Technology

Wednesday, February 3

Friday, April 25

ORIGIN OF INTERNET!!!

While computers were not a new concept in the 1950s,

World Wide Web there were relatively few computers in existence and the field of computer science was still in its infancy. Most of the advances in technology at the time - cryptography, radar, battlefield communications - were due to military operations during World War II, and it was, in fact, government activities that led to the development of the Internet.

In 1969 the Pentagon commissioned ARPANET for research into networking. The following year, Vinton Cerf and others published their first proposals for protocols that would allow computers to 'talk' to each other. ARPANET began operating Network Control Protocol (NCP), the first host-to-host protocol.

In 1974 Vint Cerf joined Bob Kahn to present their 'Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection' specifying the detailed design of the 'Transmission Control Program' (TCP) - the basis of the modern Internet. In 1978 TCP was split into TCP (now short for Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol).

By the end of the 1980s the European Particle Research Laboratory CERN in Geneva was one of the premier Internet sites in Europe. CERN desperately needed a better way of locating all the files, documents and other resources that now threatened to overwhelm it.

A young British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, working as a consultant for CERN, had the answer. His 'World Wide Web' system assigned a common system of written addresses and hypertext links to all information. Hypertext is the organisation of information units into connections that a user can make, the association is called a link.

In October 1990 Berners-Lee started working on a hypertext graphical user interface (GUI) browser and editor. In 1991 the first WWW files were made available on the Internet for download using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace (i.e., a system of names in which there is at most one holder for each possible name) is essential for the Internet to function.

By 1993 the world was starting to wake up to the World Wide Web. In October that year there were around 200 known HTTP servers. Within a year there would be thousands.

May 1994 saw the first International WWW Conference - at CERN in Geneva. The event was heavily oversubscribed, with 800 applying to attend and only 400 allowed in.

By now the load on the first Web server at CERN was 1,000 times what it had been three years earlier