The Internet was created in 1969 and has gone through several major steps in
its evolution. In addition, it
has split into several sub-sections, the two primary being email and the WWW.
Entire books have been written on this subject, but this is a concise
overview of the history of the WWW and technologies that have made it what it
is today. WWW stands for the
World Wide Web. It is the fastest
growing section of the Internet and what most people mean when they speak of
the Internet. The WWW is composed
of billions of documents, called web pages, which are linked to each other
using hypertext. This
revolutionary form of linkage transforms online media from linear documents,
like books, into a revolutionary organized anarchist (there’s a method
behind the madness) method of information retrieval.
From its humble beginnings in 1969 to the present, the Internet has
constantly been improved and expanded to become what we are familiar with
today.
In The Beginning…there was ARPAnet, and it was good.
ARPAnet was created in September of 1969 by the Advanced Research
Projects Agency to develop a network that would connect the remainders of
American society together in the event of a nuclear war.
In 1986 ARPAnet was decommissioned in favor of NSFnet, which was based
on ARPAnet and sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
NSFnet was created in 1986 by the National Science Foundation to link
all major universities together in order for scientists to share information
and discoveries to accelerate the rate of progress.
Because of its academics only status this net was not widely used and
was nearly completely academic related. Also,
because the network satisfied the scientists’ needs, not much research or
work was done to improve the net. The
public sector Internet finally replaced NSFnet in 1995.
The Internet I was created in 1993 by an act of congress, opening
NSFnet to the general public, commercializing it, and renaming it to the
Internet. NSFnet continued in a
limited fashion for two more years before fully accepting the new Internet in
1995. The Internet I is what the
public currently uses, but it is fast becoming a victim of its own success.
The tens of millions of users for which it was not designed to handle
are overburdening it. In
addition, the new technologies being developed that require broadband
transmissions at high rates are exceeding the capabilities of the existing
modem based Internet. One major
concern is that there is a finite number of IP addresses available, they ran
out in 1995, but a minor update created millions of new addresses; the problem
is that we’re running out again and no minor fix can alleviate the problem
this time. In 1995, the National
Science Foundation began researching a new network called Internet II.
This new Internet, like the old one, is for academic use only.
While academic use only is what the Internet II is intended for, it is
very likely that sometime in the future it will be released for public
consumption as well. This new
Internet will be broadband and designed for high-end multimedia, far exceeding
the current technological needs. This
will be a purely fiber-optic network capable of speeds greatly exceeding even
the fastest T1 lines in use today. Despite
all this technological wizardry, the Internet could not exit without
standards.
Standards are what allow the Internet to work.
Simply put, TCP/IP is the protocol that allows all computers to talk to
each other over the Internet. TCP
stands for Transmission Control Protocol and it is what does the actual work
of letting computers talk to each other reliably.
IP stands for Internet Protocol and it is what enables computers to
connect to the Internet. IP
addresses are unique identifying numbers that are assigned to each computer in
the Internet to ensure that the right information goes to the right places.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the primary language
of the WWW. Many companies use
HTML as a common document format that can be read by everyone and written by
everyone without any (theoretically) specific program or program version.
HTML combines several types of media.
Some of these are plain text, hypertext, graphics, tables, and more
into a common language that can be displayed as intended by any web browser
that is second generation or better. W3C
stands for the World Wide Web Consortium and it is the organization that
determines what is HTML and what is not.
It provides a standard for all browsers to read from and display the
same information the same way. The
existence of such a capable standard allows the flawless integration of so
many types of media. In addition,
the W3C makes the standards for languages that enhance HTML to even greater
levels of capability. One example
of this is Cascading Style Sheets, which was created to define the formatting
of web pages so that HTML can concentrate of the content of web pages.
We have the Internet and the standards that make it work, how do we
view it?
The oldest browsers, such as Lynx, were text only and are referred to as
first-generation. The first
second-generation browser was Mosaic by NCSA.
Second-generation browsers are characterized by the seamless
integration of text, graphics, and other objects.
What will the future bring?
The Internet is rapidly expanding and will soon reach its limits.
It will expand until it runs out of IP addresses and someone either
releases the Internet II to the general public, or finds a way to modify IP
addresses further to allow more computers to hook into the internet.
On the bright side, the Internet will eventually become a fully
interactive experience no different from life.
When connections and computer capabilities allow, it will become a
three dimensional environment that users can stroll through looking to see
what’s there and finding what they need near instantaneously.
Just as the people who created ARPAnet had no clue that the WWW could
exist outside of science fiction, the future of the Internet will make the
Jetsons look primitive.