The Internet

Part 2

he Internet is defined as the physical cable/wires and switches that link computers together. The internet style of wiring was designed by the RAND Corporation over 30 years ago to safeguard America in the event of a nuclear war. All previous networking systems had relied on a central communications hub. A nuclear attack to that hub would destroy the entire system. In 1964, RAND made public a network proposal that would have no central authority and would "survive even in tatters".

The network provided multiple routes to send information so that no one node on a network would be needed. This concept was new in that all current networks(i.e. telephone) had a central communication center or centers that all messages passed through. This haphazard network concept was picked up by MIT and UCLA universities and in 1969, the first "internetwork" was created with 4 nodes. The four nodes were supercomputers(of their time!) at Stanford, Utah, University of California-Santa Barbara and UCLA. The first message transfer was L-O-G of the word login. The system crashed after those first 3 letters but internetworking of computers had begun. By 1971 there were 15 nodes on this 1st network named ARPANET; by 1972 there were 37 nodes and it worked. By the end of that year, ARPANET's users had warped the original intent of the network by creating primitive email accounts and exchanging personal messages. Using ARPA'a original networking language, NCP(Network Control Protocol), different types of computers could communicate with each other. Eventually a more sophisticated protocol, TCP/IP, made communication between unlike computers so generic that other networks formed and linked to ARPANET. ARPANET itself expired in 1989,and these linking networks came to be known as the "Internet".

The World Wide Web refers to the way that the Internet is used. In simple terms, it is the software that is used by the nodes of the Internet to exchange various kinds of data. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN Laboratories in Switzerland, devised the concept of hypertext in 1989 and the WWW, or W3, was born. Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) is the language you are studying in this class. It is this language that is universally read by all browsers(software used to access the WWW). Berners-Lee also created the URL(Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP(Hypertext Transfer Protocol). The first web server and client machines were built at the CERN laboratories in 1990. Remember Steve Jobs and Apple Computers? From 1976 to 1983, Apple flourished with over 100% growth rate per year. By 1983, IBM realized that personal computers were here to stay and entered the market vigorously. Within 2 years IBM overtook Apple in sales of PCs. By the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989-90, there were enough networkable personal computers(both Apple and IBM based) to make the WWW a workable communication medium and the Web took off. CERN developed the first browser, the Portable "Line-Mode Browser" and releases it as freeware in 1992. At the same time, the University of Minnesota releases a simpler browser system, GOPHER, that has no hyperlinks. By the end of the year, the world had 50 web servers. The increased traffic created a need for more organization. W3C, along with the US government, contracted with Network Solutions, Inc. to help organize the Web. Network Solutions divided web addresses into the common suffixes ".org", ".gov", ".net", ".edu", and ".com" for commercial business. Given the explosion of commerce on the Web, perhaps they wish today that they had created more than one suffix for commercial business. Many foreign countries used there own suffixes but Network Solutions became the unofficial registry for all addresses. Note: In 1999, the US government created a non profit organization, ICANN, that will be the new Web traffic cop. Network Solutions, as well as any other for profit company, can sell web addresses.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen working for the University of Illinois released the 1st point and click graphical browser. He named it Mosaic. By the end of the year, he had left the university and started a corporation named Mosaic Communications(It later would change its name to Netscape Communications). Netscape Navigator became the defacto browser on nearly all networked computers.

Another software company by the name of Microsoft, had by this time taken the lead in office productivity software. It's head, a young genius by the name of Bill Gates, decided to start what have come to be known as the great "browser wars". With the introduction of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, Netscape had competition in the World Wide Web field. Microsoft began to strike deals with computer manufacturers to factory load Internet Explorer on new machines. Today, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has taken a huge lead over Netscape. Approximately 95% of users are using IE as a browser. Both browsers basically read HTML the same way, but a good web developer will check his/her work on both browsers, as well as other browsers, for slight differences.

The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web is nothing short of phenomenal. It is hard to get an exact count of web statistics because factors change so quickly. For example, around the turn of the century, computer manufacturers are selling computers for under $1000 opening up the Internet to a large group of people who previously could not afford them. It was estimated early in 1999 that 760 new US households were joining the WWW per hour!!! The number of published websites was doubling every 53 days! The growth of user numbers has slowed recently, but newer applications are sending files of larger size across the world. Of course, with such rapid growth, a big concern is bandwidth of existing cables. Much attention is currently being focused on ways to cope with the increased traffic demand. Certainly, the Internet and the World Wide Web has evolved into a medium unlike anything it's many creators intended it to be.

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