A Brief History of the
Internet
Chris Brooks
Outline
•
Prehistory•
Birth of the Internet•
The Web is Born•
The Dot-Com Gold Rush•
Web 2.0 - everything old is new againBack in the day ...
•
Ideas for “calculating machines” have been around for over two hundred years.•
Gradual developments in size, power.•
Each machine could only perform a very specific function, such as adding a list of numbersWWII
•
The military had a need for machines that could perform scientific computation•
Calculating artillery trajectories•
The first digital computers were developed at this point.Colossus
•
One of the most famous WWII computers was ColossusInnovations
•
A key idea that came out of this work was the stored program computer.•
Rather than building a new machine for each job, build a general-purpose machine and create a program for each job.•
Needs:•
A way to create programsInnovations
•
Early computers were tremendously large.•
The ENIAC took up 1800 square feet, and could store about 18K of data.Innovations
•
1947: The transistor is developed•
A “switch” can now fit into a much smaller space.•
Modern CPUs hold billions of transistors.•
1950s : Programming Languages developed.•
Programmers can more easily describe their ideas.Birth of the Internet
•
In the 1960s, scientists began developingpacket-switching networks.
•
These are different from the previously-existing circuit-switched networksPacket switching in two
minutes
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A message is broken into a set of packets, each of which is labeled with a destination•
Each packet is sent separately•
They make take different routes, or arrive out of order.•
Advantages: can deal with network crashes, uses all available bandwidth.ARPANET
•
1966-68: ARPANET proposed and constructed.•
1969: SRI and UCLA connected at 50 Kb/s.•
1970: UC-Santa Barbara and Utah added.A Question ...
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Why was ARPANET developed by the government rather than private industry?A Question ...
•
Why was ARPANET developed by the government rather than private industry?•
The computer industry in the 60s focused on selling mainframes to large corporations.•
Saw computers primarily as a tool for doing arithmetic, rather than a tool for processing information.•
What are the consequences of having a computer network developed by academia and government, rather thanA Question ...
•
What are the consequences of having a computer network developed by academia and government, rather thanprivate industry?
•
Compare to the telephone•
Greater “incubation” time; no need for immediate return•
Emphasis on open standards and interoperabilityOpen Architecture
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A basic premise of the Internet is an ``open architecture''.•
The way in which an application or network is built is publicly available.•
Anyone who follows these instructions can make an application that works with other Internet applications.•
Contrast with DVDs, game consoles, cable boxes, etc.I Love the 80s
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Computing development in the 80s took two parallel paths:•
Networking•
Universities and labs continued to join ARPANET and NSFNET•
TCP/IP developed•
Network still primarily an education and research toolI Love the 80s
•
Computing•
1981 - the IBM PC released•
1984 - The Apple Macintosh released•
1985 - Windows 1.0 released•
Online BBSes - Compuserve, Prodigy•
http://r-101.blogspot.com/2006/08/evolution-of-desktops.htmlI Love the 80s
•
Computers changed from something thatonly scientists and academics knew about to something people had in their homes.
•
Networking was still far off for most consumers.Hypertext
•
The idea of hypertext has been around since the 40s.•
Documents linking to other documents.•
Apple’s Hypercard was a successful tool in the 80s.Hypertext and the
network
•
Online systems for accessing data were developed in the 80s•
Gopher•
WAIS•
No one really got it right until ...The WWW
•
The WWW was developed at CERN in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee•
Provided a way to share information between research labs•
Insights:•
I shouldn’t need permission to link to your data•
If one link fails, everything else should continue to work.The WWW
•
Berners-Lee also helped develop HTML, a language for marking up pages in a display-independent way.•
This was huge: you didn't need to use a specific program, OS or display to use the Web.•
Early HTML was pretty primitive; text and images, not much layout control.The rise of the Web
•
A few things happened in the early 90s to promote the development of the Web.•
Internet backbone was privatized.•
ISPs began developing•
Easier for private individuals to get on the Web.The rise of the Web
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1993: Mosaic developed.•
1994: CERN releases httpd (now Apache), an open-source web server•
1995: Yahoo! founded1995-1999: The Gold Rush
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The mid to late 90s were a period of huge growth for the Web•
1994 - banner ads appear on HotWired•
The beginning of the commercial web.•
Lots of ideas about how to make money. Some of them even worked.•
1995: Internet Explorer released.1995-1999: The Gold Rush
•
1995: eBay founded•
1995: Java released•
Makes it possible to create interactive web pages.The dot-com boom
•
1996-1998 - the “get rich quick” years.•
Lots of money pumped into the IT sector as businesses and individuals went online.•
1998: MP3 format released•
Music files small enough to be downloaded.•
1998: Google founded.The dot-com crash
•
2000: The bottom falls out of the dot-com market•
Many businesses fail; unable to turn a profit.•
People had come up with great ideas without developing a business model.•
Also, an extremely competitive environment.File sharing
•
2000: Napster appears•
Makes it possible for people to share music•
In some ways, a return to the early days of the Web•
Participants as publishers, rather than just consumers•
Napster was sued out of existence, but the genie was out of the bottle•
Gnutella, KazAa, Limewire, Bearshare, BitTorrent and others followed suit.Everything old is new again
•
We are now in what some people call the ``second dot-com boom''•
Fueled by the rise of ``Web 2.0'' technologies•
These are tools or sites that encourage user participation or interaction•
Blogs, youtube, myspace, facebook, flickr, Wikipedia, etc.The future?
•
So where are things headed?•
One way to answer this is to look at developing technologiesThe future?
•
Wireless•
Voice over IP (Skype)•
Video over the Web•
Integrated cell phones/PDAs/game devices/ internet appliances•
Internet in non-traditional devices•
Cars, vending machines, cameras, etc.Summary
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In 60 years, we’ve gone from room-sized computers that can compute 200multiplications a second to pocket-sized
computers that can hold 120 hours of video.
