Tim Berners-Lee and his associates wrote the Internet standard RFC1738 to define the uniform
resource locator (URL) for use with HTTP (1994), and also wrote the Internet standard RFC1945 defining
revision 1.0 of HTTP (1996).
The WWW made the Internet useful to nontechnical people. Besides e-mail and file transfers, nontechnical
users could easily access a rapidly growing body of content made available very inexpensively by many
different providers. In 1995, the NSF turned the the NSFnet over to private organizations, and commercial use
of the Internet began.
HTTP remains at the heart of the WWW. It is a simple application-level protocol, which means that it
is a protocol used by programs at the application level. The TCP/IP protocols have no knowledge of HTTP or
of URLs. HTTP is simply a language understood by application programs, particularly web server and browser
applications. According to RFC1945, HTTP has ???the lightness and speed necessary for distributed, collaborative,
hypermedia information systems.???
134 NETWORKING [CHAP. 7
HTTP is a simple request/response protocol. When a web server program is listening for messages on port
80 of its computer, the server will respond to a HTTP request from a client computer.
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