Introduction

Contents

Before 1990, the world wide Internet network was almost entirely unknown outside the universities and the corporate research departments. The common way of accessing the Internet was via command line interfaces such as telnet, ftp, or popular Unix mail user agents like elm, mush, pine, or rmail. The usual access to information was based on peer-to-peer email message exchange which made the every day information flow slow, unreliable, and tedious. The advent of the World Wide Web has revolutionised the information flow though the Internet from obsolete message passing to world wide Web page publication. Since then, the Internet has exploded to become an ubiquitous global infrastructure for publishing and exchange of (free) digital information.