The Internet and the World Wide Web, a brief history

Until the web explosion in the early 90's, the Internet was dominated by academic and scientific users. Outside these areas most people subscribed to private networks such as CompuServe , AOL and Prodigy. (not connected to the internet but providing content and e-mail services)

The popularity of the Web had a profound effect on these private network providers, who for some time struggled to make themselves compatible with the Internet and provide Internet connectivity for their customers. CompuServe now has given up the struggle.

In the late 1950's a requirement for a decentralised computer networking system was recognised by the government in order to maintain lines of communication in the event of an attack on a network node. A solution was formulated by a US government team think tank.

A proposal was put forward in a paper issued in 1962 using a technique called packet switching. In 1969 the first packet switching network was constructed. It linked 4 research facilities UCLA - Stanford - UCSB - and the University of Utah. It was known as ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and funded by the Pentagon.
In 1971 the network had grown to include 15 nodes, by 1972 it included 40. In 1972 the project was dubbed the InterNetworking Working Group. A shortened version of which is the name with which we are all familiar today.

The Internet

With the advent of TCP/IP in 1982 the word Internet became a common term for referring to the world-wide network of research, military and university computers. In 1983 ARPAnet was divided into ARPAnet and MILnet. MILnet integrated into the Defence Data Network. ARPAnet's function as the network backbone was taken over in 1987 by the National Science Foundation network and finally retired in 1990.

In 1990 InterNIC was founded as an organisation to handle registration services etc. and is the nearest thing the Internet has to an administrative centre. However it has no control over the policies of the multitude of organisations that make up the net.

The Web Explosion

1990 European High-Energy Particle Physics Lab (CERN) is the largest Internet site in Europe. As the driving force behind the European expansion of the web, and to promote this, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN created the World Wide Web in 1992.

The Principles of the web was as follows:-

Extension of Gopher using hypertext links.
The development of three new technologies:

• HTML as a common language for page creation 
• HTTP used by a web server to transmit pages 
• Web Browser to receive, translate and display pages 

Now we all want to have Broadband in our businesses or homes.

A. The FREE browser!!

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) with Marc Andreeson (later the founder of Netscape Communications Corp) designed and produced a browser called Mosaic at the University of Illinois.

Made available free of charge on the Internet it spread like wildfire through the Internet community. Within a year an estimated 2 million users were browsing the Web.

By mid 1993, there were 130 Web sites, six months later 600!!

There are now probably over 6,000,000 web sites, this figure is still growing fast!.

In 1993, Marc Andreeson and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics formed Netscape and quickly produced Netscape Navigator for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX platforms. This program became the new standard Internet browsing software.

In 1995 Microsoft belatedly changed it's mind about the future of the Internet, famously that it was not a viable commercial proposition, and produced Internet Explorer.

What's the Web for?

To conduct business, to exchange information, to express your creativity, to collaborate with others, and to just plain have fun!

The Future?? Who knows!