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TRACING WORLD WIDE WEB ORIGINS
(or "How the Web was Woven")
  
  Along with e-mail, the World Wide Web has recently become
  one of the best-known Internet features, disseminating
  information through structured menus, extensive hyperlinks,
  and sometimes spectacular graphical interfaces.
  
  Receiving or downloading information via Internet is nothing
  new; people have been doing it for years via FTP or Gopher
  menu. What makes the Web unique is that most of these
  functions occur transparently. While in the past, a user
  had to have some knowledge of how Internet functions actually
  worked and often had to input long arcane character strings
  to find desired information, the Web offers a point-and-click
  interface that demands almost no previous knowledge of
  Internet (or computer) workings.
  
  Comprised of thousands of computers linked worldwide by
  the Internet, the Web receives its name from its function.
  Instead of harboring linear connections (similar to a long
  string of individual Christmas light sockets), all sockets
  on the Web are interconnected, allowing a user the potential
  to jump from one site to any other site with only a click
  of the mouse. The Internet has interconnected the same
  computers for years, but now users can actually see these
  sites in all their graphical glory -- as if the previous
  empty light sockets have now had bulbs placed within them.
  In essence, the Web has simply illuminated, visually, much
  of what has been in place for two decades.
  
Origin of the Internet
  
  What those unfamiliar with the Internet often do not realize
  is that the Internet itself originated with the government
  under the jurisdiction of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects
  Agency), which in 1973 became DARPA (Defense Advanced
  Research Projects Agency). It was created to do three
  things:
  
  * Connect military, university, and defense contractors
  * Promote rapid information exchange via computer
  * Support communications in case of nuclear attack
  
  Initially, two main problems had to be solved. Telephone
  switching nodes had to be constructed that would work well
  enough to facilitate information sharing among the networked
  computers. Also, protocols had to be designed and implemented
  that would allow each of the connected computers -- no matter
  its architecture -- to exist in the subnetwork and share
  its resources.
  
  In late 1967, ARPA contracted with Stanford Research Institute
  to develop specifications for the communication system
  itself. Although the final SRI report wasn't released
  until December 1968, enough essential work had been done
  by the summer for the ARPANET procurement to officially begin.
  The original schedule documented a five-year process to
  procure, construct, and operate the network, and then transfer
  it from ARPA to some common carrier. One should note the
  original premise defined by ARPA: "The ARPA theme is that
  the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium
  between people dwarfs into relative insignificance the
  historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic
  engine." (ARPA draft, III-24) Even in the Internet's earliest
  stages, the potential for quick world-wide communication
  was obvious.
  
  ARPA developed a program plan, which developed into a set
  of specifications, and these specifications were connected
  to a competitive Request for Quotation, in order to find
  an organization that would design and build the subnetwork
  between the IMPs. From an initial pool of 140 potential
  bidders, twelve submitted actual proposals, and the ARPANET
  contract was finally won in 1969 by Bolt, Beranek and
  Newman, located in Cambridge, MA. The initial system would
  be delivered on Honeywell computers.
  
  Now the protocol that would allow the hosts to communicate
  with each other over the subnetwork had to be developed.
  Based on system differences, ARPA decided that the four
  original sites -- UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and UTAH -- would
  design their own protocols, since the gurus there already
  knew their system intimately. In addition to protocol,
  hardware and software had to be developed to allow each
  host to interact with the others. In this way, the
  government and academic groups worked together to form
  ARPANET, with the underlying assumption that the academic
  world could advise the government on extraneous possible
  uses for the ARPANET.
  
  In September 1969, the computers arrived and were soon
  sending packets to each other: Success! This original system
  was strong enough that computers could find the quickest
  route between sites to send information, as well as
  discern and circumvent "crashes" or blocks along the
  route without losing data.
  
  Later on, during the development of satellite and radio
  packet networks, a new protocol named TCP/IP was created
  that allowed computers of different types of networks to
  share resources. The development of TCP/IP marked the
  beginnings of the Internet as we know it today, as various
  networks could now be connected via gateways. Internet
  Protocol could be encapsulated within lower-level
  network packets.
  
The Birth of the Web
  
  The idea of graphical interfaces on the Internet -- the
  World Wide Web -- was conceived in the late 1980's at
  the European Particle Physics Lab in Switzerland
  (CERN), and the HTML "language" (actually a tagging system)
  was created as a means to access and display documents
  stored on servers anywhere on the Internet.
  
  Initially, through 1993, there was some struggle with
  the concept, not due to any flaw in the idea but to the
  lack of hardware that could adequately support such an
  ambitious medium: at that time, Internet connections and
  modems were too slow to adequately handle large graphics,
  and the Web was only feasible on large systems directly
  connected to each other. 
  
  In addition, the hyperlinks that make the "magic" of
  the Web work -- the strands connecting every nexus on
  the spider web together -- had yet to be created. The
  arduous process of inserting sufficient links was
  sometimes made worse by page name and location changes,
  caused by internal site reshuffling and the Web's
  rapid growth.
  
  Still, faster modems and phone lines coupled with
  graphics compression techniques have enabled what was
  a virtual pipedream to become reality. The Web has
  quickly become a buzzword among computer novices and
  technicians alike. In light of its willingness to explore
  new communication frontiers when computers were merely
  considered number-crunchers, the government should also
  be front and foremost when it comes to finding useful
  implementations of Web technology.


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(c) 1997 by David M. McCandless. All rights reserved.

Material to be used solely in regards to examining
my credentials for employment.