zmj wrote "It didn't start out that way. "

What he said. 'www' is redundant, but very useful for humans trying to coordinate usage on computers.

If you're managing several dozen or several hundred computers (not at all uncommon), it's easier to track things if you give them names that relate to their function. So, we can have www.wordsmith.org or mail.wordsmith.org or ftp.wordsmith.org. That's probably a bit of overcomplicated for Anu's situation. But for, say, a university or a large corporation, it can be a big deal.

Computers can also have aliases. So, for example, I frequently use a computer called jaguar - just 'jaguar' - even though internally it's got some funky name the computer service people gave it that identifies what department owns it and a unique id that they can cross-reference to figure out where it is.