Internet/Www

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense conceived of a mechanism to safeguard communications systems in the event of a catastrophe. This mechanism was a small network of computers called ARPANET, or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It slowly grew into a larger network of contributors to ARPA projects. These consisted of researchers, defense contractors, and military personnel. Eventually, the military personnel felt insecure on ARPANET and broke off and created their own network called MILNET (for MILitary NETwork).

The entire idea of networks blossomed in 1986 when the National Science Foundation created their own NSFNET network. NSFNET was put in place to allow access to information resources to any school that wanted them. Once connected to this network, one was able to access all the other computers on the network. NFSNET grew faster than anyone imagined. Everyone wanted access. But instead of growing by a computer at a time, it was growing a network at a time. What it was becoming was a network of networks, dubbed an internetwork. The outcome of this growth is what is known today as the Internet. In fact, from 1969 to 1998 the Internet grew from four machines to over 29 million machines, with hundreds being added each day.

The largest use of the Internet today is electronic mail, or email. Email is the sending of a message from one computer user to another. This unique form of communication has taken the world by storm. Most corporate communication today is done by email, as well as much personal communication, especially over long distances. Why write someone a letter when you can send them email?

The next largest use of the internet is the World Wide Web, the web, or WWW. WWW was developed in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. He desired a system whereby he could publish information so that his colleagues could see and comment on his work, and vice versa. Calling it hypertext, describing its active content, he envisioned a software program called a hypertext server which would send "pages" to a hypertext browser. The very first browser that Berners-Lee developed was text based and showed no graphics whatsoever. The idea was that a program could display a page of information on the screen. The user, or reader, could select a portion of the page that was linked to another page and jump to that other page. These so-called "hotspots" allowed a reader to jump from link to link, drilling down to the information he or she desired. This concept was very novel at the time and created a revolution in information retrieval almost overnight.

In February of 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois-Champaign Urbana developed the first graphical WWW browser. This program, called Mosaic, was written by a student named Marc Andreessen. The program was first only available for higher-end UNIX computers, but by September of 1993 it was available for Macintoshes and IBM PC compatible machines running Microsoft Windows. In March of 1994, Marc Andreessen leaves NCSA to form Mosaic Communications Corporation, and later change the name to Netscape Communications Corporation. The Mosaic Web browser becomes Netscape Navigator. With the graphical browser available, the growth of the WWW accelerated fiercely.

During the 1990s the World Wide Web grew at exponential rates. It was calculated that in mid-1998, there were over 2 million web sites available on the World Wide Web. Today it is not uncommon to see web site addresses on television commercials. The web has meshed with society, and will continue to evolve as technology marches on.