A HEART BREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS ON THE INTERNET

The History of the Internet

Picture

Packet Switching

Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data – regardless of content, type, or structure – into suitably-sized blocks, called packets. Packet switching features delivery of variable-bit-rate data streams (sequences of packets) over a shared network. When traversing network adapters, switches, routers and other network nodes, packets are buffered and queued, resulting in variable delay and throughput depending on the traffic load in the network.

Time Sharing

This is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and mutlitasking. It's introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing. By allowing a large number of users to interact concurrently with a single computer, time-sharing dramatically lowered the cost of providing computing capability, made it possible for individuals and organizations to use a computer without owning one, and promoted the interactive use of computers and the development of new interactive applications.

The 4 Foundations

ARPANET - The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The network was created by a small research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.  The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider, of the Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) company, in August 1962, in memoranda discussing his concept for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. Those ideas contained almost everything that composes the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, at the United States Department of Defense, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA (the initial ARPANET acronym). He then convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this computer network concept was very important, meriting development, although he left ARPA before anyone worked on his concept.

CYCLADES - The CYCLADES packet switching network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was named after an island group in the Greek Aegean Sea called the Cyclades as it was designed to "connect isolated 'islands' of computing." It was developed to explore alternatives to the ARPANET design and to support network research generally. It was extremely influential on the Internet's initial design. The CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data, rather than the network itself, using unreliable datagrams and associated end-to-end protocol mechanisms. These concepts were later used in the TCP/IP, the protocol of the Internet; CYCLADES was one of the predecessor systems with the greatest technical influence on the Internet.

NPL - In 1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) proposed a national data network based on packet-switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally but by 1970 he had designed and built a packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions. By 1976 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.

OSI - Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is an effort to standardize networking that was started in 1977 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Prior to OSI, networking was largely either government-sponsored (ARPANET, CYCLADES) or vendor-developed and proprietary. The OSI reference model was a major advance in the teaching of network concepts. It promoted the idea of a consistent model of protocol layers, defining interoperability between network devices and software.

World Wide Web and HTML

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.

In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from around the world needed to share data, and with no common machines and no common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation.  He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine (turned down as it abbreviates to TIM, the WWW's creator's name) or Mine of Information (turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is "Me" in French), but settled on World Wide Web.

He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal  and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well.  However, it could run only on the NeXT (a specific computer company from California); Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer called the Line Mode Browser. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web — previously users had had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.

Source [www.wikipedia.com]