The following questions are answered in this post.
- Who invented the Internet?
- Why was the Internet invented?
- Who invented the World Wide Web?
- Why was the World Wide Web invented?
- When was the World Wide Web invented?
- Where was the World Wide Web invented?
- Did the World Wide Web drive the growth of the Internet?
- What was the first web browser?
- What was the first web site?
- What will the Web be like in the future?
No one person invented the Internet as we know it today. However, certain major figures contributed major breakthroughs:
Leonard Kleinrock was the first to publish a paper about the idea of packet switching, which is essential to the Internet. He did so in 1961. Packet switching is the idea that packets of data can be "routed" from one place to another based on address information carried in the data, much like the address on a letter. Packet switching replaces the older concept of "circuit switching," in which an actual electrical circuit is established all the way from the source to the destination. Circuit switching was the idea behind traditional telephone exchanges.
Why Packet Switching Matters
The big advantage of packet switching: a physical connection can carry packets for many different purposes at the same time, depending on how heavy the traffic is. This is much more efficient than tying up a physical connection for the entire duration of a phone call. And for services like the World Wide Web, where traffic comes in bursts, it's essential.
What if Google needed a separate modem and phone line to talk to every user, like an old-fashioned BBS (Bulletin Board System)? Handling millions of users would be prohibitively expensive.
With packet switching, packets destined for thousands or millions of users can share a single physical connection to the Internet.
J.C.R. Licklider was the first to describe an Internet-like worldwide network of computers, in 1962. He called it the "Galactic Network."
Larry G. Roberts created the first functioning long-distance computer networks in 1965 and designed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the seed from which the modern Internet grew, in 1966.
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which moves data on the modern Internet, in 1972 and 1973.
Radia Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm in the 1980s. Her spanning tree algorithm allows efficient bridging between separate networks. Without a good bridging solution, large-scale networks like the Internet would be impractical.
By 1983, TCP was the standard and ARPANET began to resemble the modern Internet in many respects. The ARPANET itself was taken out of commission in 1990. Most restrictions on commercial Internet traffic ended in 1991, with the last limitations removed in 1995.
For a much more complete history, see the web site of the Internet Society.
Note that the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. See also: who invented the World Wide Web?, What is the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet? and See also Hobbes' Internet Timeline for another excellent history of the Internet which includes later important events.
What was the first web site?
The very first web site was nxoc01.cern.ch, and the very first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. That site shut down a long time ago.
Why was the Internet invented?
The Internet evolved from ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), an effort supported by the United States Department of Defense. The developers of ARPANET wanted to make communication between separate computer systems at various universities and research laboratories more convenient. See also Who invented the Internet? and Wikipedia's ARPANET entry.
Contrary to popular belief, while the Internet was designed to survive the loss of various parts of the network, it was never intended to survive a nuclear war. See the Wikipedia ARPANET entry for more information about this urban legend.
Who invented the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990. In 1989, while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), both men made proposals for hypertext systems. In 1990 they joined forces and wrote a joint proposal in which the term "World Wide Web" is used for the first time (originally without spaces). And in late 1990 and early 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser.
Berners-Lee went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which seeks to standardize and improve World Wide Web-related things such as the HTML markup language in which web pages are written. Cailliau also made ongoing contributions to the Web. Robert Cailliau's a 1995 speech, "A Short History of the Web," is an excellent resource for those who want to understand the history in more detail.
ITim Berners-Lee invented both the HTML markup language and the HTTP protocol used to request and transmit web pages between web servers and web browsers.
Why was the World Wide Web invented?
According to Tim Berners-Lee, he had a big idea in mind when he and Robert Cailliau invented the Web: a "common information space in which we communicate by sharing information."
However, at the time, Berners-Lee and Cailliau had a more immediate goal: to make it easier for nuclear physics researchers to share information.
Both men worked for the CERN physics research facility and wrote independent proposals for a hypertext system to help researchers communicate. And you can still read Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal to his boss at the time, Mike Sendall.
