Quote:
Originally Posted by Osiris  
Here it is, this is a copy of The World Wide Web project - Tim Berners-Lee says that this is the first web page ever created. This first public web page was titled "World Wide Web" and was designed at the end of 1990! It's important to note that the actual first web page was located on CERN's Tim's computer and designed when he was developing the World Wide Web Project.
Lots of different sort of programs used the Internet before actual webpages: electronic mail, for example, was around long before the global hypertext system that was invented by Berners-Lee himself and called the World Wide Web (WWW or Web).
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. Berners-Lee is currently the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 
This is a timeline presentation by Berners-Lee himself on How it all Started: Pre-W3C Web and Internet Background. |
Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser in the world, and he did that in order to use it with his friends .. he started it in 1989, but the first browser was released in 1992.
Before that, people used the Gopher which is a software similar to a web browser but it only allows you to see text, no pictures, no links. It gives you a list of options (menues) and you type the option that you want, so it was not user friendly compared to what we have now. You can still find on the internet Gopher sites, look for sites that start with Gopher:// instead of http:/ /
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But as mentioned above, the idea of internet appeared in th 50s, and the first one who described it was Paul Baran who was an american engineer.
Controlling the missiles and defense system during the cold war was done through serial connections with the nodes. The serial system can be interrupted if you break it at any of its points. That's why there was a concern that .. in case if the russians manage to send a nuclear bomb to the USA, this would result in interruptin this serial connection between the control unit and the missiles and results in disconnecting the missles from their control units.
That's why the engineers were asked to create a system that would srvive such events.
Paul Baran was one of the first people who described te idea of internet, he called it at that time, intelligent network, and he described it as a system of nodes similar to a fishnet, if you break one of the nodes, the information (packets) can always find an undamaged node and go through it to reach the destination.
This was presented to the congress in the 50s, but they didn't take it seriously.
They revisited this idea after that Russia launched the first satellite (Sputnik 1) to the outer space, the americans felt in danger when the russians did that, because being able to send satellites to the outer space means that russia is able to send missiles to the USA (USA is closer to Russia than outer space), that's why they created the ARPA (advaced research program agency).
ARPA had to work on creating the first internet network, they were able to establish an internet connection between 4 universities in the 50s. This was the first real internet network the world has ever seen.
ARPA was split into ARPA and NASA in the 50s, NASA's mission was similar to that of ARPA, but they were strictly a military foundation (unlike ARPA which had a pure scientific mission), and their mission was to find fast solutions to defend the USA against the russian threats.
The USA was able to launch the first satellite one year after Sputnik one.
ARPANET was the name given to the internet netowrk created by ARPA, and it started being functional in 1969.
So they had internet at that time, but using it was very complicated, only engineers and programmers were the qualified personels to use this system.
With Gopher system, internet usage became accessible for reglar people, but still, it was not that user friendly ..
What made internet become that popular is the inventioned of the world wide web system, and the invention of more user friendly operating systems like windows.
The first Webpage ever! -
11th October 2008
