Did you know?

Did You Know...?

The Internet was founded in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defense in order to establish a fast and reliable computerized communications network between itself, its various military facilities, universities, and defense contractors. The first incarnation of the Internet was called the ARPANET. This ARPANET was based upon a common set of communications protocols, known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol).

In the mid-1980s, the U.S.-based National Science Foundation began to provide funding for the establishment of research and academic networks throughout the U.S., and began to link those networks into a high-speed network known as the NSFNet. The NSFNet was based upon the same TCP/IP protocols originally established in ARPANET. As the NSFNet evolved in the U.S., similar scientific/academic networks were established and grew in Canada and other countries, such as the Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland and Finland. Eventually, networks from these countries and others were linked to each other, primarily through the NSFNet. In this way, the Internet was born.

The original networks were funded and controlled by scientific/academic organizations, had restricted access only to members of those organizations, and were designed solely for the non-profit interchange of ideas, R & D projects and related information. Commercial companies, computer system vendors, as well as the aforementioned defense contractors, who had been given access to the networks in order to provide services to the network members, soon realized that a giant international network like this had immense profit potential because of the vast number of people who could be reached as a potential consumer base. Thus, many of these profit-oriented companies (such as CompuServe, AT&T, MCI, among others) started to provide access to the ‘Net for a fee via their own private, commercial access networks. This led to an explosion of the Internet in the late 1980s, when many private sector individuals decided to take a foray into the ‘Net to see what it was all about.

For the ordinary private sector layman, however, navigating the ‘Net was still difficult in the 1980s as the universal “language” used for this purpose was UNIX – a device basically created for mainframe computers and used by the programmers attending them. A better method of “communicating” with remote networks was required. And so, the “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project” was born. The year was 1989. The location was the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland (better known by its French acronym of CERN – Centre Européen des Récherches Nucléaires). The chief proponent was Tim Berners-Lee, a particle physicist. The concept was to develop a “hypertext system” for the purpose of enabling efficient and easy information sharing among geographically separated teams of researchers in the High Energy Physics community. The three most important components of the proposed system were:

A consistent user interface...

The ability to incorporate a wide range of technologies and document types...

”Universal Readership” – i.e., that anyone, anywhere on the network, on a wide variety of different computer platforms, could read the same document as anyone else, and do so with ease.

The concept of “hypertext”, a word which had been coined in the late 1970s in the United States by a visionary writer named Ted Nelson, is a disarmingly simple one: use the computer’s storage and searching capabilities to link documents together and thus enable users to jump instantly from one piece of information to the next, regardless where on the network that next related bit of information happens to be stored. As such, a hypertext is a series of documents, each of which displays on the computer screen, a visible link to at least one other document in the set. Think of it in terms of the footnotes you sometimes see in a book or document you are reading: you read a particular passage of text that is footnoted at the bottom of the page; the footnote tells you to look for further information about the subject you are reading in another book; in order to read that additional information, you would have to go to a library and borrow the book, or go to bookstore and buy the book. A hypertext link, however, allows you to go instantly, via your computer, to that “library” and read the additional information without borrowing anything, or to that “bookstore” without ever buying anything, and all that without ever leaving your armchair or place in front of your computer screen. A neat, not to mention incredibly fast, way to plough through tons of related material, stored all over the world.

By January 1993, CERN’s project had expanded to the point that 50 Web Servers were in existence, a Web Server being a hypertext system site that had joined the group and that was allowing others in the group of 50 to access data it stored in its particular computer network, on a real-time, 24-hour basis. And thus the concept of the Web congealed into reality: just like a spider’s web, clusters of web fibres in various locations (i.e., local computer networks) joined to each other by gossamer strands of silk (i.e., constantly accessible telephone communications lines between those networks). Should the spider (i.e., the Web user) be in one part of its web and suddenly need or want to go to another part of its web, it can slide or glide there almost instantly via its network of inter-connected silken threads (i.e., via Hypertext Jumps).

By mid-1993, the first web browsers, or graphical front ends to navigate and view WWW material, were being developed. Chief among these developers was a man named Marc Andreesen, who would, a bit later, spin off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he worked and created the original graphical web browser, Mosaic, to form his own company and produce one of the most widely used web browser in existence today: Netscape Navigator.

By October 1993, the number of web servers was 500, a 1000% increase in 10 months! Traffic on the WWW had increased to more than 1% of the total Internet traffic. Throughout 1994 and 1995, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as other institutions, joined CERN to form the WWW Consortium, a joint venture necessitated by the fact that the Web had grown beyond CERN’s ability to administer it alone and because the Web was fast becoming the very heart of the information-providing function of the Internet. Additionally, many members of the new WWW Consortium come from the business community and as such have the expertise to oversee the development and support of commercial activity on the Web, which had far out-grown its original purpose as an information link for the scientific research community. By March 1995, the number of web servers had increased to almost 16,000 and the amount of WWW information traffic was around 3 Million Megabytes per month! As of July 1996, there were over 200,000 web servers active on the Web! That translated into a 12,500% increase in 16 months! WWW information traffic was up to almost 30 Trillion bytes (30 Terabytes or 30 Million Gigabytes) of data transferred per month! The WWW was here to stay.

Donald James Dunn

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	Did You Know...?

