Internet Pioneers: a post-lesson summary of the key points

Material drawn from Internet Pioneers and History & Development of the Internet: A Timeline. Links are to Wikipedia.

1945  Vannevar Bush writes As We May Think. In this paper he described a theoretical storage and retrieval device, called a memex — which would use a system remarkably similar to what we now call hypertext. "The machine was to extend the powers of human memory and association. Just as the human mind forms memories through associations, the user of the memex would be able to make links between documents."

1957  Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite

1958  President Eisenhower reacts by forming two government agencies to advance space technologies, weapons, and communication systems: Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

1962  ARPA forms the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which conducts research on command and control systems. JCR Licklider, a psychologist, becomes IPTO's first director. He emphasizes time-sharing systems, graphical computing, point-and -click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate to wherever it was needed. He believed that computers  could be used to augment human thinking and suggested that an ARPA computer network be established to allow researchers to communicate information with each other efficiently. Man computer symbiosis would augment human intellect by freeing it from mundane tasks.

1964  Paul Baran at RAND develops packet-switching networks ("Unmanned nodes would act as switches routing packets from one node to another to their final destinations") and produces several papers on distributed networks. The design of ARPANET relied heavily on Baran's work.

1967  Larry Roberts at MIT establishes the first ARPANET plan. His idea is to connect all of the time-sharing computers to one another directly, over dial-up telephone lines. He draws upon Baran's ideas.

1969  The first ARPANET connections are made.

1974  Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" which specifies the architecture of a Transmission Control Program (TCP).This allowed otherwise incompatible computers to communicate with each other via the IMPs (routers).

1978  TCP split into TCP and IP. TCP or Transmission Control Protocol is designated as the host-to-host protocol and an IP, or internwork, protocol, would pass individual packets between machines. The pair become collectively known as TCP/IP.

1991  World-Wide Web (WWW) is released by CERN in Geneva.

Working during the 80s and the 90s, Tim Berners-Lee creates HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which use specifications for URLs or Uniform Resource Locators, for web addresses. Berners-Lee's vision of "a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere'. He combined hypertext and the internet: "Hypertext would allow any document in the information space to be linked to any other document. The Internet would allow those documents to be transmitted. ... The new system would need to be easy and decentralized so that anyone anywhere could share information without having to go to a centralized authority."

In 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN to develop an information system that would create a web of information. Initially, his proposal received no reply, but he began working on his idea anyway. In 1990, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)—the language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet and designed a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet. Berners-Lee called this address a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). (This is now usually known as a URL—Uniform Resource Locator.) By the end of the year he had also written a client program (browser) to retrieve and view hypertext documents. He called this client "WorldWideWeb." Hypertext pages were formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that Berners-Lee had written. He also wrote the first web server. A web server is the software that stores web pages on a computer and makes them available to be accessed by others. Berners-Lee set up the first web server known as "info.cern.ch." at CERN.

Berners-Lee tried to sell his new creation at CERN as a way to link data between the many incompatible systems at CERN. Still the bureaucracy at CERN was slow in acknowledging his efforts. Berners-Lee then turned to the Internet community. In 1991, he made his WorldWideWeb browser and web server software available on the Internet and posted notices to several newsgroups including alt.hypertext. The Web began to take off as computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own web servers. Often the owners of the new sites would email Berners-Lee and he would link to their sites from the CERN site. His dream of a global information space was finally happening.

As the number of users on the Web grew it became more attractive as a medium. Scientists, who were already used to sharing information on the Internet began to embrace the Web. It was easier to post information on the Web once than reply repeatedly to multiple requests for the same data. They also no longer had to worry whether or not the other scientists used a different operating system. Government agencies who had responsibilities to make their information public also began turning toward the Web.

As more people began using the Web the need for more point-and-click browsers became evident. Berners-Lee had developed his WorldWideWeb browser on a very specialized personal computer called a NeXT. What was needed now was browser that Mac, PC, and Unix users could use. This need was soon met as others, mostly students, began creating new browsers.

1993  Mosaic, which is one of the first Internet browsers is released by Marc Andreesen and proliferates the web with a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Mosaic provides a graphical interface to search the Internet, thus making the Internet more visually appealing.