Where it all began…
Dr Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) was an American electrical engineer and administrator who developed the Differential Analyser; a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration.
“Consider a future 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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”.
Bush said this in 1945, long before the internet communication was developed, which highlights his level of thinking. At this point, batch processing was being run, where computers could only do one thing at a time, while being stored in a whole room, as a result of a massive size of the monitors.
Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013) was an engineer and inventor, as well as an early computer and internet pioneer. He is perhaps best known for his work on founding the field of human-computer interaction. Engelbart worked at the lab which resulted in the creation of the computer mouse, the development of hypertext, networked computers and graphical user interfaces. While he was drafted in the Navy was when he came across Dr BUsh’s work and was greatly inspired by his readings.
It was after the soviets released Sputnik, the Americans wanted to match the technological advancements, resulting in DARPA. The plan was to build a network where information could be shared across vast areas. Also, for the worst case scenario, if a city was destroyed, the Americans could still be connected and in contact. These connections were made through Interface Message Processors, which basically connected one network to another. Soon universities adopted the process as a way of sharing research.
The First Email…
It was in the 1970s that the first email and the ‘@‘ sign was created by Ray Tomlinson, who created a system to send a message to multiple computers. This global network became a reality at UCLA, after a programme called Talk, sent an instant message from LA to Brighton. A conversation was started about a forgotten razor, however Tomlinson didn’t tell his boss instantly as he considered it to be a side project. It was in 1974 that the first internet service was provided, but not for another 11 years before symbolics.com was registered as the first domain name.
www…
The World Wide Web was invented by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. It was while he was working at CERN in 1989, that he developed the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing and writing the first web client and server a year later. Berners-Lee shaped the world around him whenever he gave us the world for free. This sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation which had never been seen before.