The History OF WWW

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.

The commands to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full capability. Later Archie was closed down to outside access. There were some other search and transfer information services (Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), HyWebCat). In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a Gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want.

Gopher’s usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA searchable index of Gopher menus. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).

Web appeared approximately at the same time as a Gopher. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, later to be called TCP/IP, allowed diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other. In 1991 it became the World Wide Web and was based on hypertext–a system of embedding links in text to link to other text.

The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its MicroSoft Internet Explorer.

At first the Internet originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited. Fortunately, in 1987, the National Science Foundation (NSF) took over the funding and responsibility for the civilian nodes of the ARPANET. In addition, NSF had built their own T1 backbone for the purpose of hooking the Nation’s five supercomputers together. By the time the ARPANET was formally decommissioned in 1990, the NSFnet/Internet was poised for explosive growth.

All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks - so today’s Internet was begun. Microsoft’s full scale entry into the browser, server, and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet.
Another outstanding event in the Internet history was establishing organization, called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in 1998. ICANN - is a public-private partnership that is “responsible for managing and coordinating the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that every address is unique and that all users of the Internet can find all valid addresses.
These, and other, organizations employ a variety of working groups, task forces, and committees to work through a multi-stage process of suggesting, reviewing, accepting, and issuing standards for the Internet. When a specification reaches the point that it “is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community” it is released as an Internet Standard. Today there are 63 Internet Standards.
A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. 56K modems are not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality.

But new technologies many times faster, such as cablemodems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now. Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years. The next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a “hot spot”. Another trend that is beginning to affect web designers is the growth of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.
Needless to say, the WWW has become increasingly popular today. Nothing is permanent, but changes. Therefore, the evolution of this great inventure of the mankind will still make us new presents that will make easier our lifes.

October 9, 2007 | Filed Under History