A brief history of the
Internet
The
U.S. Department of Defense laid the foundation of the Internet roughly 30 years
ago with a network called ARPANET. But the general public didn't use the
Internet much until after the development of the World Wide Web in the early
1990s. As recently as June 1993, there were only 130 Web sites. Now there are
millions. Here's a quick look at how it all came to be.
·
Tim Berners-Lee: Father of the Web
The beginnings: ARPANET
In
1957, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
a segment of the Department of Defense charged with ensuring U.S. leadership in
science and technology with military applications. In 1969, ARPA established
ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.
Research and education
ARPANET
was a network that connected major computers at the University of California at
Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford Research
Institute, and the University of Utah. Within a couple of years, several other
educational and research institutions joined the network.
In
response to the threat of nuclear attack, ARPANET was designed to allow
continued communication if one or more sites were destroyed. Unlike today, when
millions of people have access to the Internet from home, work, or their public
library, ARPANET served only computer professionals, engineers, and scientists
who knew their way around its complex workings.
Evolution
Throughout
the 1970s, developers created the protocols used to transfer information over the
Internet. By the early 1980s, Usenet newsgroups and electronic mail had been
born. Most users were affiliated with universities, although libraries began to
connect their catalogs to the Internet, too. During the late 1980s, developers
created indices, such as Archie and the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), to
keep track of the information on the Internet. To give users a friendly,
easy-to-use interface to work with, the University of Minnesota created its
Gopher, a simple menu system for accessing files, in 1991.
Sites to visit
·
A Brief History of the
Internet—more details from the Internet Society
Tim Berners-Lee: Father of the Web
The
World Wide Web came into being in 1991, thanks to developer Tim Berners-Lee and
others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, also known as Conseil
Europ饮ne pour la Recherche Nucl顩re (CERN). The CERN team created the protocol based on hypertext
that makes it possible to connect content on the Web with hyperlinks.
Berners-Lee now directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group of
industry and university representatives that oversees the standards of Web
technology.
Early
on, the Internet was limited to noncommercial uses because its backbone was
provided largely by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy, and funding came
from the government. But as independent networks began to spring up, users
could access commercial Web sites without using the government-funded network.
By the end of 1992, the first commercial online service provider, Delphi, offered
full Internet access to its subscribers, and several other providers followed.
In
June 1993, the Web boasted just 130 sites. By a year later, the number had
risen to nearly 3,000. As of April 1998, there were more than 2.2 million sites
on the Web.
Sites to visit
·
CERN—find out more about the organization
Who's in control here?
No
one authority controls the World Wide Web. Today's Web site authoring tools
allow virtually anyone who has access to a computer and the Internet to post a
Web site and contribute to the definition of what this medium is and what it
can do. But the World Wide Web Consortium does oversee the development of Web
technology.
You shape the Web
According
to the developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, "The dream behind the Web is of a
common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its
universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to
anything, be it personal, local, or global, be it draft or highly
polished."
With
the development of tools that allow us to create Web sites without having any
knowledge of hypertext markup language (HTML), this dream is being realized. If
you read the Creating a Web Site chapter, you can be one of the forces shaping
this "common information space".
World Wide Web Consortium
Keeping
an eye on the standards of Web technology is W3C, formed by Berners-Lee in
1994. An international group of industry and university representatives, W3C
promotes the Web by developing common protocols for transmitting information
over the Internet. The consortium provides information, reference code, and
prototype and sample applications to developers and users. It is hosted by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science in the
United States, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
Automatique in Europe, and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.
What are domains?
Domains
divide World Wide Web sites into categories based on the nature of their owner,
and they form part of a site's address, or uniform resource locator (URL).
Common top-level domains are:
·
.com—for commercial enterprises
·
.org—for nonprofit organizations
·
.net—for networks
·
.edu—for educational institutions
·
.gov—for government organizations
·
.mil—for military services
·
.int—for organizations established by international treaty
·
.biz—commercial and personal
·
.info—commercial and personal
·
.name—for personal sites
Additional
three-letter, four-letter, and longer top-level domains are frequently added.
Each country linked to the Web has a two-letter top-level domain, for example
.fr is France, .ie is Ireland.
Sites to visit
·
InterNIC—an organization that
administers common domain names
·
Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of
Understanding