The first studies on the creation of a huge communication network between computers began in 1962. At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union measured forces to see who was the strongest power on the planet, and the Americans were researching a form of military communication that was immune to bombing and other types of attack.
In 1969, ARPA – the acronym for Advanced Research and Projects Agency – an agency linked to the Pentagon, connected computers at four American universities. This system became known as Arpanet and, with its development, it was possible to establish international connections between the United States and universities in England and Norway in 1973.
Until then, acronyms such as “http” and “www” had not yet entered this story. They began to be used in the late 1980s.
In 1989, the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, from the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, in Switzerland, proposed the creation of a new system of communication between computers. He suggested the use of hypertext, a format for organizing information in which text and image were interconnected, in which it was possible to consult data cited in other documents related to the same subject.
By standardizing this type of communication between several computers, Berners-Lee created the famous “http”, the abbreviation of “hypertext transfer protocol” (“hypertext transfer protocol”). Right into the early 1990s, Lee continued to develop his system, but with the aim of spreading it around the world – an idea that, as you can see, ended up really catching on.
Thus was born the “www”, an abbreviation of world wide web, something like a “worldwide network”, through which this information would circulate in hypertext format. The Internet was ready to become popular – a task made easier by the emergence of special programs for browsing the network, such as Netscape (1994) and Internet Explorer (1995).
decrypted address
The salad of letters that lead to a website even indicates the type of entity that created it:
1 – hypertext transfer protocol (“hypertext transfer protocol”) is the expression behind the acronym “http”. It indicates the standard adopted to organize information (in hypertext) that circulates between computers.
2 – The abbreviation “www” is the abbreviation of world wide web (“global network”), a system created to distribute this information organized in hypertext worldwide. Its use in a website address is not mandatory.
3 – The word “site” is the so-called domain, that is, the name or trade mark of the institution that maintains it on the network. This is the main part of an email address, helping to differentiate from each other.
4 – The “com” is an acronym used to indicate the type of organization that has the website. In this case, a commercial organization. There are other acronyms, such as “edu” (educational entities), “org” (non-profit organization) and “gov” (governmental).
5 – Finally comes the identification of the country to which the domain belongs. This “br” shows that it is a website from Brazil; France is “fr”; Argentina is “air” and so on. Only the United States does not use this identification, because, in the beginning, there was only internet there.