You have it backwards the web preceded the Internet - don't remember ARPNET, PLATO and the rest? - long before there was the Internet.
(I did so love phoenix 3)
Bob,
I beg to differ. Particularly since I used the Internet extensively before 1989 and provided commercial access to the Internet shortly after the World Wide Web was created and long before there was any commercial use of it. Lets look at some easy to understand dates shall we:
The term "internet" was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675:[20] Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as an abbreviation of the term internetworking and the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was any network using TCP/IP. It was around the time when ARPANET was interlinked with NSFNet in the late 1980s, that the term was used as the name of the network, Internet,[21] being a large and global TCP/IP network.
The key date there is 1974. I will let you stretch it out to late 1980s.
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without bottlenecks. [citation needed]
One of the most promising user interface paradigms during this period was hypertext. The technology had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex"[45] and developed through Ted Nelson's research on Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS.[46] Many small self-contained hypertext systems had been created before, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard. Gopher became the first commonly-used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way.
This NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server.
In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee invented a network-based implementation of the hypertext concept. By releasing his invention to public use, he ensured the technology would become widespread.[47] For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium technology prize in 2004. One early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard, was ViolaWWW.
A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction[48] of the Mosaic web browser[49] in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill.[50] Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular than Gopher, which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet. (Gore's reference to his role in "creating the Internet", however, was ridiculed in his presidential election campaign. See the full article Al Gore and information technology).
On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project.
Key dates here are 1989 and 1993. And of course 1991, the most important date.
1974 (Internet term coined) Late 1980s (Period of time ARPANET and NFSNET were joined)
Are both before:
1989 (WWW Conceived), 1991 (WWW Spec Made Public) and 1993 (First Graphical Browser that 99.9999% of the planet connects with the WWW was created).
There is no conceivable way anyone can believe the World Wide Web pre-dates the RFCs for TCP/IP and/or the merging of ARPANET and NFSNET.
Quotes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Because they were convenient. I could easily find 1000 other first hand accounts with the same dates.