COMM260 Lecture Synopses One

COMM 260, Principles of Internet Web-Based Design
Instructor: Ross Collins

Lecture Synopsis One: Internet Development

In summer 1995 I launched my first class management internet web site. This places it among the first .00051 percent of web sites constructed. I may have been an "early adopter" of the World Wide Web, but the internet had been around for some years before that--decades, actually. The internet as a way to transmit or communicate information dates to the 1800s--with the inventions of the telegraph and calculating machine.

The first "internet" as we define it today, however, was launched by the U.S. Government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and called ARPANET. In the 1960s an ARPA scientist, Leonard Klienrock, came up with the idea of sending information as "packages": breaking up information, routing it through computers in the fastest way, and reassembling it at the end. This was more flexible, secure, and private. It wasn't until 1969 that the network was actually tried. By 1971, 23 large main-frame computers (the only kind that existed then) were connected to ARPANET.

The idea of "host" computers, that is, computers that would receive your request, connect you with another computer, but retain no information itself, dates from this time, as does the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). A protocol is a language that makes it possible for computers to talk to each other. With this protocol installed on all computers connected to a network, files or communication could be sent and received. A host computer would provide a gateway--that is, a sort of window--to the larger world of the internet.

By the early 1970s the internet was available outside universities and government, but used mostly by large companies. Other networks appeared between universities, such as BITNET ("Because It's Time"), National Science Foundation, and Britain's JANET (Joint Academic Network). University of Minnesota was home to the GOPHER protocol. But Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva believed more people would be interested in the internet if it were easy to use and allowed pictures. In 1984 a uniform system of naming hosts was established, the DNS (Domain Name Server). The tiered system ending in suffixes such as .edu, .com and .gov associated names with IP numbers.

In 1990 Berners-Lee developed a new protocol, HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol), and an easy scripting language, HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) for a way to access documents on the internet--called the World Wide Web. Interest built slowly, but finally took off in 1994, after Marc Andreeson designed the first commercial browser for the web, called Mosaic. The company he formed was called Netscape. In 1995 there were 25,000 web sites. In 2001 there were 30 million.

Still popular protocols for the internet include not only the world wide web (HTTP), but File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and e-mail.

More history of the web from the Internet Society.

Terms: ARPANET, host, gateway, protocol, TCP/IP, World Wide Web, DNS, FTP, HTTP, HTML. For more information, see a guide to web definitions.