On the other is the more nebulous conceptual World Wide Web…What the Web does. To understand what the Web does, it is helpful to understand what the Web is . That is where you will start your exploration.

The Web has been remarkable in that its founders "self-documented" its birth and early development online. You will use resources located on the web. As you will see, several of these websites were actually created by the founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

I suggest that you start with the visualizations of the web found at the "Atlas of Cyberspace" link. You could literally spend all your free time for the next several weeks exploring the Internet and Web history links and still not exhaust them all so don’t feel obligated to look at everything. Just explore until you have a sense of the physical infrastructure underlying the Web and its birth and development. You can always return to this corner of the course website at a later date if you develop an interest in this aspect of the Web.

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