SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTERS INTERNET AND THE WEB

1. SHORT HISTORYOF COMPUTERSINTERNETAND THE WEB © AC 2002

2. The 40’s and 50’s : calculators • The great ancestors : Pascal, Babbage, Ada Lovelace • 20th century ancestors : Hollerith, Atanasoff, Zuse • 1943-1946 : the Eniac (by Eckert, Mauchly and Neumann - who also did many other things in mathematics, physics and economics) • Some seminal ideas came from Turing • Computers were only « calculators » • Military, scientific, demographic and economic applications • Central processing unit + memory © AC 2002

3. The « pascaline » of Pascal The first computing machine (1641) More on this here : http://www.sdnp.org.gy/geap/ncerd/ithistory/pascal.html © AC 2002

4. The machine of Babbage http://home.clara.net/mycetes/babbage/ © AC 2002

5. The 60’s : the birth of Arpanet • The importance of the « memory » function • The advantages of connecting « computers » together • 1965 : first telephone connection between a computer located on the East-Coast and a computer located on the West-Coast of the U.S. • Standard telephone connection • 1966 : Introduction of the « packet switching » principle (Paul Baran) • 1969 : ARPANET • At first, connection between : UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah State University • Further references © AC 2002

6. The 70’s (1) : from Arpanet to Internet • 70-71 : Development of Arpanet • Connection of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. • 72-73 : New functions • Invention of E-mail • Invention of the Telnet protocol • Invention of the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) • 79 : Creation of the Usenet forums • In those remote times, we were still very far from the present “user friendliness” of computers • Main frame to main frame connection • Refrigerated rooms, machines operated by specialists, clad in white, and as susceptible as cooks… © AC 2002

7. The 70’s (2) : The birth of micro-computers • 73-75 : first proto-micro-computers • In 1974, traineeship at IBM, suitcase micro-computer, 100 000 FF… • 1978 : The Apple II • Fantastical development thanks to the invention of Visicalc (by Bricklin and Frankston) • First word processors • Development of a large number of softwares (tools, like Basic, as well as end-user applications) • 1979 : IBM decides to enter the field • Internal discussions, William C. Lowe, special division, Boca Raton • Unsuccessful contact with Gary Kildall (see also bio) • Development of DOS attributed to Microsoft • Microsoft purchases DOS from Tim Paterson • First IBM PC in 1981 © AC 2002

8. The 80’s : Internet before the WEB • 80-83 : The TCP/IP protocol is adopted • had been designed in the 70’s • Standardization of E-mail, FTP, Telnet, Usenet • Several major breakthroughs are yet to come in order to reach the WEB • Forerunning inventions : • Archie (McGill University) : first index of all the data available in the FTP sites • WAIS: first « full text » index of all the documents in the FTP sites • Beginnings of the Client / Server architecture • Gopher: first software running on a client PC to search the Internet (later on, refined into Veronica : “Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives”) © AC 2002

9. The 90’s : the advent of the WEB • Adoption of the information storing system within HTML pages and adoption of the « http://www… » protocol • Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and his team (from the CERN) in 1989 • Inspired principle of storing information within simple text pages, with « hyper-links » linking them to other pages of the same type ; founded upon the observation that 90% of the information useful to users can be stored that way. • 1993 : Invention of Mosaic (by Marc Andreessen) • Second Internet “surfing” software running on a PC • Much more user friendly than Gopher, because it has a « GUI » (Graphic user interface) • Soon transformed into Netscape • Then Microsoft Internet Explorer entered the ring as well… © AC 2002

10. The years 2000 : rocket takeoff • 4 to 5 billions of html pages (at the end of 2001) + all the invisible Web (FTP servers and others …) • it is sometimes said that it is 20 times larger than the “visible Web” ! • In December 2001, the Google search engine listed 2 billion html pages + 300 million images + 700 million Usenet messages • services, like for instance tracerlock.com, offer to permanently scout the Net and monitor pages to warn you whenever a subject of interest to you shows up • Advent of dynamic pages • Javascript (since the end of the 90’s) : active pages on the client PC and the server • And html pages created on demand by the server computer : PHP, ASP, PERL language, etc. + data extracted from a server based database (pages always up-to-date…) • Takeoff of e-Commerce... • …and of Intranets housing Information Systems (I.S.) © AC 2002

11. Internet tomorrow • Still very fast growth and evolution of Internet • Huge quantities of information created every day • Still much publicly available information • Problem of intelligent tracking of relevant information for a given question • Present and future challenge to the searching and monitoring tools • Further learning : • http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/comp_hd.html © AC 2002