To www or not?
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Not a daft question at all! 
One company/person may want to offer multiple services from the same domain name, say nikon.com. Now, back in the day they probably had different computers for those different services (website, email, ftp etc.), and so used different prefixes to point to these different computers.
Every domain name points to a unique IP address, which is akin to the 'telephone number' of a computer on the internet. So www.nikon.com might have the IP address 202.233.55.72, pointing to their web server computer. But mail.nikon.com points to 63.192.50.74, which is their email server.
That is the reason the www. prefix existed, and nowadays the main purpose of the internet is the world wide web, so it seems logical that no prefix should point towards the web server, as does the www. prefix.
To ensure that both the prefixed and non-prefixed versions can be used for a website, you need to make sure that both are pointing towards the IP address of the web server. This is done via DNS settings as Furtim has pointed out.
There are more details, but I think that gives an overview!
One thing to be aware of is that search engines are picky and they will probably see the two versions of your site as different websites altogether, which doesn't do the website ranking any good at all. To counter this you should really ensure that people trying to access the non-prefixed version get redirected to the same page on the prefixed version.
I know this was a bit long-winded but hope it helps clear things a bit.
One company/person may want to offer multiple services from the same domain name, say nikon.com. Now, back in the day they probably had different computers for those different services (website, email, ftp etc.), and so used different prefixes to point to these different computers.
Every domain name points to a unique IP address, which is akin to the 'telephone number' of a computer on the internet. So www.nikon.com might have the IP address 202.233.55.72, pointing to their web server computer. But mail.nikon.com points to 63.192.50.74, which is their email server.
That is the reason the www. prefix existed, and nowadays the main purpose of the internet is the world wide web, so it seems logical that no prefix should point towards the web server, as does the www. prefix.
To ensure that both the prefixed and non-prefixed versions can be used for a website, you need to make sure that both are pointing towards the IP address of the web server. This is done via DNS settings as Furtim has pointed out.
There are more details, but I think that gives an overview!
One thing to be aware of is that search engines are picky and they will probably see the two versions of your site as different websites altogether, which doesn't do the website ranking any good at all. To counter this you should really ensure that people trying to access the non-prefixed version get redirected to the same page on the prefixed version.
I know this was a bit long-winded but hope it helps clear things a bit.