By David Mayr
2.1) The 1960s
2.2) The 1970s
2.3) The 1980s
2.4) The 1990s
2.5) The future
3.1) What is the WWW?
3.2) WWW - a side effect of particle physics
3.3) The father of WWW - Tim Berners - Lee
3.4) Hyper Text Markup Language - HTML
3.5) Browsers
5) My sources
6) Disclaimer
7) Glossary
Welcome to a tour through the history of the Internet!
This is the HTML - version of a work I did for school from March to June
1997.
I suppose you know the history of the Net already a bit, but I'm sure you
don't know enough, especially if you are a beginner! This page should help
you to understand the Internet a bit better. A word to using this page:
You can jump to the chapters by clicking on the appropriate numbers in
the Contents - section. You can also click on any underlined word if you
don't understand its meaning. This will take you to the glossary. Have
fun! (You can mail me any comments
you have!)
Let's come to a start now. You might now believe it, but the Net's roots
are in the 1960s, the time of the Beatles, of Flower-Power and Hippies.
But the 60s were also the time of the cold war between the Soviet Union
and the USA. Both countries built more and more atomic weapons, and both
of them had the power to wipe out whole cities or even countries.
So the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War thinking machine, faced a strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear attack? If one computer of a network was destroyed, communication would be impossible. And if there was a central authority, it would surely be the first target for an atomic bomb. So RAND invented a new kind of network. In 1964, the RAND proposal was put forward. Written by Paul Baran, this proposal stated that the new network would have no central authority.
Besides, it would be designed to operate while in tatters. The principles of this network were: All the nodes would be equal in status, each could send and receive messages.
All the messages would be sent in packets, each with its own address. These packets would be sent at one node and would arrive at another one. This may seem rather obvious, but what was new was that the way the packets went through the net was not important. That means that if one node was destroyed, the rest of the nodes would still be able to communicate. This is of course inefficient and rather slow, but extremely reliable. The Internet still uses this method nowadays, and there has been only one collective crash so far.
The first test network built on these principles was installed in National Research Laboratory in Great Britain in 1968. Shortly afterwards, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) wanted to installed a more advanced network based on the same principles in the USA. The network consisted of four high speed computers. In 1969, the first node was installed in UCLA.
|
1971 |
| There were 23 nodes on ARPANET: The first node (1969) was in UCLA,
other nodes were in the Stanford Research Institute, the University of
Utah and the UCSB.
ARPANET was constructed because computer time was precious and expensive at that time and the ARPANET offered the scientists possibilities to share their computers using long distance computing. This is nearly unbelievable nowadays, for instance a normal PC has 16 Megabytes of RAM today. This is very sharp contrast to the University of Utah's computer. This Honeywell 516 mini computer had 12 Kilobytes of RAM! |
|
1972 |
| 1972 was a key year. Ray Tomlinson of BBN invented the first e-mail program. But why is this that important? Over the years, an odd fact became clear. Instead of using the ARPANET for long distance computing, the scientists used it for communicating with each other, of course for sharing results of their experiments or something, but also mainly for gossiping! (Each user had his/her own e-mail address.) |
|
1973 |
| The first international nodes were set up. These were located in England
and Norway. The growth of ARPANET was possible because you could use any
platform to connect to it. (This is still the case with today's Internet.) One year later Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published "A protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which specified the design of a TCP. |
|
1976 |
| UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) was released. |
|
1979 |
| USENET was established using UUCP. |
|
1982 |
| The TCP/IP protocol was established for ARPANET. This protocol became standard (instead of NCP) on 1st January 1983. The name "Internet" was first used. |
|
1983 |
| ARPANET split into ARPANET and the military segment, MILNET. MILNET
became integrated with the Defence Data Network created the previous year.
The new protocol standard and even more the split-up were important cut-overs
for ARPANET, keeping in mind that it was originally created for military
purposes. Thanks to TCP/IP and its decentralised structure, ARPANET grew and grew during the early eighties. The Name Server was developed at the University of Wisconsin. |
|
1984 |
| The number of hosts broke 1.000. The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. |
|
1986 |
| The National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to make supercomputers
useable for research projects, so they decided to link five super-computing
centres. First they wanted to use ARPANET for connecting the computers,
but ARPANET's bureaucracy and shortage of staff kept NSF from using this
solution.
