An Introduction to the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) Part 1: The Internet Principles, History and Communicational Applications

This paper takes a fundamental look at the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). The main purpose of this paper has been to provide a general overview on the Internet, it's academic applications, and to introduce the state-of-the-art of the information technology used on the Internet, being the WWW.The first part of this paper, published in this issue of the Journal of Medical Sciences of Modarres, includes: the principles, history, and communicational applications of the Internet. The set of technologies led to the development of the Internet has briefly been explained, with an eye to educating the academic users as to the basic knowledge required to use the Internt effectively. In this regard the Internet structure, protocols, attractions and benefits, and access levels have been described. Then the main applications of the Internet have been outlined and it's communicational application including: the electronic mail (e-mail). theInternetaddresses.mailing lists or list servers, and the newsgroups have been explained.The second part of this paper will be published in the next issue of this journal. In the second part, the applications of the Internet from the information point of view will be explained. In this regard, different server technologies prior to the development of the WWW will be explained. Then the Web server technology, access, and protocols will be explained in detail, as examples of distributed multi-database systems. These systems are the building blocks of evolving telematic architectures, which place the information close to where the users has the most need for data. Regarding this, the three key components of the WWW including the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) will be introduced and some practical examples will be presented.This paper has been accomplished by referring to the references mentioned at the end of this paper [1-12], to which the reader is referred to for more information.