History Of The Internet

Resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s. As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces. For two years beginning in 1959 at SRI in Menlo Park, Engelbart was provided the opportunity to pursue his visionary ideas further into the formulation of a theoretical framework for the co-evolution of human skills, knowledge, and organizations. At the heart of this vision was the computer as an extension of human communication capabilities and resource for the augmentation of human intellect. By 1968 Engelbart and a group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers he assembled in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI were able to stage a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system. This was the world debut of the computer mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, hypermedia--including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing.

ARPAnet was opened to non-military users later in the 1970s, and early takers were the big universities -although at this stage it resembled nothing like the internet we know today. International connections started in 1972, but the internet was still just a way for computers to talk to each other and for research into networking, there was no World-Wide-Web and no email as we now know it.

It wasn't until the early to mid 1980s that the services we use most now started appearing on the internet. The concept of 'domain names', things like 'www.microsoft.com' (Microsoft's web server), wasn't even introduced until 1984 - before that all the computers were just addressed by their IP addresses (numbers). Most protocols for email and other services appeared after this. The part of the internet most people are probably most familiar with is the World-Wide-Web. This is a collection of hyperlinked pages of information distributed over the internet via a network protocol called HTTP (hyper-text-transfer-protocol). This was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He was a physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, and wanted a way for physicists to share information about their research - the World-Wide-Web was his solution. So the web was started, although at this time it was text-only. Graphics came later with a browser called NCSA Mosaic. Both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape were originally based on NCSA Mosaic.

Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web.CERN releases the first Web server in 1991. 1992: the number of hosts breaks 1,000,000. The World Wide Web sports a growth rate of 341,634% in service traffic in its third year,1993. The main U.S. Internet backbone traffic begins routing through commercial providers as NSFNET reverts to a research network in 1994.The Internet 1996 World Exposition is the first World's Fair to be held on the internet.