So they built their own network using the IP-protocol of ARPANET. NSF linked the five centres. (56 kps). But apparently they could not link the universities with this network, simply because they didn't have enough money for building cables to every university. The solution: The schools and universities of one region were linked
together and this network was linked to one of the supercomputers. |
|
1987 |
| NSF signed a contract with Merit Networks to increase the performance
of the network. The computing centres and lines have been upgraded ever
since. -- 10.000 hosts -- |
|
1989 |
| -- 100.000 hosts -- |
|
1990 |
| ARPANET ceased to exist, but its users scarcely noticed that because ARPANET's functions were continued. |
|
1991 |
| WAIS and Gopher were released. |
|
1992 |
| WWW was released by CERN and the number of hosts broke 1.000.000. |
|
1993 |
| One year later, the first WWW-browser, Mosaic, was released. (see 3.4
for more information) The growth rate of Internet was an incredible 341%
and it stills grows and grows now. It is a valuable source of information for anyone and on any topic, and also a new, exciting way of communicating with people thousands of kilometres away. |
What can you say about the future of the Internet? One can only guess what
it will look like in ten years. What is important that speed is enhanced
greatly. If you ever tried to download a big file from a èserver
in the USA (using a PC located in Austria), you know what I mean.
Mass media is showing interest in the Net know and you can find articles
on it nearly in every magazine out there. This sounds good, but it isn't
indeed. How many articles are there about nazi or porno material on the
Net, and how many columnists do cry out for censorship?
I won't write about the censorship discussion here, as this document covers
the history of the Internet, but I suggest you take a look at the homepage
of the Blue Ribbon campaign
and read their arguments.
The WWW, also known as "the Web" or "W3" is what most people think of when they say "Internet". It is a graphical interface based on hypertext and programmed using HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
In order to view a WWW page, you must use a browser (see 3.4)
This heading is no joke. The WWW was invented at CERN, an institute for particle physics situated in Switzerland. Originally, WWW was developed only for high energy physics (for world-wide communication).
|
1991 |
AugustFiles were available for download on four newsgroups (alt.hypertext, comp.sys.next, comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media) |
OctoberThere were mailing lists, namely "www-interest@info.cern.chÓ and "www-talk@info.cern.ch. |
|
1992 |
JanuaryOn 15th , the first line mode browser was available by anonymous FTP. |
|
1993 |
MarchThe WWW measured 0.1% of the NSFNET backbone traffic. |
SeptemberNow the WWW measured 1% of the NSF backbone traffic! In December, the WWW won the IMA award and the New York Times wrote an article about it. |
|
1994 |
MayFrom 25th - 27th, there was the first International WWW Conference, also known as "The Woodstock of the Web. VRML was conceived there. |
AugustThe IW3C2 (International WWW Conference Committee) was founded by NCSA and CERN in Boston. |
SeptemberThe European Commission and CERN propose the WebCore project. This is for the development of the Web core technology in Europe. |
OctoberIn Chicago, there was the Second International WWW conference titled "Mosaic and the Web". |
DecemberOn 14th, the first W3 Consortium meeting was held in Cambridge (USA). On 16th, CERN decides not to continue WWW development due to budget conditions and transfers the WebCore project to INRIA (Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, France). |
|
1995 |
AprilThe Third International WWW Conference "Tools and Applications" took place in Darmstadt (Germany) and was hosted by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. |
JuneThe Web Society was founded in Graz (Austria) by the Technical University of Graz, CERN, the University of Minnesota and INRIA. |
| Tim BL was the driving force behind the development of the WWW. He
wrote the first WWW client and the first WWW server and defined standards
such as URL, HTML and HTTP while working at CERN. Prior to that, he was a founding director of Image Computer Systems and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England. He has graduated at Oxford University. Tim has got a wife (Nancy Carlson) and two children, born in 1991 and 1994. |
Most of the WWW pages are written with the programming language HTML.
