Web Concepts

Many People can’t imagine there life without the Internet today. We use it for chat, work, shopping, searching and other reasons. And it goes without saying that talking about Internet, people don’t think about protocols and cables either as they don’t think, that TV - is a set of cables and communication satellites use to transfer tv-channels.

Let’s determine the Internet itself: Internet - is an integration of nets of the world, where all the computers “talk” using a special language - net protocol TCP/IP, also it’s based on this protocol and available for using services (such as e-mail, Web & so on). This is a present-day definition. But many years ago the conception of the Internet was different.

Let’s briefly talk about the history of the Internet. The Internet we know today grew from seeds planted by the U.S. government.
And was developed to regain technical superiority for the United States as a response to the USSR that launched Sputnik.
J.C.R. Licklider first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it.

About this same time, a RAND researcher by the name of Paul Baran was working on a classified U.S. Air Force contract
about a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike. Baran’s finel proposal was a packet switched network.
Leonard Kleinrock also developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections.
Packet switching is an approach that slice a message into separate, discrete pieces(datagrams) or packets.

Each packet then moves from its point of origin to its destination over any open route, regardless of which path the other packets take. When all the packets arrive at the destination they are reassembled — and the message is delivered intact. To embody this ideas, that were needed technologies, the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) used a competitive bidding process.
In 1968 BBN won the ARPA contract. So, The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the ARPA which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). Later some other branches were added. So, the physical network was constructed in 1969. Anyone who used the early Internet, had to learn to use a very complex system.

Needless to say, that in the beginning was chaos as it always happens when people are trying something new, using there great energy and excitement, differing techniques for creating common standarts and protocols. E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972.The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. At first the extraction of the information from the Internet was connected with a program called FTP(File Transfer Protocol). FTP-protocol allows a user to connect to a remote system and then exchange files with it. But this system was inconvenient, because required to know for sure the name of the file. Later more convenient FTP-clients with graphic interface were created, but there were still no tools to index the resources that were available.

The first effort to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software.

(more…)