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| A Brief History Of Cyberspace |
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Before You Begin March 1999 • Vol.5 Issue 3 |
A Brief History Of Cyberspace | ||
 It contains more than 350 million pages of information, but it's not a library. It offers courses in everything from art appreciation to the principles of macroeconomics to X Windows/MOTIF programming, but it's not a school. It can take you for visits to foreign cities, but it's not a jet. What is it? The Internet, of course, and with everything it has to offer, it's no wonder it's redefining the way society operates. It has become an important part of the government, schools, the business world, and for an increasing number of people, the home. But before it changes the world too much, it's a good idea to take a peek at how the Internet and its popular partner, the World Wide Web, came to be and where they are in their continuing evolution.  The History Of The Internet. The Internet essentially is a giant network that is composed of thousands of smaller networks. It consists of all the computers, telephone lines, and other communications devices that hold the smaller networks together. It is an infrastructure that supports the transmission of electronic data. The development of the Internet didn't happen overnight. It began in the Cold War days of the Eisenhower administration. The Eisenhower administration, like the rest of the United States during the 1950s, was preoccupied with the Soviet Union. So in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, the U.S. government responded. And respond it did, with the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. America had just lost the race to space, and ARPA was to ensure that the United States didn't lose any more important races to the Russians. After an intense recruiting period, the agency soon had many of the finest minds in the country working to develop new technologies and studying how to use existing technologies for military purposes. A nuclear attack from the Soviet Union was a real threat in the late 1950s, and ARPA was perceived as a major weapon in the fight to prevent—and if it couldn't prevent, then win—World War III. The idea of developing an interconnected computer network came about gradually at ARPA. It wasn't until a scientist from MIT became the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962 that it really began to be considered. J. C. R. Licklider, or "Lick," was interested in the relationship between computers and humans. After contemplating this relationship for several years, he proposed the idea of an intergalactic network, on which scientists could share their research and collaborate on projects. The idea was immediately popular at ARPA, but Licklider's fellow researchers had more important projects to attend to—specifically, preparing for a nuclear war—and Licklider himself did not have the technical expertise to create such a network. So the intergalactic network remained an unfulfilled dream. Robert Taylor, the third director of the IPTO, breathed new life into the idea of networking multiple computer systems. As the story goes, Taylor was frustrated with the computer systems at ARPA. Those systems throughout the country were tied into the Pentagon through connections and had separate control monitors. While using these control monitors one day, Taylor decided he could devise a networked computer system that was much more efficient. He scribbled his plans for such a network on a piece of paper—unlike Licklider, Taylor possessed the technical expertise to design a network—and approached his boss. Twenty minutes later, he had received official approval. Surprised by his success, Taylor immediately went looking for someone to help him build the network. Larry Roberts was that someone. Roberts, a computer scientist who had been working on long-distance computer networking at MIT, came to ARPA in 1967. His experience with long-distance computer networking was a valuable asset, and by January 1969, he had devised the prototype system that would be used to develop the ARPA network. After working through a few technical glitches, Roberts saw the first ARPANet connection come together in October 1969. ARPANet Is Born. The fledgling ARPANet was like an untamed wilderness. Several universities and government facilities signed on, and before long, scientists and scholars from all over the country were performing various experiments to determine what the network could do. One of the biggest discoveries during the early days of the ARPANet occurred when Ray Tomlinson, an engineer with BBN, became the first person to send electronic mail (E-mail) over the ARPANet. Tomlinson also was the first person to use the @ (at) symbol to delimit the end-user and the domain name in an E-mail address. But not every discovery was a pleasant one. One of the first major problems discovered by ARPANet developers occurred in 1973, following the network's first international connection. The ARPANet had picked up much more traffic than its planners had ever expected it to have, and the growing ARPANet was straining the limits of the Network Control Protocol (NCP), which was the standard used to govern the transmission of data over the ARPANet. Initially, no one was sure how to solve the problem. Then Vinton Cerf, a graduate student at UCLA, and Bob Kahn, a member of the BBN team, collaborated in 1974 to develop the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a set of protocols that could handle much heavier ARPANet traffic. Not only did TCP/IP save the ARPANet from a serious crash, but the acceptance of TCP/IP as the default transmission standard could be signaled as the beginning of the Internet as we know it. Most current definitions of the Internet include a clause that states it must be governed by TCP/IP. With this new transmission protocol, the Internet continued to grow. By 1990, it consisted of more than 100,000 hosts (a computer to which other computers are connected) and had consumed the ARPANet. The World Wide What? If the Internet is the infrastructure of cyberspace, then the World Wide Web is the substance. Basically, the Web is a conglomeration of hyperconnected multimedia data. Next to E-mail, it's the hottest thing going on the Internet right now, and it's responsible for bringing the Internet into the homes and offices of millions of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered with cyberspace. The Web was created in 1991 by the English-born scientist Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at the Geneva, Switzerland,-based European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). But this is merely the "where" and "when" of the Web's past. To truly understand the context from which the Web has evolved, you also must understand the "why." And to obtain the answer to that question, you must go all the way back to 1945. That's when Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Roosevelt administration, wrote an article titled "As We May Think" for the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Nearly 50 years before the invention of the Web and more than 20 years before the invention of the Internet, Bush recognized the problems created by the masses of information being produced at that time. In his article, he proposes a system of automated information access in which all materials are indexed associatively rather than alphabetically or numerically. And at the heart of this system is a hypothetical contraption that Bush describes as a memex. "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility," he wrote. "It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." "As We May Think" inspired a handful of futurists in the technology industry, including Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. Engelbart theorized a system of information collaboration and called it the Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge (CoDIAK). Confident in his belief that digital technology could be used to supplement the collective human intelligence, he asked the U.S. government to develop an interactive online computing system. After the government dismissed his