Ever see a picture of the Milky Way galaxy? (That's our galaxy, by the way). It's a massive collection of stars and planets and all kinds of cool things. And there's always new things popping up here and there (like nebulas) and other things disappearing here and there (like stars). It's all very fluid. And it's so big you'd think that it must encompass everything there is. I mean, the Milky Way contains something like 200 to 400 billion stars and is about 100,000 light years across (meaning if you were jetting at the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to go from coast to coast). But at one time, the Milky Way was really tiny -- it's just expanded a lot since then. That's what the World Wide Web is like. Back in 1989, the Web was only about 50 people sharing webpages using an agreed up method called HyperText Transfer Protocol (that's what "http" stands for at the beginning of web addresses). Only 50 people? That's really tiny. From there it grew into the massive collection of webpages and Portable Document Files (PDFs) and Flash resources and QuickTime video and audio files and Zip files and all the other things that are stored on the thousands of computers (called servers) connected to the Internet. And there's always new resources being uploaded onto new servers, while other resources and other servers disappear. It's all very fluid. And it's big. As I'm writing this, the search engine Google has searched through 8,058,044,651 webpages just so it can tell you where you can find a free greeting card website or all natural toothpaste. As for how many people are using the Web, nobody knows for sure, but whatever the number, it's growing by leaps and bounds. Still the Web is only a subset of the Internet, just one part of the whole (albeit the largest part). And that's why the World Wide Web is like the Milky Way galaxy. |
