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Internet History

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Carlos Cuixart
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18 views23 pages

Internet History

Uploaded by

Carlos Cuixart
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The internet

A history
Internet origins
 Faculty “early adopters” established class
web sites in the mid 1990s.

 We used hand-coded HTML, the language of


the web.
Internet origins
 The Web was already a few years old. But
slow to gain popularity.

 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, was


still pushing the sled uphill.

 People didn’t understand the concept of the


Web, and of non-linear information
presentation.
Internet promotion
 The public began to notice the internet
around 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfhInhkvtM
Internet origins
 The Web was a new way to transfer
information among computers.

 But the internet had been around a lot


longer, transmitting messages by electrical
pulses between machines able to read them.

 That concept goes back to the nineteenth


century: the “Victorian Internet.”
Internet origins
 The “Victorian internet” was the telegraph.

 Samuel F.B. Morse developed a code that


allowed anyone connected to a telegraph
wire to send and receive messages.
Internet origins
 The world was connected by instantaneous
communication. You could send a message
to, say, London or Cairo or Melbourne as
rapidly then as you can by email today.
 The first message was sent in 1844 by Morse from
Washington to Baltimore: “What hath God wrought?”

 The first message of most computer programmers nowadays


is “Hello, World!” We seem to have lost a bit of gravitas in
the new century.
Internet origins
 Of course, the telegraph was
not a computer. To have the
internet, you need a
computer.

 The computer is really good


at arithmetic. But so was the
calculating machine. As early
at the 1840s, people could
use machines for math.

 By the 1930s they were


standard. But big and clunky.
Internet origins
 World War II troops discovered they needed
better and faster ways to calculate trajectory
of anti-aircraft guns.

 In 1944, IBM came up with a large calculator


able to do that. It used instructions on
punched ticker tape.

 Ticker tape had been around to report stock


market prices since the turn of the twentieth
century.
Internet origins
 What do you do with
all that used ticker
tape? Hold ticker tape
parades, of course!

 The first ticker tape


parade was New York,
1926.

 They look impressive,


but leave
an awful mess.
[http://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=6S8hlR0y9T4]
Internet origins
 In 1951, the first non-military computer, the
UNIVAC, was launched by Remington Rand Corp.

 Problem: they were room-sized. The first


integrated circuit board, or “chip,” was invented
in 1961.

 Room-sized computers were located at a few


major universities, shared by use of terminals.
Internet origins
 The big computers, of course, couldn’t do
what even a smartphone can today but, boy,
were they impressive looking.

 That’s what mattered


in the movies and on TV.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=6Dz2t5EV_NA&feature=related]
Internet origins
 But what about the Internet? Think back to
1957. (Well, imagine back.)

 The United States feared the Soviet Union.

 Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA,


was created as defense department think
tank.

 If ARPA could link its computers with its


subcontractors and research institutions, it
could communicate more quickly.
Internet origins
 John Licklider, MIT, thought computers could
be linked in a “Galactic network,” 1962.

 Leonard Kleinrock thought information could


be sent in “packages”: break up information,
route through several systems, reassemble it
at the end.
Internet origins
 In 1967 several
universities and
laboratories drew their
research together for the
first internet, the
ARPAnet.

 Kleinrock’s Internet
Message Processor
provided the first
protocol.

 Computers could now talk


to each other.
Internet origins
 By 1971, 23 computers were linked to
ARPAnet. It was opened to the public the next
year.

 To build a way for computers from different


networks to communicate, ARPA developed
the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol, TCP/IP, in 1974.

 The idea was that each network could work


on its own, but link to one large computer,
which would provide a window to other
networks, called a gateway.
Internet origins
 In 1974 Stanford University launched Telnet,
the first commercial “packet data” service to
transmit data over the internet.

 The Domain Name System (DNS) was


established in 1984 to replace the original
system, which assigned a separate name to
each computer.

 It used words instead of numbers, and top-


level domains such as .com, .gov, .edu
and .org.
Internet origins
 Universities encouraged system expansion.

 By 1987 28,000 internet hosts existed. But it


was not well known among the public, with
its complicated procedures.

 In 1990, ARPAnet was discontinued,


overtaken by the Internet.

 In 1991, Senator Al Gore sponsored funding


for government “information superhighway”
research.
Internet origins
 The problem still was the Internet’s
complexity. But that was soon to change.

 Also in 1991, the World Wide Web was


released to the public.

 Tim Berners-Lee, an Oxford researcher


working in a lab in Switzerland, devised a
simplified way to use the internet.
Internet origins
 The idea was to use links hidden behind text
to connect to other documents, making it easy
to retrieve them.

 People were not used to finding information in


this non-linear way. By 1993, only 150
websites existed in the world.

 Berners-Lee realized he’d have to do a sales


job for his new idea. www.youtube.com/watch?
v=loi6PYaRqHA

 I would like to point out that I have something in common with Tim: we are the
same age, and both graduated from “Oxbridge.” The similarly quite definitely
ends there.
Internet origins
 Email, or electronic mail, uses the Internet,
but with a different protocol, or way of
communicating, than the web-based protocol,
Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP). A
variety of other protocols also exist.

 You need a way to read Web documents. In


late 1993 Marc Andressen launched the first
“web browser” to the public, Mosaic. By
1994, it was on thousands of computers.
(Firefox browser today descends from
Mosaic.)
Internet origins
 1994: 3,000 websites in the world. 1995:
25,000. 2001: 30 million.

 In 2007: 109 million. In 2013: 649 million.

 Brag break: Ross’s website, launched July 1995, was among the first .00051
percent of web sites. But, boy, does it look old fashioned today.
Internet origins
 And yet…it’s no faster
than the telegraph and
Morse code developed
nearly two centuries ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=JOxXd6-Orcc&feature=related

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