Preface

Why I wrote this.

I stumbled upon some Internet history sites during my normal surfing routine, and I was reminded of the origins and original purpose of the Internet, and the World Wide Web, and found it interesting that some of the things we are talking about today, were actually part of the original concept for the Web (collaborative facilities - blawgs, web conferencing, etc.).

I also found the exercise of assembling this information to be a great example of how powerful the Internet can be as an information source, since I didn't crack a book to do this piece. And finally, I was hoping to demonstrate the full potential of blogs as a communications tool, and information medium, since all these hyperlinks are a perfect way to highlight the powerful resource this could be for communicating information to your clients.

So, I hope you enjoy reviewing this brief historical review of the origins of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Even if the topic doesn't interest you, take a look at how we assembled this, and think about ways you could use it to attract and/or educate your clients.

Introduction

The Internet ('Net) is a network of networks. Basically it is made from computers and cables. What Vint Cerf and Bob Khan did was to figure out how this network could be used to send around little "packets" of information. As Vint points out, a packet is a bit like a postcard with a simple address on it. If you put the right address on a packet, and gave it to any computer which is connected as part of the Net, each computer would figure out which cable to send it down next so that it would get to its destination. That's what the Internet does. It delivers packets - anywhere in the world, normally well under a second.¹

The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you find computers -- on the Web, you find documents, sounds, videos,.... information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have know about computers and cables.²

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, had this in mind in formulating his creation:

"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."³

The Genesis of the Internet

While the original prototype to today's Internet did not come into existence until 1958, the vision that resulted in it's creation was conceived in 1945 when Vannevar Bush had realized that an era of information was approaching. He commented: "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, [but] the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

Bush wrote of a "memex", a conceptual machine that could store vast amounts of information, in which a user had the ability to create information "trails": links of related text and illustrations. This trail could then be stored and used for future reference. Bush believed that using this associative method of information gathering was not only practical in its own right, but was closer to the way the mind ordered information.⁴

Although 'memex' was never implemented, in 1960 it inspired Ted Nelson to develop the modern version of hypertext, a term he coined in his article, "Literary Machines".⁵ Hypertext, as we will find out later, became the backbone of the World Wide Web, and dramatically facilitated the fashion in which we now access information on the Internet.

The Creation of ARPANET - An Infrastructure Takes Shape

The year 1958 marked the official launch of the infrastructure that would later become the Internet. The previous year, the United States and Russia were racing to be the first to launch an earth orbiting satellite. Russia beat the United States to the punch by adopting a very simple, but quickly developed model, and launched it on October 4, 1957.

Not to be upstaged again, the United States created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA"; sometimes referred to as "ARPA") within the Department of Defense. Its mission was to apply state-of-the-art technology to US defense, and to avoid being viewed as technologically inferior to our most feared enemy at that time.

ARPA became the technological think-tank of the American defense effort, while it's original mission was much broader, including research and development of ballistic missles, nuclear test monitoring, and space exploration (before NASA was established), it's most significant activity ended up being advanced computing.⁶

In 1962 ARPA opened a computer research program and appointed Dr. J. C. R. Licklider of MIT to lead it. Licklider had just published his first memorandum on the "Galactic Network" concept... a futuristic vision where computers would be networked together and would be accessible to everyone. Within ARPA, Leonard Klienrock was already developing ideas for sending information by breaking a message up into 'packages', sending them separately to their destination and reassembling them at the other end.

This would give more flexibility than opening one line and sending the information through that alone. For example, the system would not be reliant on a single routing and, if files were broken-up before transfer, it would be more difficult to eavesdrop... both useful security advantages. The inadequacy of the telephone network for running programs and transferring data was revealed in 1965 when, as an experiment, computers in Berkeley and [/url] of MIT were linked over a low speed dial-up telephone-line to become the first "wide area network" (WAN) ever created.⁷

By 1966/67 research had developed sufficiently for the new head of computer research, Leonard Roberts, to publish a plan for computer network system called ARPANET. This system ended up being a collaborative work amongst teams at MIT, the National Physics Laboratory (UK) and by RAND Corporation who had all been working on the feasibility of wide area networks. Once they became aware of each other's works, their best ideas were incorporated into the ARPANET design.

In 1968 a communication protocol known as interface message processor (IMPs) was completed, and IMP's allowed for ARPANET to take the next big step. In October 1969, IMPs installed in computers at both UCLA and Stanford. UCLA students would 'login' to Stanford's computer, access its databases and try to send data. The experiment was successful and the fledgling network had come into being.

By December 1969 ARPANET comprised four host computers as with the addition of research centres in Santa Barbara and Utah. In the months that followed, scientists worked on refining the software that would expand the network's capabilities. At the same time, ever more computers were linked to the net. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other.

In October 1972 ARPANET went 'public'. At the First International Conference on Computers and Communication, held in Washington DC, ARPA scientists demonstrated the system in operation, linking computers together from 40 different locations. This successful launch resulted in additional advances from 1972 to approximately 1980, including direct person-to-person communication that we now refer to as e-mail, the establishment of transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed computers for different computing platforms to operate on the same network (1974), and finally, in 1979, the establishment of Usenet, an open system focusing on e-mail communication and devoted to 'newsgroups' is opened, and still thriving today.

By the middle 1980s, the Internet had a new, easy-to-use system for naming computers. This involved using the idea of the domain name. A domain name comprises a series of letters separated by dots, for example: `www.bo.com' or `www.erb.org.uk'. These names are the easy-to-use alternative to the much less manageable and cumbersome IP address numbers.