Berners-Lee and Cailliau joined forces and wrote a joint proposal for the "WorldWideWeb" system, justifying it as a single simple interface to all of the information systems used by researchers at CERN and elsewhere.
When was the World Wide Web invented?
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau's official proposal for the World Wide Web is dated November 12th, 1990. This is the first document that actually uses the term.
In 1989, Berners-Lee and Cailliau had separately presented ideas for a hypertext system for their employer, the CERN nuclear physics research facility in Switzerland.
In early 1991 Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser.
Where was the World Wide Web invented?
The first world wide web was invented at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), in Switzerland.
Did the World Wide Web drive the growth of the Internet?
Yes. Email was already a popular application making inroads into the mainstream before the arrival of of the World Wide Web, and Gopher servers were already beginning to provide a user-friendly means of sharing information. The introduction of web browsers and HTML, however, made Internet publishing accessible to a mass audience and greatly increased demand for Internet access.
The open and free nature of the standards on which the Web is based made it possible for content providers to publish without paying license fees to any one central organization such as America Online, Compuserve or Microsoft. The nonproprietary nature of the Web drove its acceptance by those on the supply side of the equation, in turn generating new demand as new groups of users discovered web sites of interest to them.
What was the first web browser?
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web together with Robert Cailliau, built the first working prototype in late 1990 and early 1991. That first prototype consisted of a web browser for the NeXTStep operating system. This first web browser, which was named "WorldWideWeb," had a graphical user interface and would be recognizable to most people today as a web browser. However, WorldWideWeb did not support graphics embedded in pages when it was first released.
You can learn more about the original "WorldWideWeb" browser from Tim Berners-Lee himself.
Since WorldWideWeb had a graphical user interface (GUI), it could be called a graphical web browser. However, it did not display web pages with graphics embedded in them That did not happen until the arrival of NCSA Mosaic 2.0.
The first graphical web browser to become truly popular and capture the imagination of the public was NCSA Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others who later went on to create the Netscape browser, NCSA Mosaic was the first to be available for Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh, and the Unix X Window System, which made it possible to bring the web to the average user. The first version appeared in March 1993. The "inline images," such as the boutell.com logo at the top of this page, that are an integral part of almost every web page today were introduced by NCSA Mosaic 2.0, in January of 1994. Mosaic 2.0 also introduced forms.
Netscape is the browser that introduced most all of the remaining major features that define a web browser as we know it. The first version of Netscape appeared in October 1994 under the code name "Mozilla." Netscape 1.0's early beta versions introduced the "progressive rendering" of pages and images, meaning that the page begins to appear and the text can be read even before all of the text and/or images have been completely downloaded. Version 1.1, in March 1995, introduced HTML tables, which are now used in the vast majority of web pages to provide page layout. Version 2.0, in October 1995, introduced frames, Java applets, and JavaScript. Version 2.0 was the last version of Netscape to introduce a major feature of the web as we know it today; later versions improved reliability and stability and introduced features that did not catch on as standards for all browsers. In 1998, Netscape decided to release their browser source code as open source software, and the Mozilla project began.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is by far the most common web browser in use as of this writing. Internet Explorer 1.0, released in August 1995, broke no important new ground in a way that became part of a future standard. Later versions of Internet Explorer quickly caught up; Internet Explorer 3.0 was very close to Netscape 2.0's feature set. In July 1996, Internet Explorer 3.0 beta introduced the first useful implementation of cascading style sheets, which allow better control of the exact appearance of web pages. In April 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced the first quality implementation of the Document Object Model (DOM), which allows Javascript to modify the appearance and content of a web page after it has been loaded.
What will the Web be like in the future?
If I knew for sure, I'd be out there building it! However, here's a sampling of what I see coming up, in no particular order:
1. Better interactive applications. Web-based applications will get faster, friendlier, and more visually impressive, bcoming able to do things we normally associate with software that comes on a CD. gmail and Google Maps are good examples of how AJAX programming makes web sites more interactive, without forcing the user to wait every time they click a button.
