A Brief

History of the Web

Module 1: Lesson 1
Fundamentals of Web
Development
Daniel Krieglstein PhD
It’s not that old
 1972 - First Email
 1991 - First Webpage
 1993 - First Browser
 1995 - Ebay and Javascript
 1998 - Google
 2004 - Facebook
 2007 - Phone (first true smartphone)
 1963 - Hypertext
Ted Nelson coined the term “Hypertext”: Text linked to content.
 1969 – IBM Computer
System/360 Model 91: (Link)
 NASA installation started 1968
 Top Speed Computer
 6.3 Megabytes of memory
 64 bits of logic process in
four nanoseconds
 OS = Punched card input
 First: out-of-order operation
 Only 15 ever assembled
 Cost: $6,000,000
 1969 – IBM Computer
System/360 Model 30 (Link)
 Most popular
 Released in 1964
 8-64 Kilobytes of memory
 Rent: $8,000 a month
 By 1969 grossing IMB nearly a $billion

CompuServer
 First Dial-Up service for data
 Each computer had its own phone#
 1969 - Arpanet
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
 First Packet Switched Network
 First Link: UCLA & Stanford
 Mostly Universities
 No Routers
 Just Computers Chains
 Store-and-forward packet
switching functions

Advanced Research Projects Agency

 US Department of Defense
 Rand Corporation
 Several US Based University Scientists
 1972 - Email
Ray Tomlinson – Cambridge Massachusetts
 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN Technologies)
 Subsidiary of Raytheon

 He standardized email format

 Like “header”, “CC”, and “BCC”
 Chose the @ Symbol
 Separated user from computer model

 “Email” adopted later

 He called it “FTP mail”
 Original Proposal (Link)
 1973-1974 – TCP
Transmission Control Protocol: Byte transfer between hosts
 Reliable (assurance): Yes, your data arrived as intended
Robert Kahn
 Error-checking: Requests re-transmission of lost data
 Ordered: Rearranges out-of-order data
 Accurate delivery > Timely delivery

World Wide Web (WWW), Email, File Transfer Protocol,

Secure Shell, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming media

(Contrast with Real-time Transport Protocol: VOIP & Video

Chat)
 1974-1978 – TCP/IP
Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford develop TCP (1973)
 Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, & Carl Sunshine published RFC 675 in December 1974
 First appearance of “Internet”: Shorthand for “internetworking protocol”

Finalized as TCP/IP in 1978 (IPv4)

Vint Cerf
 Delivering “packets” from the source host
 “IP Address” i.e., server network addresses
 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: IEEE paper (1974)
 1974-1978 experimentation (IPv3).

1979 USENET
 First internet dial-up
 Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin
 1980 - Enquire
Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire)
 ‘Memex’ and ‘NLS’ hypertext system lacked uniform data transfer
 ENQUIRE simplified hypertext, making it universally compatible
 Cataloged users and software models
 It unified:
 networks
 disk formats
 data formats
 character encoding schemes

Berners-Lee’s NeXT Computer:

World's first web server
 The 80’s
 1983 ARPANET switches over to TCP/IP
 1984 DNS (Domain Name System)
 Adding a human friendly address system
 The internet's phonebook
 Decentralized “authoritative name servers”
 1986 NASFNET (National Science Foundation Network)
 US Networks “supercomputers” at several universities
 Creating the core for inter-institutional networking
 Followed by connections to international networks
 1987 = 30,000 hosts on the internet
 1989 – World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee pairs Hypertext with ICP/IP
 Builds a browser to “browse” WWW pages
 1990: First website = info.cern.ch
 1990: Protoculs finished
 HTML
 HTTP
 URL
Information Management: A Proposal
 1990’s – Commercialization
 1990 ARPANET decommissioned
 1990 CompuServe had thousands of “moderated forums” (not yet interactive)
 $7.50 to do a search for a new forum
 1991 AOL enters that internet game
 1991 Neverwinter Nights becomes first graphical MORPG
 1993 Mosaic becomes first widely used graphical web browser
 Marc Andreeson @ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
 Later becomes Netscape (my first browser)
 1994 Dial UP
 1995 AOL adds exclusive search engine for AOL services
 Dominates Internet Search
 1995 Explosion!
1995 online shopping 1998 Google
• Ebay • PageRank: prioritizes search results by link
count
• Amazon
1999 Napster
• Geocities (first DIY websites) • Peer-to-peer pioneer
• The first Vatican website! (WHAT!?!) • No server held content
2001 Wikipedia
2004 Facebook
1996 Hotmail
• Friendster anyone?
• First website email access • Everyone gets a social network
• i.e., webmail 2005 Youtube
2006 Twitter
2007 iPhone changes everything
1997 Weblog (now just “blog”) • Mobile internet > 75% of use (now)
NASA pathfinder site = 46 million visits in a single day. • Developing world use explodes