New Wonder No. 5: The Internet

Nov. 15, 2006 — -- "Good Morning America" and a group of experts have chosen the fifth new wonder: the Internet.

The Internet may be the most enigmatic "wonder" of all. It reaches across time and space, and connects people from faraway places. It is vast and sprawling, and yet it gives each person his own private window to the world.

In just a few short years -- and it really is still in its infancy -- the Internet has revolutionized everything from commerce to education to dating.

It may seem tangled, but the Internet and the World Wide Web (or simply the Web) are related but distinct.

The Internet is a global, public network of computers obeying the same rules -- thus the information superhighway analogy. It is physically made up of cables and satellites, and has many uses, including e-mail, online chats and -- the most popular -- the Web.

The World Wide Web is a collection of browsers, links and Web sites -- metaphoric destinations on the Internet superhighway. Simply put, the Web is accessed via the Internet.

The first inkling of the Internet was a 1960s government project called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which connected four Department of Defense computers in the event of nuclear attack.

We might have been researching on the Intermesh or The Information Mine (TIM) if the father of the Internet had stuck to his first instincts.

Instead, on Aug. 6, 1991, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee posted the existence of the "WorldWideWeb (WWW) project," despite his wife and colleagues' warnings that the name was "really stupid" since "www" takes longer to say than "the World Wide Web." They had a point.

Berners-Lee's childhood influence came partly from Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Dial F for Frankenstein." He recalls that fictional creation as "crossing the critical threshold of [a] number of neurons," and reaching "the point where enough computers get connected together," so that the whole system "started to breathe, think, react autonomously."