Learning Computing History

A Brief History of the World Wide Web

 The Internet - An infrastructure of Locally, Nationally & Globally well-connected enmeshed networks.  The internet has changed the very way we live & how we do business.  

The World Wide Web - The transport, by which content can be indexed, searched & retrieved globally via Hypertext standards.   The WWW has made accessible to the masses an enormous diversity of resources throughout the internet. 

History:

• 1945 - Memex Conceived (an indexing tool that predates search engines)

• 1948 - A Mathematical Theory of  Communication

  • We can now send and receive data reliably with “bits”

• 1958 – Silicon Chip

  • We can do it cheaply by using digital circuits etched in silicon

  • Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce, co-inventors of the silicon microchip

• 1962 - First Vast Computer Network Envisioned

  • We can accomplish a lot by having a vast network of computers to use for accessing information and exchanging ideas

  • Joseph Licklider theorized that in such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

  • Robert Metcalfe, ARPANET engineer and inventor of Ethernet, the means by which to interconnect hosts

• 1964 - Packet Switching Invented

  • Packet switching can be used to send digitized data though computer networks

  • Claude Shannon, Nobel winner for his master’s thesis in 1936, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”.

  • Paul Baran, packet switching networks developer & innovator from research at RAND organization.

• 1965 – Hypertext Invented

  • Hypertext can be used to allow rapid access to text data

  • Ted Nelson is known for coining the term "hypertext”

• 1968 - DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contracts with BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman) to create ARPANET

• 1969 – ARPANET

  • It proved that packet switching works over a WAN

  • 1940 – 1969 ~ Vannevar Bush established the U.S. military / university research partnership, DARPA, that later developed the ARPANET.

  • Leonard Kleinrock is one of the pioneers of digital network communications, and helped build the early ARPANET

  • Lawrence Roberts was the ARPANET program manager, and led the overall system design

• 1970 - First five nodes:

  • University of California – Los Angeles

  • Stanford University

  • University of California - Santa Barbara

  • University of Utah

  • BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman)

• 1972 - TCP/IP Created

  • The protocol for Efficient and Reliable transmission of packets over a WAN: TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol)

  • Bob Kahn & Vinton Cerf are co-designers of the TCP/IP networking protocol.

• 1974 - TCP specification by Vint Cerf

• 1984 – The Internet is named and goes TCP/IP

  • January 1, the Internet with its 1000 hosts converts en masse to TCP/IP

  • The ARPANET needs to convert to a standard protocol and be renamed to The Internet

  • Jon Postel was the “Policeman of Internet Standards” for many years during the infancy of the Internet.

• 1989 – WWW Created

  • Computers connected through the Internet can exchange content more easily utilizing hypertext links, URLs & HTML: Now it’s really a World Wide Web

  • Tim Berners-Lee is considered the father of HTML

• 1993 – Mosaic Created

  • The World Wide Web is easier to employing a browser that can navigate web pages, utilizing a GUI (graphical user interface)

  • Mark Andreessen & Jim Clark found Netscape Communications with Netscape Navigator

• 1995 - Age of eCommerce Begins

  • Great efficiencies can be accomplished if we use the Internet and the World Wide Web to conduct business

  • Steve Crocker specialized in current Internet and electronic commerce technologies, writing RFCs

  • Christian Huitema’s group (including Brian Carpenter) are involved with all the networking support for Windows, including the evolution of TCP/IP support, IPv6, Real-Time Communication & UPnP (Universal Plug and Play).

•  1998 - Esther Dyson, visionary who helped start the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and who was the first Chairman of ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)

Starting from 1977 with 111 IP hosts, the web has grown to over 200,000,000 IP hosts & close to a billion users worldwide by September 2002.  The web & the internet have been engineered by bright & talented people with vision.  It will continue grow & evolve into the necessary extension of human interaction & communication well on into the 21^st century.