Todays lecture was on the history of the internet and where it all started.

What did I learn?

I’m found the lecture very interesting especially the early discoveries such as Douglas Engelbart who developed interface ideas in the 1960’s and invented the first ‘mouse’.

He is considered as one of the early computer and internet pioneers. He also gave the first-ever live demonstration of networked personal computing in San Francisco. Today, it’s known as “the mother of all demos,”. He had a vision of people sitting in front of computer monitors, using words and symbols to develop their ideas, and then collaborate. “If a computer could punch cards or print on paper,” he said, “I just knew it could draw or write on a screen, so we could be interacting with the computer and actually do interactive work.”

I learned that the Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the first generation of rooters that the beginning of the process. The first message was sent and in 1971 the first email programme was created by Raymond Tomlinson which was something like ‘QWERTYUIOP’ which was a test email he sent to himself.

 

The most well known figure when it comes to the creation of the internet is Sir Tim Berners-Lee who is known for the World Wide Web. In 1990 he created the HTML which is still used today. Then in 1991 he created the first web page, the website can still be viewed today:

I also felt a sense of awe when the lecture was finished as I realised how far the internet has come from just that first simple html web page by Berners-Lee. It also reiterated for me the ever changing qualities of the internet, and how just in a few short years the development of webpages and the design changed so much.

This was the first proper web browser released in 1993 by Marc Andersen and Eric Bina, it is already visible of the progression in just a few short years and this is something to be marvelled at. The small icons and graphic elements are so simple and it is crazy to see the high quality and highly detailed websites that exist today.

When looking up Tim Burners-Lee I found out that he has many famous quotes of his, these are a few of my favourites:

‘The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people”.

“The Web as I envisioned it, we haven’t seen it yet. The future is still so much than the past”

These are very inspiring and a positive way to end my internet history research. It sums up my expectations for this Interaction Design course and the endless possibilities of the Web.