Introduction to information systems T. Cornford, M. Shaikh is1 060 2013

4.6.2 The internet and the world wide web
Reading activity
Read Chapter 7 of Laudon and Laudon (2013) and Chapters 5 and 6 of Curtis and 
Cobham (2008).
The internet came about through academic and military projects in 
the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s it mushroomed, becoming a great 
network of networks that spans the globe and provides services to the 
largest multinational corporation as well as to individual people. The 
internet is used to communicate – as in email or chat programs, to move 
data and files around – as well as to publish information to a worldwide 
community. The internet manages to operate around the world through 
the standard adoption of certain rules and protocols for addressing 
and passing messages. The principal such standard is known as TCP/IP 
(transmission control protocol/internet protocol). Access to the internet is 
usually made via an internet service provider (ISP), which is often part of 
a telecommunications or media company. 
The basis of the universal and worldwide acceptance of the internet as 
the basis for digital communication has been the establishment of certain 
standard protocols (rules and conventions) for exchanging data. We have 
already briefly discussed the two main protocols that are at the heart of 
the internet – TCP, the transmission control protocol that ensures data is 
sent completely from one point to another, and IP – the internet protocol 
that ensures that each individual packet of data is routed through the 
internet to the right destination. There are a number of other protocols 
that are in common use, for example for the world wide web HTTP – 
hyper text transfer protocol, which allows web pages to be located and 
retrieved. 
From a user’s point of view, the main technologies they see as they use the 
internet are perhaps an email client, which prepares, sends and receives 
messages, and a browser program such as Firefox, Chrome or Internet 
Explorer, through which they navigate around the world wide web. Other 
applications could include instant messaging, file transfer or voice over IP 
telephony (e.g. Skype).
To find information, world wide web users usually need to access some 
kind of search engine such as Google or Bing to provide a list of relevant 
sites based on some key words. If and when a user wishes to trust the 
internet with sensitive information – for example, to send a credit card 
number to a company – then a user may need to become aware of the 
various means of securing information, such as encryption and the 
protocols that secure servers use such as HTTPS; a protocol enabling the 
secured transmission of web pages. Finally, when we come to publish our 
own information, we will need to master the simple language used to 
prepare web pages – HTML (hypertext mark-up language).
The existence of the internet has also given rise to new areas of business, 
including ISPs, and the vast range of old and new companies ‘do business’ 
over the internet – so called e-commerce. As one example, Amazon 
has pioneered selling books over the internet. Likewise, airlines now 

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IS1060 Introduction to information systems
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sell tickets over the net, and most banks offer ‘online’ banking services. 
Other types of organisation also use the internet – for example, most 
governments around the world now publish much of their material on 
the web and allow all manner of transactions to be processed by citizens 
directly – what is commonly known as e-government.