7. So…in the
beginning, there was
….
The idea of the global village
Marshall McLuhan – media theorist and writer –
coined the term in the 60s, indicating that
increasingly, people would become less attached to
their nationalities in the traditional sense as they
became more involved in each other’s lives –
regardless of location.
8. On with history…
The history of the ‘Net, is of course up for interpretation
and some what disputed.
Accepted versions regard the internet as a product of the
Cold War
The Air Force in 1962 – wanting to maintain the ability to
transfer info around the country even in the event of
destruction from attack – leading scientists were
commissioned to solve this problem.
Some still call it a myth that has just been undisputed so
long it is accepted as fact. That the government developed it
to protect national security in the event of nuclear attack.
9. The Internet – version 2
(.0?)
Joseph C. R. Licklider, a devotee of McLuhan’s thinking –
envisioned linked home computers and left the field of
psychology for computer science. He saw these things as
necessary for political evolution and success.
He wrote in 1960: “The hopes that in not too many
years, human brains and computing machines will be
coupled….tightly, and the resulting partnership will think
as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a
way not approached by the information handling
machines we know today” Man-Computer Symbiosis
10. Inspiration
So, just as computers were getting smaller and less
expensive, this writing inspired scores of computer
experts to plunge ahead toward the development of
what we know now as the INTERNET – a global
network of interconnected computers that
communicate freely and share and exchange
information.
11. Backing up a bit…
The Computer. Without it…well, no Internet.
Originator: Charles Babbage (WAS going to make a
steam-driven computer…interesting) but money and
resources failed him. So by the mid-1880s produced
plans for a computer that could do algebra stored in
memory and used punch cards for input and output.
Colossus – developed by the Brits to break German
codes, was the first digital computer. It reduced
information to binary code (digits from 1 – 0).
12. More on computers
The ENIAC – Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator, came about in 1946. 18 feet tall, 80 feet
long and 60,000 pounds. 17,500 vacuum tubes and
500 miles of electrical wire. Could fill an auditorium
and ate up 150,000 watts of electricity.
Commercial computers burst onto the scene thanks
to IBM. Mostly sold to businesses and transformed
the business from rental to sales.
13. So back to the
Internet…
ARPANET
ARPA – Advanced Research Projects Agency
To create a decentralized comm network in case the
HQ was knocked out.
Packet switching – data gets broken down into packets
(datagrams) that are labeled to indicate the origin and
the destination of the info. They were forwarded from
one computer to another until it reached its
destination. If lost, can be resent from original
computer.
14. Two things
Common rules (protocols) and common languages (HTML)
Embedded instructions to reroute if the next destination
computer was unavailable.
ARPANET went online in 1969 – Stanford U, UCLA, U of
California-Santa Barbara and U of Utah. Took one year to
become reliable and fully operational.
On Oct. 29 – computers at Stanford and UCLA connected
for the first time - the first hosts on the future Internet.
The first message sent was supposed to be “login” but the
link crashed on the letter “g.”
15. Eeeeeee! - Mail
Ray Tomlinson created the first email program in
1972. He was an engineer and gave us the wonderful
“@”
16. More milestones
1971 – Project Gutenberg – global effort to make
books and documents in the public domain available
electronically-for free- in a variety of eBook and
electronic formats.
1972: CYCLADES – France began its own ARPANET-like
project called CYCLADES – it eventually shut down
but it did pioneer a key idea: the host computer
should be responsible for data transmission rather
than the network itself.
17. More milestones
ARPANET made its first trans-Atlantic connection in
1973, with the University College of London. Also in
’73, email accounted for 75% of all ARPANET network
activity.
1974: TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol/IP. A
proposal was published to link ARPA-like networks
together into a so-called “inter-network” which
would have no central control and would work
around transmission control protocol (eventually
TCP/IP)
18. More and more
1977: the PC modem
1978: The BBS system – developed during a blizzard in
Chicago, SPAM was also born in ‘78.
1979: MUD, the earliest form of multiplayer games.
Precursor to WoW and others. Text-based virtual worlds.
Also, USENet was born – created by two graduate
students, was an internet-based discussion system.
1980: CERN (European Prg for Nuclear Research) launched
ENQUIRE, a hypertext program that allowed scientists at
the particle physics lab to keep track of people, software
and projects using hypertext (hyperlinks).
19. The 80s!
EMOTICONS! :-) were born in 1980. In 1982, Scott Fahlman proposed this.
1983: ARPANET switches to TCP/IP
1984: Domain Name System
1985: Virtual Communities – The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link).
1986: Protocol Wars- Europe was trying to use their own, our TCP/IP eventually won
out.
1988: First real-time chat. IRC – Internet Relay Chat
1989: AOL is launched
1989: Proposal for the WWW – originally called “Mesh” was proposed by Tim Berners-
Lee. Code was written in 1990 by Lee during which time he coined the WWW phrase.
20. The roaring ‘90s
First commercial dial-up Internet provider (“the World”). ARPANET ceased to exist.
The first code protocols for the WWW were finished – written by Berners-
Lee….along with standards for HTML, HTTP and URLs.
1991: First web page created. First content-based search engine: Gopher. MP3 became
a standardized file format. First webcam. Set up at Cambridge U to monitor a coffee
pot so people would know it was empty and not be disappointed when they got to an
empty pot.
1993: first graphic web browser – Mosaic. Government got online (.gov and .org was
created).
1994: Netscape Navigator
1995: Geocities and the Vatican go online, Javascript is born.
1996: First web-based email – Hotmail is born.
21. The 90s continued
1997: “weblog” is a term
1998: First news story is broke online instead of in
traditional news. It was the Monica Lewinsky/Clinton
scandal. Drudge Report ran it after Newsweek killed it.
Google also launched in 1998, along with Napster.
1999: SETI@home launches. This was when the Signs of
Extraterrestrial Intelligence folks put a project online for 3
million computers in homes worldwide…it created a
supercomputer, that when the screen saver would come
on, it would take that processing power and use it to
analyze radio telescope data to look for signs of ET.
22. Issues
Piracy
Security
Data Mining
Privacy
The Digital Divide or the Technology Gap/Information Gap
Child Internet Protection Act/Child Online Protection Act
Upheld in the Supreme Court in June 2003, gave Congress the
power to require libraries to install filters on computers that
had access to the web if they were to continue receiving
federal funding.
