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Authors: Patricia Ball Jenna Farnham Sean Iraca |
 Once in a while, an invention becomes an innovation. Its introduction causes a fundamental change in the way that we view our world, and other inventions accrete around it. The Internet is such an innovation; its seemingly-humble beginning as a scheme for a decentralized network enabled the development of a suite of transfer protocols, which in turn paved the way for hypertext, the browser, and an explosion of new ideas. These four great ideas--decentralized networking, TCP/IP, hypertext, and the World Wide Web--lie at the heart of the Internet's operation. Understanding these concepts will help make the nebulous idea of "the Internet" more concrete, and may open the door to deeper inquiry about the workings of computers in general.
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