THE INTERNET & THE WWW:A HISTORY AND INTRODUCTION

The term “telecommunications” commonly refers to a variety of media used to link people and information electronically for the purpose of communication. Telephones, for example, are telecommunication devices, as are closed circuit video systems. In this course, of course, we are only concerned with computer-based telecommunications, but, as we shall see, distinctions between media are blurring as technologies advance.

When computers telecommunicate, the resulting systems are called networks. The international network of networks, the mother of all networks, is the Internet. Our beloved Vice-President has called it the “Information Superhighway,” a designation that seems most appropriate in light of its history.

The Internet can be seen as a logical extension of the massive highway building campaign which took place during the 1950's when the Cold War was at its height. The basic assumption was that, if one city were destroyed, the effect on the overall flow of supplies to the rest of the country could be minimized by the availability of alternate routes bypassing the area of destruction. Similarly, a decentralized communications network would allow the military avoid having to rely upon a single command headquarters that could be targeted and put out of commission by the enemy. Command within the system could be “distributed.”

Indeed, the Internet was created by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to link computers at Stanford, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah so that artificial intelligence researchers at these sites could collaborate on projects funded by the military. “DARPAnet,” as the resulting network was called, ensured the safe transport of data between mainframe computers at different strategic locations by creating alternate communication routes in case of bomb attack and by decentralizing functions so that no single computer could be targeted.

To do this, the computer scientists invented a new technology called “packet switching.” Previously, computer networking required a line between each computer on the network and data moved in a continuous flow from host to host. Packet switching allows data files to be broken down into "packets" of information for random transfer to their ultimate destination, enabling the same communication lines to be shared by many different users at the same time.

The researchers using DARPAnet, so the story goes, were amazed at how this collaboration enhanced their intellectual productivity. The truth is that they were probably not all that amazed, because they, especially the folks at Stanford led by Douglas Engelbart, had the creation of just such a system for exactly that purpose in mind all along. In fact, Engelbart had for some timebeen writing about the design of networked hypermedia for the “augmentation of human intelligence,” based on the even earlier visionary ideas of Vannevar Bush (see As We May Think).

In any case, more and more academic researchers wanted access to the network, and DARPAnet grew; but the tension between the military’s “top secret” mentality and the academics’ collaborative needs grew as well. In response, the National Science Foundation (NSF) set up a network that linked academic institutions around the country through a system of small regional networks connecting universities to their nearest neighbors in chains that at some point connected to one of five supercomputers. In this manner, any computer on any of the chains could eventually communicate with any other computer by forwarding the conversation through its neighbors. The Internet was born.

Throughout the 1980's, technological advances in computer hardware and software made powerful computers more accessible to the public. Better communications systems allowed more computers to link to networks linked to the Internet. Still, during this period, computers actually on the Internet numbered only in the hundreds and, for the most part, were used primarily by government and scientific researchers and a few free-wheeling "techies".

Then, in 1991, Vice President Gore gave his Information Superhighway speech, and overnight, "Internet" became a household word. Of course, there’s a big difference between being a household word and actually being in households. It took the development of the World Wide Web (WWW, the Web) and the development of high speed personal computers to make the Internet appealing to more than a relatively small group of “nerds.”

The WWW is actually a subset of the Internet. If the Internet is a network of computer networks, the WWW is a web of information webs. The WWW uses the Internet, a standard hypermedia language (HTML), and a universal addressing system (URL) to create a complex web of interconnected information worldwide.

What makes the WWW look and feel the way it does is its hypertext interface which allows you to simply click on “hot” items and jump almost instantaneously from one document to another. You don't have to know where any of these files are actually located -- they could be situated on computers around the corner or half-way around the world from yours -- and you don’t have to know any arcane programming.

The big fascination, however, is with the Web's Graphical User Interface (GUI) that enables not only the “point and click” navigation that makes it so user friendly, but the integration of graphics, animations, sounds, and video into web documents.

Interestingly, the Web wasn't created to provide an easy access, entertaining platform for non-techies. Much like the Internet itself, it was developed in 1989 by researchers at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, as a way for high-energy physicists around the world to share data. And, as with the Internet itself, other computer users soon heard about the development and began to apply it to their own uses.

As soon as it became popular, the WWW became commercial and it took the Internet from being restricted to a limited set of academics and government workers to being accessible to all. The Internet today is a network of networks, connecting a growing number of regional sites to an intercontinental electronic grid that in 1996 encompassed 13.4 million individual servers in more than 100 countries around the world. It has been estimated that over 100,000 new servers are being added to the Internet each month.

Who is managing and coordinating all this activity? Actually, nobody.

You'll never see complete uniformity on the Net because no central authority or governing body controls or runs the Internet. Universities, schools, governments, individuals and businesses own the hardware and the files at their particular sites. The backbones that interconnect the sites are jointly owned by hundreds of telecommunications companies, government agencies and universities, which spend tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for Internet connectivity.

So, contrary to popular opinion, the Internet is not free. If you have so-called "free" access to the Internet, it is because someone -- usually your school or employer -- has covered the cost and is kind enough not to pass it on to you. As demand and usage increase and putting added pressure on already overburdened, systems, this basic scenario could change. Of course, those of you not lucky enough to be allied with a firm or institute offering "free" access may be paying a monthly fee for the privilege already.