The word internet—or simply the “net” to its friends—is with us largely (although not entirely) thanks to the United States Department of Defense.
It all began in 1969, with the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, which linked together four separate networks of small computers at four different sites in America. It was, in effect, a network of networks, connected to each other thanks to a new protocol for data exchange known as “packet switching.”
Thus arose the notion of calling this set-up an “inter-network”—a term that seems to have appeared first in its contracted form, “internet,” in a 1974 document outlining the specifications of the system written by Vint Cerf, one of that handful of American computer scientists honored today with the title “the fathers of the internet.”109
An interesting footnote to the word itself is the question of whether the initial i of internet should be capitalized or not. The argument for capitalization rests on the point that there is only one internet, representing the interconnected mass of every sub-network in the world operating according to the Internet Protocol (IP) that Cerf helped draw up.
Back in the 1990s, the capitalized form of internet tended to be used by most official publications, from newspapers to researchers. Today, though, the balance has shifted the other way. The argument against capitalization is that, essentially, the word is now so common that it’s absurd to treat it like a proper noun, especially when most people think of themselves not so much as users of a monolithic internet as users of distinct internet-based services, from email to social networks.
Alongside the net, perhaps the most universal term in digital use today is the “web”—a shortened form of “world wide web.” A far younger beast than the internet, both the web itself and the word describing it exist thanks to just a handful of people employed in the late 1980s at CERN, the European Institute for Nuclear Research.
Chief among these was Tim Berners-Lee, whose March 1989 proposals for “a large hypertext database with typed links” provided the basis of the system he and his collaborator Robert Cailliau subsequently launched publicly in August 1991. As Berners-Lee explains in his book Weaving the Web, it was nearly called something very different.
Alternative names under consideration included The Information Mine (rejected because the acronym TIM spelled out Berners-Lee’s first name) and the Mine Of Information (rejected because its acronym, MOI, was also the French word for “me”). The Information Mesh, another potential name, was turned down because it sounded too much like “mess.” And so the phrase World Wide Web won out, thanks to its stress on what Berners-Lee described as his brainchild’s “decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything.”110
In “www,” too, it offered a unique and memorable acronym—whose nine syllables make it the most time-consuming three-letter spoken combination it’s possible to create in English, as well as one of the few acronyms that actually takes longer to pronounce than the phrase it is “short” for.