This article is the first article in the Emerging Web series which chronicles the rapid evolution of the world wide web in the past, present, and future. Accompanying this series is the New Web Glossary. Words (to be) defined in the glossary are placed in italics on their first appearance. After each post new entries are added.
The focus of this series is on the world wide web. We’ll start however with a bit of Internet history to put things in perspective.
To find the roots of what later became the Internet, we have to go all the way back to the California of the 1960’s. In that time a computer was a huge mathematical engine mainly used by universities or governmental institutes for research. To use it you first had to prepare a set of punch cards, pieces of cardboard with holes in that were the forerunners of floppy disks. It generally took a day or two to get the results, if any. More advanced where Time-Sharing systems, with many screens and keyboards connected to a single big computer.
In 1962 Dr. J.C.R. Licklider (cool name, huh) became head of a military research agency named ARPA. He realised that to advance in research, they needed advances in computer science as well. Licklider had a vision of an ‘Intergalactic network’, in which computers connected people. Instead of only calculating, they could aid communication between individuals and communities. The first computer of the ARPANET was installed in August of 1969 at UCLA. Three years later 24 sites were connected to the network, primarily using it for electronic mail and newsgroups. These were mostly academic super-computing sites that did some form of military research.
When computers are connected to form a network, they have to agree on the ‘language’ they will use to communicate with each other. This is tightly related with other important factors in the design of a network. This ‘common language’, together with a set of rules all participators have to obey is known as a protocol. In 1981 TCP and IP became the standard communication protocols on the ARPANET, and they still are on todays Internet. They work closely together and are most often referred to together as TCP/IP. The design of TCP/IP shows how visionary these pioneers were. It was designed to be platform independent, so any type of computer would be able to communicate with any other computer on the network. Second it has proven to be very scalable, allowing many millions of computers to be connected to the network without it becoming congested.
During the 1980’s first CSNET was founded to connect various universities in the US. A similar project in Europe was named EUnet. The National Science Foundation initiated NSFnet to allow researches general access to supercomputers. All these networks would become connected over time, forming the basis of the Internet. After 1990 the number of computers connected exploded, partly due to the rise of the World Wide Web.
New additions to the Glossary : TCP, IP, DARPA, ARPANET, Internet, Protocol
Next Post : The rise of the World Wide Web
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