Internet history
In this day and age, it’s very hard to imagine what life would be like without the internet and the computer, even though that these two inventions are relatively young, it’s used by over half of the human population on earth. What’s even more intriguing, is the history of how it came to be, which is what we were talking about today in class, on how it was just an idea once, and now something we rely on, on a daily basis.
It began as early as 1945, the idea of a device that you could store information on was mentioned by Vannevar Bush, an American engineer that was involved with the Manhattan Project. His words lead at followed:
“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
Not only was his predictions right about the future, but it came faster than imagined.
Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013) was an American engineer and inventor, whose work that began in the 1950s led to his patent for the computer mouse and the development of the basic graphical user interface (GUI). Douglas’s dream was to use computers to connect people in a network that would allow them to share information and update it in real-time, just like socializing. As previously mentioned, Englebart was the inventor of the computer mouse. It was invented in 1963/1964 as a part of an experiment to find a better way to point and click on a display screen.
The Mother of All Demos
The December 9th, 1968, Douglas held a demonstration of the NLS computer system, that showcased many of the fundamental elements that we use in modern personal computing, such as Windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse and much more. This public presentation was highly influential, and the underlying concepts and technologies influenced Microsoft Windows and Macintosh later on. The downfall of NLS however, was due to the program’s difficult learning curve, looking back at it, looking at it from our perspective as avid users of computing, it’s still confusing for us, until today.
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or as we call it ARPANET, was the forerunner of the Internet and was founded in the late 1960s with its initial purpose to link computers at Pentagon-funded research institutions. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) supported the evolution of ARPANET. What ARPANET did, was basically that it would connect different networks together.
In October 1969, computers at Stanford and UCLA connected for the first time. They were the very first hosts on what would one day become the internet.
Ray Tomlinson (1941-2016) was an American computer programmer who added the first email program on the ARPANET system in 1971. It could be said in other words that, in 1971 email was first developed. He was also the man that made the decision to use the at (@) symbol to separate the user name from the computer name.
Jumping forward to 1984, which is when the Domain Name System (DNS) was made. This meant that addresses on the internet became more human-friendly, rather than using IP addresses with consisted of numbers. DNS allowed the users to type in a domain name that was easier to remember, which the computer then would convert into an IP address.
Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) is an English computer scientist, also known as the inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989. Tim was also subsequently working to ensure that the web was made freely available for all, he’s now dedicated to protecting the future of the web, as well as enhancing it. HTML was also one of Tim Berners-Lee’s inventions, and in 1991 the first webpage appeared.
Jeffrey Zeldman (1955-) is an American entrepreneur, web designer, and speaker on web design. He is also known to be the co-founder of the Web Standards Project, launched to encourage the use of the web standards, recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium(WC3), which is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web, founded the Tim Berners-Lee.
In 1993, the first graphical web browser was accessible to the general public. The web browser was called Mosaic, although it wasn’t the first web browser, it was considered to be the first browser to make the internet easily accessible to the general public, aka non-techy people.
In 1995, the term UX was first heard in public, by Don Norman(1935-), an American researcher, designer, professor, and author. This term came public when we were working for Apple as a User Experience Architect.
2000 and forward.
At the start of the 2000s, the web became more and more popular. Since computers got cheaper and easier to access for everyone as well, it was right at the very boom on the internet, with websites such as Facebook(2004) and youtube(2005) as well as streaming websites going online. It is hard to believe that just 30 years ago it would have been completely different, and the internet, as well as computer systems, are constantly evolving to become better for the users.
Sources:
https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/the-fascinating-history-of-ux-design-a-definitive-timeline/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson
https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Don_Norman
https://www.wired.com/story/50-years-later-we-still-dont-grasp-the-mother-of-all-demos/
https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/t/the-mother-of-all-demos.htm
https://dougengelbart.org/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Douglas-Engelbart
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/raymond-tomlinson
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-Berners-Lee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Zeldman
https://www.nngroup.com/people/don-norman/