In Lesson 10 we looked at the history of the internet, who created the World Wide Web and other relevant features such as the first working mouse. The origins of the internet and computers are rooted to the 1950s in America initially used by military scientists and university staff during The Cold War.

Dr.Vannevar Bush

Dr.Vannevar Bush is widely recognised as the godfather of the wired age that we live in today, where technology is a necessity and the invention of social media is taking over society. Bush predicted a “memex” which is similar to computers or smartphones.

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is merchandized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” – Dr Vannevar Bush

 

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart was an engineer, inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. Engelbart’s most famous invention is the computer mouse, developed in the 1960s. The mouse was not adopted for general use until the 1980s when Apple computers began using them. Douglas saw technology, especially computers, as the answers to the problem of dealing with the ever more complex modern world and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technology to augment human intellect.

I have included an image of the mouse that Douglas Engelbart created.

DARPA

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in 1958 as a reaction to the Soviet Union launching the Sputnik 1 satellite during The Cold War. Their mission make breakthroughs in technologies for national security and have shaped the modern world today.

ARPANET

Advanced Research Projects Agency Network started its development in 1966 and was released 3 years later. This connected one network to another network which allowed universities to connect and share research. They used interface messaging processors to do so. Access was extremely limited until it began to become accessible to the masses.

 

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson created the first email program on ARPANET which eventually allowed people to send messages to multiple recipients or to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To do this, he used the @ sign to separate the username from the name of their machine.

 

Internet and the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee was the creator of the World Wide Web and developed many of the principles we use today, such as we browsers, HTML, HTTP and URLs.

“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”

In 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the web in a document called Information Management: A Proposal – his boss said it was “vague but exciting…”

By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had written the first web client server creating the web technology spread which were specifications of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.” – Tim Berners-Lee

 

 

 Jeffrey Zeldman – an American entrepreneur, web-designer, author, and speaker on web design. Following a career in advertising, Zeldman launched himself as a web designer with Warner Bros’ Batmanforever.com and in 1998, he co-founded The Web Standards Project to bring HTML, CSS, and JavaScript standards to our browsers.

 

We also had a look into web standards and why we need them.

Why do we need web standards?

• Keeping the web free and accessible to all
• Help make source code simpler, reducing development and maintenance time
• Allowing for backwards compatibility and validation
• Helping to maintain a better SEO
• Creating a pool of common knowledge

Overall, I found this class to be one of the most interesting so far, particular as we have started to use HTML and CSS and I can personally understand how extravagant a creation something such as the World Wide Web is. Not to mention that I have been researching Tim Berners-Lee for my web essay project, so this added a lot of depth around my previous knowledge of the creation of the web.