What is CERN?
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 13:17:23
-0700
From: ... Jin.Whitt ....@ ... on.net
Subject: CERN
To: view@netvalley.com
You give no explanation of the acronym CERN
beyond "European Laboratory for Particle
Physics". Could you insert the correct name
somewhere?
... forwarded it to Ben and have got the following answer :
The acronym "CERN" stands for "Centre European
pour la Recherche Nucleaire", the original French
name of the organisation.
More recently it was felt that "Nucleaire" implied
reactor or even military applications, so the name of
the organisation was changed to the ""European
Laboratory for Particle Physics" but the acronym
was left as it was.
Confusing, isn't it? 7
Ben M. Segal
Note: Some amazing
numbers - Immensity, Scope, & Why the WWW was born in CERN:
CERN is now the world's largest
research laboratory with over 50% of all the active
particle physicists in the world
taking part in over 120 different research projects.
3000 staff members, 420 young students
and fellows supported by the Organization,
and 5000 visiting physicists, engineers,
computer experts and scientists
specializing in a variety of front-line
technologies are collaborating with CERN
from 40 countries and 371 scientific
institutions.
Binding together the creativity
of so many different nationalities,
backgrounds and fields of research...
... has established CERN
as the global centre for High Energy Physics and set a
precedent in scientific collaboration
which has been followed by Europe's other
fundamental research organizations
(ESO, ESA, EMBL, ESRF)...
"Scientific research lives
and flourishes in an atmosphere of freedom - freedom to
doubt, freedom to enquire
and freedom to discover.
These are the conditions under
which this new laboratory has beenestablished";
these were the words written in
1954 by Sir Ben Lockspeiser,
first President of the CERN Council.
This is the atmosphere in which
CERN has flourished for 40 years and in which
the Organization looks forward
to continuing successfully into the future. 8
1989 - hyperlinks
Work
on protocols and related issues at Cern brought other problems. With
thousands of contributors and contributions, an incredibly huge amount
of data was accumulating. 11
gives a detailed account of the
needs and of the possible solutions, a complex collection of databases
and systems which needed to be unified.
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor
of the World Wide Web. Included in his work are HTML (hypertext
markup language), URL (Universal Resource Locator) and HTTP (HyperText
Transfer Protocol). Now at MIT, he is the Director of the World Wide Web
Consortium which decides on standards for the Web.
About
Tim Bernerslee
statements
of architectural principle explain the thinking behind the specifications.
Piracy Stats (3/20/97)
The financial losses to software companies due
to piracy are astounding. "Global software piracy losses--more than $13
billion--exceed the combined revenues of the 13 largest software companies,"
says Robert Holleyman, president of the Business Software Alliance. According
to the BSA, Eastern Europe has the highest overall piracy rates, with an
average of 83 percent. North America has the lowest regional piracy rate,
with an average 27 percent rate. The BSA defines "piracy rate" as the amount
of software pirated as a percentage of total software installed in each
country.
Exerpts from The
Internet Index Number 4
Inspired by "Harper's Index" 3
96
2 January 1996
Number of people over 16 in US
and Canada with access to the Internet: 37 million
Number who have used the Internet
in the past three months: 24 million
Number who have used the World
Wide Web in the three months before the survey: 18 million
Number of votes against a definition
of "Internet" at the Federal Networking Council: 0
Percentage of connections to InterNIC
Registration Services using HTTP: 71
Percentage of connections to InterNIC
Registration Services using Gopher: 5
Number of localities added to the
US domain in October, 1995: 36
Total number of localities registered
in the US domain: 905
9 June 1996
Number of security incidents reported
to the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination
Center in 1995: 2412
Number of sites affected by those
incidents: 12,000
Number reported in 1988: 6
Estimated amount spent on advertising
on the Internet in 1995: $33,000,000
Estimated total amount spent on
advertising in the U.S.: $159,000,000,000
Number of Internet hosts, as of
January, 1996: 9.5 million
Number of Web servers counted in
the June Netcraft Web Server Survey: 252,685
10 July 1996
Estimated percentage of adults
in the U.S. using the World-Wide Web: 7.7
Number of Internet Service Providers,
worldwide (July, 1996): 3,054
Estimated size of Internet access
market in 1997, in billions of dollars: 2.5
Proposed tax on Internet access
providers serving Tacoma, WA, in percent: 6
Number of US states taxing online
services: 6
Number of private Internet providers
in Egypt: 7
Ratio of number of e-mail messages
to number of phone calls to InterNIC Registration Services during April,
1996: 4.8:1
As of April, 1996, number of domains
in .COM: 316,271
Number of domains registered in
Liechtenstein (.LI): 100
Estimated volume of sales generated
by the World Wide Web in 1995 (in millions of dollars): 436
Estimated volume of sales generated
by the World Wide Web in 1998 (in millions of dollars): 46,000
Cost of the report detailing these
estimates, in dollars: 795
Percentage of online users in the
San Francisco Bay area who are female: 47
17 October 1996
Number of Brazilian orphans to
be available for adoption on the Internet: 48
Number of e-mail address entries,
per person, on the MIT alumni contribution form: 2
Number of ill chess players rescued
after calling for help on the Internet: 1
Percentage of the first 20 ads
in the October '96 Scientific American with Web addresses: 75
Percentage of the first 20 ads
