(341k)Grech V*. Publishing on the WWW. Part 5 - A brief
history of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Images Paediatr Cardiol
2001;8:15-22
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Editor-in-Chief, Images Paediatr Cardiol
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(341k) |
Grech V*. Publishing on the WWW. Part 5 - A brief
history of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Images Paediatr Cardiol
2001;8:15-22
|
|
*
|
Editor-in-Chief, Images Paediatr Cardiol
|
| Publishing | Internet |
Article
| War is unfortunately an invariable impetus for technological development. Vennevar Bush was one of the pioneers of US radar research in the 2nd World War, and was President Roosevelt’s top advisor on matters of technology in the war. One of his interests was the potential development of a machine that would augment human memory by linking stored or memorised material and associative links through paths of logical connections, and thus facilitating retrieval. He called this machine a memex and described it as desk and camera that could record anything a user wrote and then link it to other pieces of information indexed in its storage space - does this not remind you of the way we now work? Unfortunately, the idea was way too far ahead of its time, and no such machine was ever built, but Bush wrote up his idea in an article in 1945 for Atlantic Monthly titled “As We Think”. |
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| In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. The idea of such a device orbiting the skies did not go down at all well in the United States, especially when associated with the destructive power of the then recently developed atomic weapons, and hence the possibility of a hostile nation dropping an atomic weapon on the US. |
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| Paul Baran, a scientist at the RAND Corporation (a national
defence think tank), proposed the creation of a communication network that
would have several possible routes between any two points. Dvisruption
of one route would allow information to reach it’s destination through
other routes automatically. For this method to work, messages would have
to be split into blocks, and each would travel to its destination independent
of the rest.
"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator." Paul Baran |
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In 1965, Baran acquired funding from the Air Force, but the project
was plagued with bureaucratic problems and Baran withdrew his funding request.
However, several other scientists were working independently along the
same lines. In the United Kingdom, Donald Watts Davies was also working
on a block-switching scheme for the British National Physical Laboratory,
but Davies called these blocks “packets”, a name retained to this day.
| Earlier, in 1962, JCR Licklider (1915-1990) theorized that computers augment human thinking by increasing the ability to communicate over a network. He proposed that if the whole world could be interconnect through an “intergalactic network” ideas could be shared easily and rapidly. However, he had no ideas as to how to create such a global network. |
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In 1965, the Association of Computing Machinery hosted its 20th annual conference. One of the speakers at the event was Theodore Nelson, who gave a presentation entitled “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate.” His audience were some of the first to hear the word “hypertext.” Nelson theorised the creation of a “docuverse”, where Hyper-links pulled portions of documents and multimedia components across the network, and copyrights were managed to protect the intellectual property of contributors. However, a working model was never built.
In 1966, Taylor was appointed managed all of the computer projects funded
by ARPA. Taylor proposed networking the different ARPA computers together.
The proposal was called “Cooperative Network of Time-Sharing Computers.”
Early on, it was decided that network traffic between computers would be
broken up into blocks (a packet-switched network), and that a separate
computer would act as a gateway to the network for each node. This computer,
named an Interface Message Processor (IMP), would be connected to the network
All the nodes would have almost identical IMPs, thus creating a standard
interface for the network between nodes. The proposal was completed in
1968 and the contract was awarded to the BBN company. The computer chosen
to be modified into the IMP was the Honeywell DDP-516, one of the most
powerful computers available at the time.
| Four university research centres were chosen for the initial
test sites for this ARPANET, based on the specialties of each research
centre. These were connected, in order:
1. UCLA (September) 2. Stanford (October) 3. Santa Barbara (November) 4. Utah (December). |
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| Electronic mail (email) rapidly became very popular and Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the first email reader and writer for the network in 1971. Tomlinson decided to use the ‘@’ symbol to denote to which computer the message would be sent, a practice used to this day. |
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| Norm Abramson, a programmer at Stanford, was a keen surfer and frequently visited Hawaii. In 1970, he started work on a radio-based system to connect the Hawaiian islands together. The completed packet-switched network was called ALOHAnet. The following year, ALOHAnet was connected to ARPANET. By 1971, ARPANET was up to 15 nodes with a total of 23 hosts. |
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Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented transport protocol that controls the sending of messages as a collection of individual, sequential data packets and reorganises the received packets into whole messages. When data is lost in transit TCP retransmits the data until either a timeout condition is reached or until successful delivery is achieved. TCP also recognises duplicate messages and will discard as appropriate. If data from the source is being sent at too fast a rate, TCP employs control mechanisms to slow down the data transfer.
Internet Protocol (IP) is the primary protocol in the Internet suite of protocols. It provides internet routing, error reporting, data fragmentation and reassembly. IP addresses are globally unique 32-bit numbers assigned by a central body (Network Information Center - see below). These unique addresses permit IP networks anywhere in the world to communicate with each other. IP addresses are divided into three parts. The first part designates the network address, the second designates the subnet address, and the third part designates the final host address.
With the advent of TCP/IP, the ‘global network’ became a reality. Universities
and government offices and agencies increasingly used the network for communication.
Up to this time, the Internet was, by law, for strictly official use. However,
personal email addresses became commonplace and games began to be played
over the network. Unofficial use of the Internet gained impetus in the
1980’s when personal computers by Apple and IBM became common in both offices
and in homes.
| In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland commenced work on a system for distributing information across a network of different computers and operating systems which he called ‘the World Wide Web’. |
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The ‘Hypertext Transfer Protocol’ (http) is the communications protocol
that enables the transfer of web pages. Http runs on top of TCP/IP and
defines how different types of hyperlinked data (text and multimedia) are
transmitted and accessed. It supports a ‘client/server’ mode of communications
between remote computers where a ‘client’ is a computer that requests data
from a ‘server’ computer.
| This first text-based browser was completed in 1991. In 1992, Marc Andreessen wrote the first graphical browser - Mosaic, and by 1993, this was used by over one million people. Further versions of Mosaic became Netscape. |
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| Up to 1992, it was technically illegal for businesses or private individuals to operate on the Internet. In this year Rep. Frederick Boucher from the 9th district of Virginia drafted a bill in the U.S. Congress that would amend the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. This ‘authorises National Science Foundation to support the development and use of computer networks which may carry a substantial volume of traffic that does not conform to the current acceptable use policy.’ By this time, the Internet bandwidth had increased to 45Mbps. |
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| In 1994, the ARPANET/Internet celebrated its 25th anniversary.
The bandwidth had increased to 145Mbps.
It is estimated that the Web has greatly surpassed one billion pages and that individuals, companies, educational institutions, and all other types of organisations are putting Web pages online at the rate of 65000 per hour. The Web is supported by backbone networks that are comprised of major, high capacity, long-distance computer networks with very high data transfer capacity, typically in the hundreds of Mbps (Megabits-per-second or million bits per second) to 2Gbps (Gigabits-per-second or billion bits per second). This capacity permits the transmission of real time or packaged video and other large files. There is no end in sight to the capacity of the Web. |
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Further reading
Hardy, Henry. "The History of the Net." Master's Thesis, School
of
Communications, Grand Valley State University.
http://www.ocean.ic.net/ftp/doc/nethist.html
Hardy, Ian. "The Evolution of ARPANET email." History Thesis,
UC Berkeley.
http://www.ifla.org/documents/internet/hari1.txt
"ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet". Encyclopedia
of
Communications, Volume 1. Editors: Fritz Froehlich, Allen Kent.
New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc. 1991
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