This one is really interesting. If you look at old networking documents and standards, an “internet” (lowercase) is defined as a “network of networks”. This could be something as simple as IP subnets across a university campus coming together at a central router or as big as a telecommunications company’s mesh of leased lines.
At the time, there were lots and lots of “internets” around the world, both large and small, private and commercial. Some of the more well known ones include ARPANET, Telenet and Tymnet.
There were also many application-specific networks that were designed to be protocol-agnostic, supporting transport over a wide variety of different and mutually-incompatible networking technologies. Like the global e-mail system (it wasn’t always just SMTP - go read through the full set of configuration options for sendmail to realize how deep that rabbit-hole goes) and Usenet, which was used for global community messaging.
Today, with TCP/IP having taken over pretty much all networking technologies and just about every network of non-trivial size having connectivity to every other network of non-trivial size, the global collection of “internets” has coalesced into a single “network of internets”, which I am perfectly happy rendering as a capital-I “Internet”.
I do capitalize “Web” when referring to the World Wide Web.
It’s interesting how the WWW seems to have become synonymous with the Internet, despite the Internet being much older.
A bit of trivia: evidently, people in the radio and TV industries informally referred to the broadcast networks as “the webs” decades before the birth of computer networks.
Now if only I knew why it’s web* page but website, I wouldn’t have to go look it up all the time. For some odd reason, I just can’t get myself to remember which one is spelled which way.
*) I’ll stick with Oxford here and use lowercase web page but then capitalize when referring to the Web as in the WWW.
Same here. Autocorrect is fine with both. But Oxford claims that while website is OK, web page has to remain separate.
I personally don’t have strong feelings either way, but if there were some kind of logic behind that it would help me remember which one to use without having to go look it up.
In some hypothetical future, when we have colonies on other planets, I could easily see each planet having its own planetary network, with some kind of data transmission system for inter-planetary traffic.
When that happens, I predict that we’ll have proper names for the planetary networks (maybe Earthnet, Marsnet, etc.) and “The Internet” will be redefined (initially informally, later formally) to represent the über-network that includes each planet’s network and the inter-planetary links that join them.
