History Of The Internet
Although we consider the internet to be a new technology in the modern world with the development of mobile devices and smart tech that allows us to connect to the internet almost anywhere in the world. After the invention of the internet and the first computer technology rapidly advanced over the past couple of decades and still continues to grow everyday. Individuals like Dr Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart played a major role in the development of the technology we use today.
Dr Vannevar Bush
Although Dr Vannevar Bush wasn’t directly involved in the creation and development on the internet and what we now know as the World Wide Web, he is still widely recognised as the godfather of the wired age that we live in today where technology is a necessity in our lives, as generations have progressed throughout the years technology has began to create an imprint on the minds of young people, with the invention of social media and other technologies that offer people an escape from realty.[1]
“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.” – Dr Vannevar Bush[2]
In 1945, Dr Vannevar Bush published an articled titled As We May Think, the article described an idea of a new technology dubbed Memex, this was a technology that would allow the enhancement of the human memory through storing and receiving documents and data. This technology had a resemblance with the Hyper Text Markup Language that was created by Tim Berners Lee in the late 1900’s.[1]
“It is sooner than we think” – Dr Vannevar Bush
Born in 1890, Dr Vannevar Bush had an extremely interesting life and career. Bush studied engineering at Tufts College and went on to develop ideas for the future, he used to say “It is earlier than we think.” and his friends, family and close relations saw him to be always looking towards the future and what the future will hold for us as humans.[1]
Douglas Engelbart
Born in 1925, Douglas Engelbart was an American inventor renowned for the development of the first computer that included a working mouse and keyboard that allowed humans to interact with the computer. He is widely recognised for the first ever variation of the computer mouse, keyboard and computer which he developed throughout the 1960’s. This was technology that we still use today but it has just been developed massively over the years to where we can now interact with technology through touch and voice recognition. Originally from Portland, Oregon Engelbart went on to to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University. Throughout his career he went on to create the computer mouse, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and groupware, this technology Engelbart developed had similarities to the ideas Dr Vannevar Bush had in the 1940’s. Douglas Engelbart aim was to connect individuals in a network that allowed them to share information between one another in real-time, this idea was extremely similar to social media and email that we use today. Come 1997, Engelbart was awarded one the the highest honours within computer science which is the A.M. Turing Award.[3]
I have included an image of the mouse that was created by Douglas Engelbart below.
Web 1.0 – Web 1.0 refers to the earlier stages of the internet and the World Wide Web, these were web pages that were primarily just static, basic pages utilising HTML that was the emerging technology at the time. As this technology was still being developed it was all extremely basic and was primarily focused on just sharing basic information through a web page.[4]
Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 refers to the later years of the internet and the World Wide Web where users were able to share information regarding their personal thoughts, opinions and life events. This was the earlier stages of social media back in the early 2000’s when Facebook and Youtube were created which allowed users to share video content, photos and personal statuses about themselves. While the technology was advancing it was still quite limited as to what you could do, uploading large files to YouTube would usually take a long time and there would often be limitations to how large the file could be.[4]
Web 3.0 – Web 3.0 refers to the stage of the internet and the World Wide Web we are using today, Web 3.0 focuses more on the back-end system development and the storage of user data. In the modern world, user data is extremely valuable especially with the development of the World Wide Web companies are looking to purchase user data to allow them to target their advertising – this is why we see adverts of certain items we have searched on google in the past.[4]
Darpa
The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a government organisation that is apart of the Department of Defence in the United States focusing on research and development. Their mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security and are considers as the agency that shaped the modern world that we live in today. DARPA was created in 1958 as a reaction to the Soviet Union launching the Sputnik 1 satellite during the Cold War, the American government were paranoid about the Soviet Union and their motives for launching the Sputnik satellite into the earths orbit.[5][6]
ARPANET
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) started its development in 1966 and was later released 3 years later in 1969, ARPANET was the first public computer network that allowed users to share information between one another. The network was primarily only used by academic institutions, prestigious universities and the military to allow them to communicate with one another, access to the ARPANET network was extremely limited until it began to become accessible to the masses.[7]
References & Sources
- Vannevar Bush. 2021. Vannevar Bush. Available at: http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html.
- theatlantic. 2021. As We May Think – The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.
- Encyclopedia Britannica. 2021. Douglas Engelbart | American inventor | Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Douglas-Engelbart.
- GeeksforGeeks. 2021. Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 with their difference – GeeksforGeeks. Available at: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/.
- Wikipedia. 2021. DARPA – Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA.
- DARPA. 2021. Paving the Way to the Modern Internet. Available at: https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet.
- Tech Target. 2021. ARPANET. Available at: https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/ARPANET.