(There is also Java, JavaScript, CGI/Perl,...)
HTML is no real language such as C++ or Pascal, it is just a system for
describing documents. A WWW browser interprets the HTML - code and displays
it.
HTML is a special version of SGML (is used by big companies for exchange
of data) focused on Hypertext. HTML code is written in ASCII
- format. This is a big advantage, because ASCII can be read by about any
platform (IBM, Macintosh, UNIX,...) thus making the WWW usable for any
platform as long as viewer programs, the browsers, exist.
The current standard defined by he W3 Consortium
is HTML 4.
It all started with HTML 1.0. This was a very simple and basic standard. The popularity of the Web started to grow when Mosaic (see 3.5) came out. Mosaic used some elements not specified in HTML 1.0. Some, but not all of these were included in the second version (2.0) of HTML. The rest of the elements are the so-called "obsolete" elements which are used but not included in the official standard.
What are browsers?
Browsers are programs for displaying HTML-code. They are used for "browsing"
the WWW, but also for FTP, USENET or e-mail.
History The first browsers, Viola and Midas, were released in
January 1993 for X - Windows. At the same time, a Macintosh browser was
released as an ALPHA - version.
www, a line mode browser, was available for the public on 15th January
1992 via telnet.
The first popular browser was NCSA Mosaic. It supported only HTML 1.0.
(First ALPHA - version was released in February 1993 [Mosaic for X]).
It was released for all common platforms (X, PC/Windows, Macintosh) in
September 1993.
When Marc Andreessen, the mastermind of Mosaic, founded his own company,
Mosaic Communications Corp. (now called Netscape), and released a browser,
the Netscape Navigator 1.0, he soon controlled 70% of the browser market.
Microsoft saw this gigantic success and soon released its own browser,
the MS Internet Explorer, for free.
Currently, there is version 4.0 (Communicator) of Netscape
Navigator and version 4.0 of the Internet
Explorer.
When the Internet Explorer 2.0 came out, it did support a few things
the Navigator didn't, for example the Marquee - function (scrolling text).
Netscape, on the other hand, did not sleep, and they also had a few things
Microsoft's program couldn't do. These was for instance the Frame - function,
which allows splitting up the browser windows in different sections and
the Tables function for Tables.
The new versions both support most of the HTML - elements. Also, both new
browser support already part of the HTML 4 standard.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this work as much as I did writing it. The Internet is a fascinating world to explore and certainly offers new methods of communication. When you see it that way, the Internet is the best thing that could have happened to us. Have I said that before? Surely I have, but it deserves being mentioned twice.
Maxwell, Christine:
Internet Yellow Pages: das Adreßbuch für jeden Datenreisenden
Dt. überarbeitete Ausg., Haar bei München: Markt und Technik,
Buch- und Softwareverlag, 1995
ISBN 3-87791-699-6
Krol, Ed:
Die Welt des Internet, Handbuch und Übersicht
Dt. Ausgabe, Bonn: O'Reilly / International Thomson - Verlag, 1995
ISBN 3-930673-01-0
PC sources:
Internet - Glosssar
Supplied with SPRY-Mosaic - CompuServe edition
WWW sources:
The W3 Consortium Web page
CERN Web page
Internet Valley
Due to a computer crash, I lost my bookmark file and so I don't know where I downloaded the rest of my WWW information. Sorry again that I can't mention all the WWW pages, but I would like to thank all the individual authors who wrote this pages.
[This applies to ANY version or format of this document]
You may NOT use this document, "The History of the Internet and the
WWW", or parts of this document for ANY commercial purposes without
explicit permission from the author, David
Mayr. You MAY, however, use this document or part of this document
for any noncommercial purposes.
Possible (registered) trademarks are marked according to my knowledge, but the missing of such signs doesn't automatically suggest that the (product) name isn't a (registered) trademark. In addition, no kind of liability can be taken for the correctness of the content of this document.