It revealed how the ARPANET funded the ‘internetting’ project to find a way of linking different networks together into a ‘network of networks’. This project and the development of the ‘open standard’ protocols such as TCP/IP that allowed the spread of the Internet itself lasted from 1973 until 1983. These first sections were structured around the set book “Where Wizards Stay up Late” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

Supplementary material, provided on extra pages of the T171 web site, took up where the book finished. This covered the initial invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva in 1979 and its phenomenal growth due to the development of graphical browser programs in 1993. Other topics covered included Usenet News and the Open Source Movement.

Exercises were once again aimed at enhancing student study skills including maintaining our HTML study diaries, searching the Web intelligently, assessing the quality and reliability of information, coping with information overload, designing web pages, considering the question of usability and creating a small web site. I was familiar with most of these.

Module 3 explained the history of the conception, design and construction of the network, giving us a general understanding of how the underlying technology worked. We also considered the network’s significance, its power and its potential through an appreciation of the distinctive culture that has developed around the Internet.