The Internet consists of thousands of local computer networks at businesses and educational institutions world-wide. Each local network includes resources for which access is restricted; for example, only Harvard students and faculty may log into "fas."

But many local networks do offer limited resources to users on the Internet at large. Harvard students can access host computers at Stanford and download programs from their public software libraries. Likewise, anyone on the Internet can use "gopher" to peruse Harvard's course catalogs.

For veterans of cyberspace who know how to access this information effectively, a wealth of knowledge is at their fingertips.

But most computer users find it difficult to navigate through the Internet using the traditional tools.

There are several reasons behind this difficulty.

First, the text-based nature of most Internet tools is a limiting factor. Often, a user needs to access visual or aural information, and this becomes tedious when the primary navigation tools offer no graphics, no sound, just text.

Second, few tools share a common interface, and nearly all tools use arcane commands and sport non-intuitive names like "archie" (named after the comic book character) and "gopher" (named for the mascot of the Minnesota school at which it was created).

Third, the sheer volume of publicly accessible information on the Internet makes it easy for users to suffer from "information overload." Never before has a medium existed with so much data, so immediately obtainable. Most means of accessing the Internet do not moderate the flow of information between computer and user.

The designers of the Web saw these problems as they began what has now been dubbed the "World Wide Web Initiative."

The World Wide Web is built around the concept that the Internet is essentially a "web" of information. As explained by its developers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, the Web "is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge...it has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions."

What this means is that the Web is simply the Internet with a standardized user interface; the new "protocols and conventions" are what distinguish the Web from all previous attempts at navigating the Internet.

The Web is an easy-to-use way of interacting with and navigating the Internet, and this is why it is so popular with students.

"I think that the Web is a lot more intuitive than most other Internet tools because of its rather simple interface--users can point and click," says Janet E. Rosenbaum '98.

"It's a lot easier for people who are unfamiliar with UNIX to use these tools," Rosenbaum says. "I think that the Web offers the largest such potential of any tool."

Gwertzman says the main advantage of the Web is its simple interface.