in the October 7, 1996, Business Week with Web addresses: 60
Percentage of online users who
prefer to remain anonymous when visiting Websites: 60
Amount, in millions of dollars,
President Clinton proposes to spend for expanding Internet capacity at
universities: 500
Amount, in millions of dollars,
Microsoft spends to plan promoting MSN in the next 12 months: 100
Number of e-mail messages to the
FBI about the crash of TWA Flight 800 in the first eleven days after the
crash: 900
Maximum prison term, in years,
for possessing an unauthorized modem in Myanmar (Burma): 15
20 December 1996
Estimated number of Internet users
in China at the end of 1996: 100,000
Estimated number of adult Americans
who use the Web daily: 9 million
Amount spent by MCI upgrading the
Internet backbone, in millions of dollars: 60
Percentage increase in Internet
traffic, per month, estimated by MCI: 30
Number of "wanted posters" posted
on the Wells Fargo Bank Web site: 11
Number marked "arrested": 2
Advertising revenue on the Web
in the third quarter of 1996, in millions of dollars: 66
Percentage increase from the second
quarter: 43
Exerpts from The
Internet Index Number 5
Inspired by "Harper's Index"3
97
15 February 1997
Number of times President Clinton
mentioned the Internet in the 1997 State of the Union address: 6
Number of times he mentioned it
in the 1996 address: 0
Percentage of domain registrations
required to pay for the service that have done so: 51.1
Approximate number of new domain
name registrations, per month: 85,000
Rank of Ford among Web advertisers,
in estimated dollars spent, August, 1996: 18
Rank of Microsoft: 1
Average number of customers at
an ISP: 1,850
Number of "Internet search engines"
ordered to remove references to a domain name as a result of a
trademark lawsuit: 25
Number of Boston Public Library
branches: 26 - Percentage connected to the Internet: 100
Number of new top-level domain
names to be added for the Internet: 7
Number of colleges and universities
which are charter members of the Internet II project: 98
16 April 1997
Number of hits on boston.com during
the blizzard of 4/1/1997: 3,123,787
Number of priests in Catholic Priests
On Line on AOL: 30
During 1996, percentage of 1-800-FLOWERS'S
online sales that came via the Web: 55
Percentage of online 1-800-FLOWERS
customers who are male: 62
Estimated total Internet advertising
revenues in 1996: $266.9 million
Percentage of total spent for advertising
computer products: 38
Estimated number of new jobs created
by the Internet in 1996, worldwide: 1.1 million
Number of Internet millionaires
listed on the Internet millionaires page: 88
According to Nielsen, estimated
percentage of people over 16 in the U.S. and Canada who use the Internet:
23
10 September 1997
According to Boardwatch Magazine,
approximate number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the
U.S. and Canada, in August, 1997:
4,133
Number of ISPs listed by Boardwatch
in February, 1996: 1,447
Amount of venture capital investments
in Internet companies during the second quarter of 1997, in millions of
dollars: 561.5
Number of Internet-related job
titles in the new proposed edition of the Standard Occupational
Categories of the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics: 0
Number of occupations listed: 795
Number of Americans who consider
the Internet "indispensable," in millions: 20
Percentage difference in time spent
on the Web by business users over home users: 65
Rank of Internet security among
accountant's top technology concerns for 1997: 1
By the year 2000, estimated percentage
of Internet commerce related to travel: 41
Estimated number of e-mail messages
that will be sent in the year 1997, in trillions: 2.7
Estimated number of e-mail messages
that will be sent in the year 2000, in trillions: 6.9
Estimated amount spent by end-users
on Internet and Intranet products in 1996, in billions of dollars: 19
Number of subscribers to the Internet
Index mailing list, August, 1994: 213
Number of subscribers to the Internet
Index mailing list, September, 1997: 10,118
10 October 1997
Percentage of employers who think
the Web has raised productivity: 48
Number of Web rings (chains of
related Web sites) listed at webring.com: 18,689
Approximate number of page views
at Yahoo, in millions per day: 38
Percentage of U.S. public schools
connected to the Internet, in 1994: 35
Percentage of U.S. public schools
connected to the Internet, in 1996: 65
Number of issued patents mentioning
the word "Internet": 170
Percentage of people who remember
a banner ad from a Web site: 12
Percentage of people who remember
a TV ad: 10
Percentage of CIOs planning to
increase Internet spending significantly in 1998: 31
1997 - XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML)
is an important new
standard emerging for structured
documents on the Web.
XML extends HTML beyond a
limited tagset and adapts SGML
(Standardized General Markup Language),
making it easier for developers
to write programs that process this markup
and providing for a richer, more
complex encoding of information.
Document Object Model
On December 9, , the W3C DOM Working
Group released a new draft of
the Document Object Model Specification
that provides a standard
set of objects for representing
HTML and XML documents,
a standard model of how these objects
can be combined,
and a standard interface for accessing
and manipulating them.
Polls, petitions, and principals: -
The general feeling among web publishers
and webmasters is that two prominent
companies offering web browser software packages
are maintaining incompatability
and individuality for the sake of their own identity,
with the end result being
lower standards of production and higher workloads.10
1999 -
Sometime during 1999 internet users climbed past
150 million.
(NB to be confirmed)
Result of Dec polls on internet
usage - 40% of Canadians use the internet - next are
Australia, Singapore & USA at
25%, with New Zealand at 24%.
NB China taken from 3 key cities