idea, Engelbart focused his attentions on other areas of interactive computing and invented the computer mouse. Nelson had similar ideas about information collaboration. In 1960, he initiated "Project Xanadu" with the goal of creating a document universe (a "docuverse") that would interconnect and cross-reference every important written document in the world. The project introduced two terms that have become staples to the Web lexicon: hypermedia and hypertext. Despite their visionary work, Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson were unable to gain the funding and support that was needed to produce a viable system of associatively indexed information. The man who finally was able to accomplish this difficult task was Berners-Lee. Interactive, Interconnected System. Berners-Lee was not a radical visionary in the field of information collaboration. He simply saw a need to create an interactive, interconnected system that would let scientists and scholars share their ideas more efficiently. He took the first step toward fulfilling this need in 1980 when he wrote Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything (ENQUIRE). This program allowed for the interconnecting of files stored on multiple computers in a network. Nearly a decade later, Berners-Lee circulated a proposal at CERN. His proposal described a global hypertext project that would connect an infinite number of digital documents around the world. Although the proposal was initially rejected by his superiors, CERN management eventually took notice and Berners-Lee received go-ahead in September 1990. By the end of that year, he had named the project "World Wide Web," created the first Web browser, and launched the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at the CERN headquarters. At first, the Web was only available to those who had access to the CERN computer system, and it consisted of only one file, the CERN phone book. In August of the following year, the Web officially hit the Internet. It was not an instant sensation, to say the least. Traffic gradually increased, but the Web remained in the shadow of the Internet's more visible components, including E-mail, Gopher, and Veronica, as well as the online services. The World Wide What? Part II. That all changed when a handful of college kids discovered the Web. The first of these explorers was Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the head of a team of software developers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In 1993, Andreessen wrote the code for Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser. With Mosaic, which was available as a free download, individuals could use the Web to view graphics files and text documents. The simple addition of graphics capabilities attracted attention to the Web. The popular media, including The New York Times and The Economist, offered feature articles about this "new" Internet phenomenon. In 1993, the White House went online. Traffic on the Web grew by an astounding 341,634% that year. Turbocharged by such momentum, things began to happen quickly on the Web, and the next group of young explorers entered the picture. These explorers devised ways of organizing and using the information that was popping up all over the Web. In 1994, a pair of Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created the Yahoo! directory (http://www.yahoo.com). About the same time, Joe Kraus and five other Stanford undergraduates founded Excite (http://www.excite.com) in a garage in Palo Alto, Calif. By 1995, the Web was well on its way to becoming the most popular source of information on the Internet. Andreessen had graduated from the University of Illinois and had co-founded Netscape Communications Corp., which produces Netscape Navigator. Microsoft had finally broken down and joined the Internet fray with the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer. For the most part, users had lost interest in the text-based Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, Telnet, and bulletin board systems (BBSes), and online services had begun to feel the crunch of competition as the Web lured away subscribers. The Web's Present State. In the early days, there were all sorts of ways to organize and transmit data on the Internet. Back then, individuals might have used five or six different tools, including Veronica, Gopher, Telnet, and WAIS, to get all the information they needed. But as time has passed and the Web has become the dominant feature on the Internet landscape, online action has been limited to E-mail and the Web. E-mail. E-mail really hasn't changed much since the early days and is still recognized by the @ symbol that Tomlinson used to delimit the username and domain in his first message in 1971. Today, you can attach multimedia files to E-mail messages, but that may be the only major difference. A handful of E-mail applications currently dominates the market, but most individuals use a Microsoft product (such as Microsoft Inbox, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Outlook Express) or a Netscape product (such as Netscape Mail or Netscape Messenger) to send and receive electronic messages. The Web. E-mail is considered to be the most popular activity supported by the Internet, but it's not that exciting. The Web, on the other hand, is nothing but exciting. And the good news is that the Web is only going to get more exciting in the years to come. For one thing, the Web is starting to generate lots of money—and excitement usually follows anything that involves money. In this case, the money primarily is coming from online commerce. Individuals currently can use the Internet to purchase everything from real estate and automobiles to flowers and chocolates. According to International Data Corp., revenues from online commerce are expected to reach as high as a third of a trillion dollars by 2002. The Internet also is generating cash in another place: Wall Street. Starting with the initial public offering (IPO) of Netscape stock in 1995, the Internet has produced several companies that have seen their stocks grow by more than 1,000% in just a few years. The second reason the Web is getting more exciting is that it's becoming even more convenient and user-friendly. It's safe to say that almost everything now happening online is happening to enhance your browsing pleasure. One example of this is the emergence of Web portals. A portal, which is intended to be a starting point for users who go online, combines a number of popular Internet services, including news headlines, Web-searching capabilities, and interactive forums, into a single site. This one-stop convenience is valuable for busy individuals who want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. Check out Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), or Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) to sample a few of the most popular portals. The Future Of The 'Net. One thing that's bound to happen eventually is convergence. Convergence is the merger of Internet sites with other media companies, including TV networks, newspapers, and magazines, to provide extended Internet functionality. An example of this at work right now is Intercasting, which combines the interactive nature of the Web with television programming. Users who have the proper equipment (an Internet connection, a TV card, a subscription to cable TV, and the appropriate software) can use the Internet to access information that complements a participating television program. Another event that is sure to happen is an improvement in Internet connectivity. Most Internet experts agree that access must become ubiquitous and data must be transmitted at higher speeds. Unfortunately, the current Internet was not built to accommodate such high connectivity standards, and it will take some time for a new system to be developed and implemented. But it's the full potential of the Internet that makes it so exciting. Few people could have predicted that the early ARPANet would develop into an information system that has changed the way we live. Where the Internet goes from here could be even more remarkable. by Jeff Dodd |
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