August 2016
August 2016 is the 35th anniversary of the PC and the 25th
anniversary of the World Wide Web.
This month we had a look at the history of the development of the
net, the web and the rise of the PC and concluded with a discussion on
the effect the rise of the web has had on the world of information.
This brief history is drawn from the following sources.
https://www.w3.org/wiki/The_history_of_the_Web
https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/08/25-years-ago-the-world-changed-forever/
There are four components to the web. 1. The servers that holder
documents, called the net, 2. the documents that link to the net,
3. the
browser that finds the documents and the 4. protocols that makes it all
work.
Birth of the net.
Let’s start with the development of the net.
- US Department of defence funded the Advanced Research Projects Agency
ARPA in 1957 to fund science research.
- In 1962, Joseph Licklider writes a paper “man – computer symbiosis”, he
is head of the Information Processing Office at ARPA. Planning for a
computer network starts and by October 1967 the ARPA net is born.
- By October 1969 there are four computers forming the ARPA net
- Problem! How to connect these computers without tying up resources?
- Solution! Packet switching. Send data requests in small bursts, the
computer recognises the sender accepts the information while having time
to read other signals from other computers.
- Other networks adopt this idea and new networks are born, including,
the UK University network called “Janet” and the first American
public network called “CompuServe”.
- Different network protocols make connection to the other networks
difficult. The solution developed by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf is
Internet transmission control program by ITCP December 1974.
- This protocol asks the host computer to maintain the integrity of
the packet sharing. That means the computer receiving the requests
will translate the request to its network system, which means each
computer regardless of OS will receive data from another networked
computer. ARPA funded development of specification and 1977 saw the
first successful demo. In 1981 specifications were published. In
1982 they were adopted worldwide as TCP/IP protocol. TCP stands for
Transmission Control Protocol and are the directions used to connect
hosts to the internet. IP stands for Internet Protocol and is the
protocol for addressing.
More details here
- FTP and email had already been developed and with TCP/IP protocols
established all networks can talk to each other, the internet as we
know it was born.
The next problem was how to find the information on these networks.
Birth of the World Wide Web
-
The first information retrieval system was called Gopher. Created
by University of Minnesota it is used for delivering menus of links
to files computer resources and other menus. John Symonds described
how he used Gopher when working for Balmain Hospital. He signed on
to the Sydney uni net, then using Gopher he would find a list of
documents, unfortunately Gopher showed no details of the contents.
Taking a guess, he would download one to the Sydney Uni network in
about 10 seconds then download it to the Hospital machine in about
10 minutes.
- In 1993 the University of
Minnesota decide to charge licensing fees, which signed its death
nell.
- 1989 Tim Berners-Lee was working for CERN, famous for the Hadron Collider and wrote a
proposal called “Information Management Proposal”. It is around 10
pages long and proposes an information sharing system using hypertext.
- On September 1990 CERN buys a NeXt cube for Tim, who writes the first browser editor called
WorldWideWeb. Here is a screen shot
- The browser editor was renamed Nexus to define it from the information space now called World Wide Web
- 1991 Nicole Pellow a graduate student employed by CERN wrote the original ”Line-mode
Browser”.
- August 6th 1991 the files
detailing the World Wide Web are posted on CERN net by FTP. Tim
sends an email on alt.hyperlink introducing CERN users to World Wide
Web, info.cern.ch becomes the first web server. The World Wide Web
is open for business.
Here is the full text of the e-mail
- What Tim did was bring
ideas like General Markup Language and Apples hypercard system into
the three elements of the World Wide Web, HTTP HyperText Transfer
Protocol, HTML Hyper Text Markup Language and URL Universal Resource
Locator. In summery Tim devised the way documents are found the URL,
how to note documents to be found and displayed, the HTML, and the
protocol that ties it all together.
- December 1991 the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Centre in Stanford University installs the first
North American server.
- March 1993 commercial use of www is allowed
- April 30th 1993 CERN declares WWW
technology freely available
- By October 1995 there are 200 servers world
wide.
- Then on October 13 1995, a free browser
called Netscape Navigator is made available for personal computers
and Macs bringing the WWW to the world.
After tea we looked at the history of the PC which is 35 years old
this year.
Of note was the rise of the clones with Compaq reverse engining the
PC BIOS then building there own. After surviving the invertible legal
challenge from IBM, the cat was out of the bag and the clone industry
took off. IBMs hold on the industry was lost and in 2004 they sold the
PC business to Lenovo.
After that we had a discussion on the effect of the World Wide Web.
While it started as a method finding documents its explosion as an
overarching tool for any action has changed for ever how documents are
retained. I noted how I had letters from an uncle written in World War 1
and now with e-mail the main personal communicate used by soldiers in
Afghanistan those records will be lost. John remarked how a Liberian he
knew in the Mitchel Library told him that the last twenty years will be
the least recorded period in our history
Steve South
Sig Leader
