The internet
 

I must admit that I am one of the millions of people who read Dan Browns Sacrileg and Da Vinci Code. Good books and I read a lot of interesting things I did not know.
Especially the thing about the www surprised me. Is it true that the Swiss CERN actually invented it and did you know that? Funny how they don't give a shit about it...

Well, I'm not sure but a researcher att CERN programmed the first web-browser. And that could be called "inventing" internet. Before that I guess it was much more complicated if not impossible to "surf" on the net... You should found a lot of pages about the history of internet on the...well...net, if you googled or something. ;)

Tim Berners Lee invented the web when he created Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML. He was at CERN when he did this and it is therefore CERN's baby.

Prior to HTML the Internet was a text-based medium, with the exception of downloadable binaries.

Definatley do a Google on the history of the Internet if you are curious.

Gopher and ftp "browsers" were other early attempts. Primitive and without the concept of pages beyond a working directory. Public X clients weren't widespread but it was another interesting presentation effort. I'm also remembering graphical nntp, but the ones I messed with died off when http took off.

I'd forgotten about Gopher... Don't remember it using inline graphics though.

Remember Archie, Veronica and Jughead? ;)
I'm not dating myself, am I?

I remember them as well... didn't use them too much though. Mostly just used newsgroups and email.

Hard to believe this was, what? 10 or 12 years ago... feels like an eon.

Archie variants were big. Looking back, everything seemed to move at lightspeed. Now most everything client or infrastructure lines up behind the one, the only, http.

I'm both attracted and repelled by this discussion. :D

The difference between the WWW and the Internet should be stressed.

The Internet is the network of computers over which the data travels.

The WWW is the web of html files and servers that has grown up on the Internet.

Things you do in your web browser (firefox or internet explorer) tend to be WWW things.

Your email client uses the Internet, but not the WWW, usually. Unless you use web-mail.

The history of the Internet goes back really far. Argueably to the first time people took two computers and wired them together, in order to save shoe leather. Eventually people wired together entire campus's. And then they started moving data between these internal networks via late night phone calls.

There are alot of fun stories about the invention of the internet. Read up on it!

You're all wrong.
Everybody knows that Al Gore invented the internet.

Al Gore pushed through legislation which gave DARPA funding to create arpanet, the precuror to the internet. So without Al Gore, this thread wouldn't exist.

Astonishing how much knowledge there is in the... hm... knowledge section. Until today I (like most people) thought that the internet was something that the army used first and opened to private use (like GPS). Could you imagine a world without the internet? That'd be weird... All those people actually buying porn and music.
Thanks for the info though!

Yep, you gotta love it. All those little digital 0's and 1's are out of the box and try as they might they cannot control them.

I remember the bulletin board system (BBB) people used in sweden. But that was maybe only for Amiga computers...

dan brown is not a credible source of anything he writes about.

I remember using BBSes with RIP graphics. With a fast enough modem (at least 9600) you could mouse-click through the BBS by clicking on ASCII images.

I miss those days. Not really.

edit: although the images were really RIP they just looked like the old school ASCII/ANSI art.

Gore wasn't even around when "it" started ~68 as a project of ARPA. He & Bradley helped the funding process much later (80's) but things were rolling quite well. Check out all the pre-76 RFC's for a historical view before Gore's first election to office, pre-86 for before he helped NSFNet get funding.

What Gore did was roll out legislation to fund NSFNet. NSFNet was the public access project under the National Science Foundation giving wide access to DARPANet which had existed for years. (ARPA/DARPA - ...by any other name, but they've changed it 3 times) The Pentagon was cutting funds for the public project so schools and the few others who had become dependent on the Internet (coined ~74) would have had to do something creative. It was a noisy problem. Gore picked it up and ran. Good for him!

Some accounts tell it as an arranged marriage. A problem created and solved for mutual benefit. The Pentagon was tired of justifying funds for something that was not a direct benefit, so the pitch was gentle and right over the plate.

Who knows, maybe Jimmy Carter would have created Internet for Humanity, or maybe we'd all be using BITNET listservs. :eek:

I think one of the interesting "alternatives" to the internet is the concept of the "sneaker net." Before people start thinking about spies, the sneaker net is based on the concept that sometimes it is cheaper and faster to simply physically transfer data. IE UPS/FEDEX a while computer or a hard drive. When you look at the numbers, its pretty interesting. You can move data a whole lot faster (albeit with greater latency) by physically moving it. And at large enough scales, it is actually *cheaper*!

And of course, I remember playing "strip poker" on a text mode BBS. Gotta love ANSI graphics. Hilarious!

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of burned DVD's.

man, i wish i was old enough to be able to comment with any type of authority on this subject. you guys were living in a pretty exciting time.

Actually, you are right. The Internet was originally a Department of Defense project. Here's a brief timeline that I constructed a few years ago for my Highschool senior project. This was actually on a slide, so it's brief. My paper goes much more indepth, and doesn't actually focus on the history of the Internet, but more of its transition and what I expect for the future.

1969 – US Department of Defense starts ARPANET (US Advanced Research Projects Agency)
1973 – ARPANET globalizes the internet
1982 – TCP/IP (Transaction Control Protocol / Internet Protocol).
1986 - Most Universities are connected to NSFNET (Nat. Science Foundation Network)
1989 – Ohio State University connects CompuServe and Universities
1992 – CERN creates World Wide Web and Graphical Web Browsers

This is the first time I've read this thread but I knew, I just knew that someone would put that in there! :rolleyes:

Aww, man, you missed the most important parts.

The name changes from DARPA to ARPA to DARPA!

More anicdotes: (re: very first ARPANET connection)

http://livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm

Until 1983, the 'internet' didn't use TCP/IP.

email:

http://livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm

SMTP, the current email protocol, was developed in the early 80s.

Lots of good stuff at the livinginternet.com

Just because some of his main themes are questionable doesn't mean you can write off everything he says. Or, well... You can, of course. But that would be stupid.

Oh my God...

Yes.

Yes you are.

You're an old fart like me!


Mr Mephisto

Heh, I know of those. From a moldy old book. I bought an ancient copy of 'the whole internet catalogue' a while back, it is full of cute things like that! =)