The Internet was founded in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defense in order to establish a fast and reliable computerized communications network between itself, its various military facilities, universities, and defense contractors. The first incarnation of the Internet was called the ARPANET. This ARPANET was based upon a common set of communications protocols, known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol). In the mid-1980s, the U.S.-based National Science Foundation began to provide funding for the establishment of research and academic networks throughout the U.S., and began to link those networks into a high-speed network known as the NSFNet. The NSFNet was based upon the same TCP/IP protocols originally established in ARPANET. As the NSFNet evolved in the U.S., similar scientific/academic networks were established and grew in Canada and other countries, such as the Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland and Finland. Eventually, networks from these countries and others were linked to each other, primarily through the NSFNet. In this way, the Internet was born. The original networks were funded and controlled by scientific/academic organizations, had restricted access only to members of those organizations, and were designed solely for the non-profit interchange of ideas, R & D projects and related information. Commercial companies, computer system vendors, as well as the aforementioned defense contractors, who had been given access to the networks in order to provide services to the network members, soon realized that a giant international network like this had immense profit potential because of the vast number of people who could be reached as a potential consumer base. Thus, many of these profit-oriented companies (such as CompuServe, AT&T, MCI, among others) started to provide access to the ‘Net for a fee via their own private, commercial access networks. This led to an explosion of the Internet in the late 1980s, when many private sector individuals decided to take a foray into the ‘Net to see what it was all about. For the ordinary private sector layman, however, navigating the ‘Net was still difficult in the 1980s as the universal “language” used for this purpose was UNIX – a device basically created for mainframe computers and used by the programmers attending them. A better method of “communicating” with remote networks was required. And so, the “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project” was born. The year was 1989. The location was the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland (better known by its French acronym of CERN – Centre Européen des Récherches Nucléaires). The chief proponent was Tim Berners-Lee, a particle physicist. The concept was to develop a “hypertext system” for the purpose of enabling efficient and easy information sharing among geographically separated teams of researchers in the High Energy Physics community. The three most important components of the proposed system were: A consistent user interface... The ability to incorporate a wide range of technologies and document types... ”Universal Readership” – i.e., that anyone, anywhere on the network, on a wide variety of different computer platforms, could read the same document as anyone else, and do so with ease. The concept of “hypertext”, a word which had been coined in the late 1970s in the United States by a visionary writer named Ted Nelson, is a disarmingly simple one: use the computer’s storage and searching capabilities to link documents together and thus enable users to jump instantly from one piece of information to the next, regardless where on the network that next related bit of information happens to be stored. As such, a hypertext is a series of documents, each of which displays on the computer screen, a visible link to at least one other document in the set. Think of it in terms of the footnotes you sometimes see in a book or document you are reading: you read a particular passage of text that is footnoted at the bottom of the page; the footnote tells you to look for further information about the subject you are reading in another book; in order to read that additional information, you would have to go to a library and borrow the book, or go to bookstore and buy the book. A hypertext link, however, allows you to go instantly, via your computer, to that “library” and read the additional information without borrowing anything, or to that “bookstore” without ever buying anything, and all that without ever leaving your armchair or place in front of your computer screen. A neat, not to mention incredibly fast, way to plough through tons of related material, stored all over the world. By January 1993, CERN’s project had expanded to the point that 50 Web Servers were in existence, a Web Server being a hypertext system site that had joined the group and that was allowing others in the group of 50 to access data it stored in its particular computer network, on a real-time, 24-hour basis. And thus the concept of the Web congealed into reality: just like a spider’s web, clusters of web fibres in various locations (i.e., local computer networks) joined to each other by gossamer strands of silk (i.e., constantly accessible telephone communications lines between those networks). Should the spider (i.e., the Web user) be in one part of its web and suddenly need or want to go to another part of its web, it can slide or glide there almost instantly via its network of inter-connected silken threads (i.e., via Hypertext Jumps). By mid-1993, the first web browsers, or graphical front ends to navigate and view WWW material, were being developed. Chief among these developers was a man named Marc Andreesen, who would, a bit later, spin off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he worked and created the original graphical web browser, Mosaic, to form his own company and produce one of the most widely used web browser in existence today: Netscape Navigator. By October 1993, the number of web servers was 500, a 1000% increase in 10 months! Traffic on the WWW had increased to more than 1% of the total Internet traffic. Throughout 1994 and 1995, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as other institutions, joined CERN to form the WWW Consortium, a joint venture necessitated by the fact that the Web had grown beyond CERN’s ability to administer it alone and because the Web was fast becoming the very heart of the information-providing function of the Internet. Additionally, many members of the new WWW Consortium come from the business community and as such have the expertise to oversee the development and support of commercial activity on the Web, which had far out-grown its original purpose as an information link for the scientific research community. By March 1995, the number of web servers had increased to almost 16,000 and the amount of WWW information traffic was around 3 Million Megabytes per month! As of July 1996, there were over 200,000 web servers active on the Web! That translated into a 12,500% increase in 16 months! WWW information traffic was up to almost 30 Trillion bytes (30 Terabytes or 30 Million Gigabytes) of data transferred per month! The WWW was here to stay. *Donald James Dunn*

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		© Copyright 1997-2000 Deutsche Rundschau -- All rights reserved