Dr. Vannevar Bush’s predictions

In his 1945 article: “As We May Think”, Dr Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, scientist who had previously worked on the Manhattan Project, predicted the internet; describing a hypothetical device named Memex, he wrote:

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanised private file and library… a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. 

An enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

– Dr. Vannevar Bush (1945)

The Mother of All Demos

Bush’s predictions for the internet began to manifest itself in the 1950s with the beginning of computerised batch processing: a method of running high-volume, repetitive data jobs. The batch method allows users to process data when computing resources are available, and with little or no user interaction. During this time, Douglas Engelbart (an American computer engineer who had been inspired by Bush’s article) had created a research team who began to create the computer interface like bitmap – the precursors to graphical interface. In 1968, Engelbart gave what is considered: “The Mother of All Demos” via a revolutionary form of communication that is commonplace now: video conferencing. Engelbert utilised the earliest form of streaming to broadcast himself to universities across the U.S., demonstrating almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart’s presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system.

The Cold War’s and the Development of Networks

In the 1957, the USSR released the first satellite: Sputnik into space. Amidst the greater political and ideological tension between the Soviets and the U.S. known as the Cold War, this advancement allowed the Soviets to boast their technological might as they now held presence in space. The U.S. government – now under pressure to catch up with the Soviet’s rapidly developing military technology, authorised the creation of DARPA. DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) created a network that would be able to share research and information over large geographical areas known as ARPANET. This network was significant as started connecting universities and students communicating establish Network Protocols. In 1965, Ted Nelson coins term Hypertext and Hypermedia in Lincoln Lab. In 1969, student programmers attempting to send text from California to another Stanford research lab (more than 500km) experienced a system crash which ultimately led to the internet. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson creates email system (and consequently @ symbol). By 1973, UCL and Norway connect to ARPANET and networking begins to expand. In 1974, first internet service provider is created and in the 1980s the first domain name systems is created.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is an English software engineer who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing – a development which shaped interaction design. In 1989, Berners-Lee drew up a proposal for creating a global hypertext document system that would make use of the Internet. His goal was to provide researchers with the ability to share their results, techniques, and practices without having to exchange e-mail. Instead, researchers would place such information “online,” where their peers could immediately retrieve at anytime. Berners-Lee wrote the software for the first Web server (the central repository for the files to be shared) and the first Web client, or “browser” (the program to access and display files retrieved from the server), between October 1990 and the summer of 1991. As well as creating the first website, Berners-Lee also wrote the first version of HTML in 1993. Following his release of the first website, several developments emerged including: the term User Experience was coined in 1993 by Don Norman; Yahoo, the first major internet server portal was established in 1994; and online shopping began to enter the mainstream with stores like Amazon founded in 1995.