Chapter 1. Anatomy of a Website

We have a lot of ground to cover in this book, so let’s get to it. We’ll begin by reviewing in this lesson what the World Wide Web is and where it came from. Afterward we’ll take a look at some of the major components that make it work.

A Short History of the Web

In the late 1950s, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This was largely a response to the Russian success in launching the Sputnik satellite and employed some of the country’s top scientific intellects in research work with U.S. military applications.

During the 1960s, the agency created a decentralized computer network known as ARPAnet. This embryonic network initially linked four computers located at the University of ...

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