The Internet is a conglomerate of networks in the world of millions of computers connected by the Internet Protocol that allows access to information and all kinds of data transfer. The Internet is the principal of the new information and communication technologies (NTICs). Contrary to what you usually think the Internet is not synonymous with World Wide Web This is part of that, the World Wide Web, using hypermedia in basic training, one of the many services offered on the Internet. According data from March 2007, the Internet is used by 16.9% of the world's population (around 1.1 billion people).

To understand the concept of what is to be the Internet, the global network of computers, you should return to the 1960s and 1970s to understand how she became one of the most popular means of communication. It emerged during the period when the cold war hovered in the air between the two major powers of the time, the United States and former Soviet Union.

The U.S. government wanted to develop a system for their military computers could exchange information among themselves, a military base to another. It then emerged that the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, a project initiated by the Department of Defense of the United States then took the interconnection of computers through a system known as package switching, which is a diagram of data transmission in network of computers in which information is divided into small "packets", which in turn contains words of data, the recipient address and information to the reassembly of the original message.

This system guarantees the integrity of the information if a network of connections suffered an enemy attack, as the traffic it could be automatically routed to other connections. The curious thing is that the network rarely has any enemy attack. In 1991, during the Gulf War, ensured that this system really worked, because of the difficulty the United States to overthrow the system of command in Iraq, which used the same system.

The success of the ARPANET was created by both the networks were now focused on the area of scientific research in universities. With this, the ARPANET started to have difficulties in managing this whole system because of the large and growing number of university places in it. It is then divided it into two groups [2], the MILNET, which have the locations and the new military ARPANET, which had the non-military locations. A technical scheme called Internet Protocol (Internet Protocol) enabled traffic information to be walked from one network to another.

All networks connected by IP address on the Internet to communicate is that all can exchange messages. Through the National Science Foundation, the U.S. government invested in creating backbones (which means backbone, in Portuguese), powerful computers that are connected by lines that have the ability to flow to large flows of data, such as fiber channel optics, satellite links and links of radio transmission. In addition to these backbones, there are those developed by private companies. The smaller networks they are connected, more or less anarchic. It is basically what is the Internet, that does not have a specific owner.

What form the Internet today, began in 1969 as the ARPANET, created by ARPA, acronym for Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Agency Advanced Research Projects, a division of the Department of Defense United States. It was created for war, because with this promising network, the valuable data from the government of that country would be scattered in several places rather than centralized in one server. This would avoid the loss of data if, for example, a bomb exploded on campus. Then it was used initially by the universities, where students could change so fast for that time, the results of their studies and research. In January 1983, the ARPANET changed its protocol from NCP to TCP / IP. In 1985 comes the FTP.

However, the Internet as we know today, with its interactivity, and framework of interconnected networks of computers and multimedia content is only made possible by the contribution of the scientist Tim Berners-Lee and CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche nucléaire - European Center for Nuclear Research, which created the World Wide Web, initially linking scientific research systems and later academic, linking universities, the collective network gained a greater public disclosure from the 1990s. In August 1991, Berners-Lee published his new project for the World Wide Web, two years after you start creating the HTML, HTTP and the first few Web pages at CERN in Switzerland. In 1993 the Mosaic browser was released 1.0, and at the end of 1994 had the public interest in the Internet. In 1996 the word Internet was already in common use, especially in developed countries, referring to most of the time the WWW.