A program called Distributed Name Service (DNS) maps domain names onto IP addresses, keeping the IP addresses `hidden'. DNS was an absolute breakthrough in making the Internet accessible to those who were not computer nerds. As a result of its introduction, email addresses became simpler. Previous to DNS, email addresses had all sorts of hideous codes such as exclamation marks, percent signs and other extraneous information to specify the route to the other machine. ⁸

In 1987, we witnessed the launch of "UUNET", the first commercially available subscription service for Internet access, and obviously, others followed. At the time that UUNET was introduced, navigating the Internet still required a fair amount of technological sophistication to navigate around, and make it useful. This fact, and the public's growing interest in the Internet made the scene ripe for the next major development, a more user friendly interface to be known as the World Wide Web.

Early Search Engines

By the late 1980s, another reality has begun to set in on the Internet, would become an issue for the future of the Web as well. The amount of data was getting too large to use informal sharing of hints and pointers from other users. From its start in 1983, the internet had grown to 1000 hosts in 1984, to 10,000 in 1987, to 100,000 in 1990 and to 1,000,000 in 1992. Information retrieval was becoming a bottleneck and a clustering of innovations took place to resolve the problem.

In 1990 "Archie", the Web's first search engine, was developed at McGill University (Montreal).Archie allows surfers to retrieve information on the Internet in a more predicable and uniform manner. What Archie did was automatically visit all the archives it knew about and copy the list into a searchable database (this software was was the predecessor to spidering software programs in use today). When you logged into an Archie site, it would tell you where any file was, and you could view and e-mail the results to yourself..... and you could go through the entire 'log-in and retrieve' procedures for each computer yourself.

In 1991, The Gopher System offered a dramatic improvement on ftp retrieval. "Gopher" was developed at the University of Minnesota (whose mascot was a golden gopher). The host computers (servers) put their files in a 'menu' form and the menus of the different servers]http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/server.html]servers[/url][/url] were merged.

Now you logged into any gopher server and you could query it for information by typing in keywords and, again like Archie, you would get a list of items. But now, instead of sending yourself the list and individually looking up the items, you scrolled down the list, pressed 'enter' and you were transferred directly to the relevant 'gopher' address, where you could read the contents. Then, if you wanted, you sent the file to yourself via e-mail. Since 'gopher' was a useful way for storing data, the system caught-on very rapidly. And, within 'gopherspace' asearch engine called Veronica (supposedly Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Network Index to Computerised Archives), developed at the University of Nevada operated on the same principle as Archie but it also allowed you to distinguish between a search for 'directories' and an undifferentiated search combining directories and files (the latter was much larger and time-consuming). Again, having located something, you e-mailed it to yourself. Neither Archie, nor Gopher is in use today, but they certainly contributed mightly to the way in which we currently retrieve information off the Web.

The Genesis of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, the segment of the Internet which permits multimedia transmission, was created at CERN, Switzerland’s Particle Physics laboratory, which has long supported scientific research in advanced computer technologies. ⁹

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee was working in a computing services section of CERN when he came up with the idea of creating an interface that would allow CERN scientists to collaborate more effectively, from all over the world. Tim had the idea of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information. But far from simply making available a large number of research documents as files that could be downloaded to individual computers, he suggested that you could actually link the text in the files themselves. In other words, there could be cross-references from one research paper to another.

This would mean that while reading one research paper, you could quickly display part of another paper that holds directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and mathematical nature would thus be represented as a `web' of information held in electronic form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents together by using buttons on the screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to another. Before coming to CERN, Tim had already worked on document production and text processing, and had developed his first hypertext system, `Enquire', in 1980 for his own personal use. Tim's prototype Web browser on the NeXT computer came out in 1990. ¹⁰

Tim's development of hypertext capability has become the hallmark of the Web, and is probably the single most important factor in the utility the Web offers us today. Then in 1991 the World Wide Web was developed and two years later the Mosaic graphics browser. These contributed to an enormous expansion of the net, but they also offered the development of a new generation of user-friendly search-engines. If, in 1992 the number of hosts had reached 1,000,000, by 1996 the number had surpassed 10,000,000. Moreover, the number of web sites was beginning to increase exponentially. Two years later there were 36 million hosts and 4 million web sites.

Modern Search Engines

Yahoo! (an anachronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle') is a commercial directory established in late 1994 by two PhD students at Stanford University (David Filo and Jerry Yang, who also developed the software). In 1995 Marc Andreesen, invited them to use the more powerful computers at Netscape, but it maintains a separate commercial identity. The principle is one of user registration, but it also uses an advanced 'spider' engine. Google is a deliberate misspelling of googol - 10 to the power of 100.... but really chosen because the name sounded 'cool.’ It was formed by two Stanford graduates in April 1998. The principle behind it was that it monitors other indices to see who links to what (and to rank these) in order to locate the real 'authorities' on a topic and it uses this to rank the results. It had superb, clean looks and it now also has the largest coverage of any search engine (1.6 thousand million web-pages) and it still delivers plenty of useable references within the first hundred or so results (it depends… but you can easily see when the quality tails off). If you use the "cached" pages (kept on its own computers) you can see you search terms highlighted in the document. It has recently introduced an "advanced search" category and an image search. In total, a fabulous resource.¹¹

Conclusion

The Internet, and the Web have come a long way in a very short period of time. They are testatment to how fast technology is changing our entire way of living. Who knows where these technologies, or their successors will take us in the future, but if the past is any indication, we have a lot to look forward to in coming years!

Other Resources

A history of HTML
A Little History of the World Wide Web
History of the Internet
History of Internet Protocols
Different types of Servers
History of the Internet
History of Listserve
History of Search Engines
Archive of early ezines
Satirical History of the Internet Timeline of Internet History
Timeline of Internet History

Internet Firsts and Internet Trivia:

Archie, the first search engine on the Internet.
First subscription based commercial internet company, UUNET
First Ezine