The computers in your office are office are conencted together, which are in turn connected to MITnet, which is turn connected to NEARnet (which stands for New England Advanced Research net), which is, in turn connected to the Internet backbone. This backbone used to be maintained by the Federal government, and now it is maintained by a coalition of businesses.
Data is transferred from one computer to another through gateways and routers using "Transmission Protcols". You may have heard the term tcp/ip. It stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. This is a standard that was developed in the late eighties. Your computer can talk to itself and computers just like it in whatever language it likes. To travel over the networks however, the data is bundled into packets determined by the tcp/ip protocol and shipped over the networks. The job of modems and various peices of software is to "unbundle" these packets so you computer can read them.
The Internet is very large. Estimates vary but are on the order of four million hosts.
OK, so how does the World Wide Web come in?
The World Wide Web is not a separate network. The pages you see are files, much like any other on your computer. The difference between Web pages and other and say Text files is that they are segregated from other files on a computer in order and madein a special directory which allows them to be publicaaly accessed. Additionally, they are formatted using a special markup language which displays them graphically when you download them using a Web browser.
Browser, Pages, URL, http, html Hypertext is what makes the Web unique. Within Web pages you have links to any other page, anywhere on the net. This makes it a very powerful tool for organizing information. To learn more about the Web see