2. Better vector graphics. Although Flash is extremely well-established, Microsoft's Sparkle will challenge Adobe/Macromedia's dominance with superior 3D effects for web pages. However, Sparkle works only with Windows Vista, and Flash works everywhere: Mac, Linux, and old and new Windows computers. SVG, an open standard supported by the W3C industry organization, is also a player here but acceptance of SVG as a Flash alternative has been slow. That may be partly due to its sheer complexity - it's true that Internet Explorer doesn't support it, but even Firefox is still "a long way away" from full SVG support.
In response to the complexity of SVG, the latest versions of both Apple's Safari and the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox support Canvas, a simple way of adding 2D graphics support to JavaScript-enabled web pages. Even though Internet Explorer doesn't support it, the inviting simplicity of Canvas may make it popular with web developers - and if Canvas-only web pages become common, that will drive users to Firefox and Safari... leading Microsoft to do the sensible thing and add Canvas support to Internet Explorer.
3. Open standards for cross-platform video. Unfortunately, right now, Adobe's Flash video format is the only high-quality, low-bandwidth video format that works well across most browsers and operating systems. Since the tools to create Flash video aren't free, there's an opportunity for an open-source solution of similar quality to break in... if users can be convinced to install the player software. Theora is a possible candidate here.
4. Open standards for cross-platform audio. While MP3 is a mostly adequate audio format, it's not really free: Fraunhofer AG charges license fees for the use of MP3-creation software. Ogg Vorbis is a truly open alternative, and some feel it offers superior quality. Again, the big catch is convincing users to install it.
5. Open standards for audio and video control. There are many different players for audio and video, leading to a tangle of different scripting approaches that make it almost impossible for a web designer to offer anything but "play," "pause" and "stop" buttons. Everything else is proprietary or not available to JavaScript at all. Right now, the only way to design an embedded audio player that fits harmoniously into your page design is to design your player in Flash - another closed standard. The time is ripe for a standard set of JavaScript methods, or "verbs," that interact with embedded audio and video players. To "play," "pause" and "stop," we must add "getcurrenttime," "gettotallength," and "setcurrenttime" at a bare minimum. Until that happens, web designers will continue to desert JavaScript in favor of designing media-rich pages in Flash.
6. The "semantic web." Many hope that XML will lead to a Web where web sites can describe their own contents in a way that other programs - not just people - can understand. This leads to useful tools that combine information from many sites. For example....
7. Web service "mash-ups." Many major web sites, such as Amazon and Google, now provide ways to fetch data and use it as part of another site. Amazon, for instance, lets you fetch information about books and use it as part of your own dynamic site design, presumably because it all leads to improved sales. And Google allows both web searches and map displays to be integrated into your own site - under certain terms and conditions. These features are leading to intriguing new applications of the web.
8. XML: important, but not everything. XML is a full-service, overwhelmingly complete way to describe things. But despite the "X" in AJAX, many AJAX applications don't actually rely on XML, because simpler ways of formatting data sent between web browsers and web servers work just fine for many applications. XML will shine primarily as a way of standardizing information that one web site can request from another.
9. Blogging and RSS. Virtually all sites will offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of what's new and interesting on the site. Reading a collected "newspaper" of what's new on your favorite feeds will replace manually visiting web sites every morning... and for many people, it already has.
10. High-quality free content, supported by advertising. Google Adsense and Kontera have made it possible to derive a profit from almost any popular web site - as long as the web site's audience is reading about something that might have a connection to a legitimate product or service.
11. Great stuff from the WHATWG. WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology working group) is finalizing proposals to improve all web browsers in many ways. Their proposals include Web Forms 2.0, which enhances support for data entry in web pages, Web Applications 1.0, which covers more advanced features such as rich text editing and Canvas 2D graphics, and Web Controls 1.0, which will make it easier to create custom controls in web pages, such as calendars, color selectors, and so on. While Opera and Mozilla/Firefox appear to be the most active participants, the WHATWG had the wisdom to adopt the Canvas feature from Apple's Safari browser as part of Web Applications 1.0, and it is hoped that Microsoft will also participate.
Yours truly,
Ferdinand Che.
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