Reading this thread reminded me of a question that’s been bugging me for ages. I’ve always assumed that the Internet and the World Wide Web are one and the same, but apparently that’s not true. So…what, exactly, is the difference? (And more to the point…why is the difference?)
I get the impression that WWW is everything done by HTTP, and the Internet that and everything else combined. But that’s just a WAG…
J.E.T.
Taken from this site:
The World Wide Web is all users and resources on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
The Internet is a worldwide system of computer networks - a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers).
Pretty much. The internet is the actual worldwide network of wires and servers and routers and all that. The world wide web is just the http part of that. For example, when you use FTP or Telnet, you are using the internet, but not the world wide web. Email is sent across the internet as well.
The Internet is a network of computer networks connected around the world by high-speed phone lines. It is, therefore, a physical thing.
You could go to your local Internet provider and kick their piece of the Internet. You could try to find the secret high-speed phone lines that connect their computer servers to each other and kick them too. It is physical.
The World Wide Web refers to a kind of “service” that runs on this physical network. E-mail is another kind of “service”. Napster is another. Usenet (newsgroups) is another. FTP is another. ICQ is another. IRC is another. These “services” exist in the computers which form the network. You can’t kick them. They aren’t physical.
So the Internet is a network of networks. It is physical. The Web et al is not physical.
It’s sort of like the difference between your (physical) computer and Microsoft Word. When word processing was all that was done on computers, everyone assumed that a computer was “the same” as its most prominent program. The same kind of confusion exists regarding the Internet and it’s most common “service” - the Web.
But it’s a good WAG 
Yeah, the Internet is lots of computers joined together, using TCP/IP to talk.
On this framework, you can use things like email, FTP, telnet, gopher (still in use?), IRC, Usenet and (of course) the Web.
The Web is just one more thing you can use the net for, but it’s almost certainly the easiest to use - you don’t need to know much except how to click a link - so you can see why it’s become so popular.
Because of its ease of use it now has equivelents for most of the other things it was used for pre-web days.
IRC -> Chatrooms
Usenet -> Message Boards, such as this one
Email -> Probably mostly web based these days anyway
I’ll leave you with a quote (note the date):
To elaborate on JuanitaTech’s answer, the Web, more or less, is the collection of all the hyperlinked web pages on the Internet. A web page is something served by a server using the HTTP protocol, and is normally displayed with a web browser. The HTTP protocol includes methods for hyperlink from one page to another, displaying text, graphics, etc.
The Internet itself is the giant TCP/IP network that connects millions of computers around the world. HTTP is one of many protocols that are carried by the Internet. Others include email (SMTP protocol), file transfer (FTP), remote login (telnet, etc.), Usenet news (NNTP, IIRC), and various other miscellaneous services (ping, network time, etc.). These Internet services existed long before HTTP and web pages.
Arjuna34
As a couple of other people have suggested, the Internet as a whole predates the World Wide Web by eons in computer-time; early versions of the 'net as we know it were functioning in the late 60s/early 70s, albeit only to a few select research universities and government sites. The Web, however, did not come about until the creation of Mosaic, the first graphical browser, which IIRC was sometime in the early 90s.
[old fart]Why, back when I first started using the net, there WEREN’T no pretty pictures! And you had to do everything at command-line prompts, using clunky programs like gopher and WAIS…kids today…[/old fart]
It’s always been my understanding that the Internet is more of an idea than a physical thing: that it doesn’t really exist at all: that it’s really just a metaphor for the fact that, suddenly, one day, someone realized that all these phone lines all over the world could be used–were being used–for computers to communicate with each other.
And not even that “one day, someone realized” it–just that it gradually came into being as the computers and phone lines of the world became more ubiqitous and better at communicating with each other.
How far off is this?
Well, lissener, it’s sort of accurate and sort of not. The first packet-switching networks were of course made by ARPA, and when this technology became more or less public, people started connecting Usenet servers together via UUCP. UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Protocol) was not real-time. Peer machines called each other with regular modems every few hours (or sometimes days) to swap email and Usenet news. Later, when leased lines became less expensive (and there was more interest) computers became connected together in real-time via TCP/IP. People made networks this way. Then they got the great idea to join their networks.
They realized chaos would soon ensue, so standards bodies like IETF, which maintains the official protocol standards for Internet services, routing, etc.
Later, the Domain Name System and IP routing tables were standardized through ICANN. ICANN oversees the assignment of IP address space on the public Internet to prevent chaos. At this point, the “bunch of connected networks” could be said to be “one big Internet.”
Of course, that point is not discrete. It was a gradual shift. There are still legacy things out there; I think FidoNet still exists, for example. And then there are the large Internet-connected BBSs, like AOL.
I just want to say that the OP gave me a twinge of nostalgia for the days when newbies would ask “What’s the difference between Usenet and the internet? Aren’t they the same thing?” and they would be flamed to a fine powder for their newbieness.