What we commonly refer to everyday as the Internet, isn’t the Internet it is actually the World Wide Web. Created by Sir Tim Berners Lee in 1990 while he was working at CERN in Switzerland. The Internet’s story started much earlier, ARPANET connected its first computers in 1969. Over the next 30 years, multiple developments have led us to where we are today. We have fibre optic broadband, 5G mobile connections and endless content at our fingertips. However none of this would have been possible without all the different developments of the past, and the many visionary people who made them.
The first person who came up with the idea of creating a place where information could be stored and then retrieved, to supplement knowledge was Dr Vannevar Bush. He suggested a theoretical machine called the “memex” where information could be stored to enhance human memory and be linked by associations. Dr Bush put forward this idea in an article called “As We May Think” in 1945. It is amazing to me that there was a man who had the fundamental idea of what the Internet could be nearly eighty years ago, way before any of the other technology was available to make it work. A true visionary. In this week’s lecture we looked at all the inventions, ideas and innovation that got us from a theoretical machine to the interconnected world of today.
In the 1950s the American Military wanted a way to communicate secure from spying by the Russians. At this time computers were massive machines which took up whole rooms, as such they were only accessible to the military and at some Universities. At this time the amount of researchers who needed access to these computers was high but the amount of computers and time to use them was low. It was at this stage that the researchers came but with “time-sharing” where multiple people could use the single mainframe computer at once from separate terminals, each getting a fraction of the power of the overall mainframe computer.
This got researchers thinking about connecting the mainframe computers together, wherever they were situated. This led to DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Agency) starting research into achieving this. They worked with ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) where Lawrence Roberts was the first person to connect two computers together. When a packet switch network was created in 1969 and Leonard Kleinrock used it to send a message between two sites the ARPANET network was born. By 1973 ARPANET had connected thirty research, military and academic institutions, in the USA, Britain and Norway.
Packet Switching which is still used today was created by Donald Davies and involved breaking down information to be sent over a network down into manageable chunks. These chunks of data could then be sent via multiple different routes on the network and be put back together at their destination. Packet Switching solved the issues of certain parts of the network becoming overloaded with traffic or if one route in the network was not working the information could be sent another route. Devices called routers controlled where packets were sent. For PAcket Switching to work each packet required: a Destination Address, the number of packets in the overall piece of information being sent and a packet number of where each packet should be placed in the sequence of packets arriving to rebuild the information correctly. Without Packet Switching the Internet would not have worked and we would not have the World Wide Web.
The next innovation was a set of protocols to control the format data was sent in, how it was sent and how it was labelled with its destination. These where the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol) and laid down the rules to allow computers to share information over the Internet.
The first email was sent in 1973 and in the 1980s as more and more devices joined the network the DNS (Domain Name System) was created to change IP addresses, which were previously a string of numbers such as 66.220.144.0, to an easier to remember and use name such as Facebook.com. The first domain was registered in 1985 as Symbolics.com.
With all these underlying technologies in place, the time was right for Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, which became publicly accessible in 1991, and went mainstream after Internet Explorer shipped pre-installed with Windows 95.
It still amazes me that so much of what we think of as modern and very recent has actually been around for a very long time, by the time I graduate the use of domain names will be over 40 years old. Not to mention the fact that the “Internet” I use daily still runs using Packet Switching and the TCP/IP protocols, technology from the 60s and 70s. We all owe a lot to these pioneers as they have gave us the world we have today and made a career in Interaction Design possible.
The first browser to allow people to view web content, only worked on Next computers (a company run by Steve Jobs). In April 1993 the World Wide Web was made free and accessible to anyone and the World Wide Web consortium was established with Tim Berners-Lee in charge.
The first easy to use browser for the web was Mosaic launched in 1993. It was the first browser to allow users to view images along with text content, rather than in a separate window. As PCs became more affordable and entered more homes, the world wide web was accessible to more and more people. This led to more and more people learning HTML and the building blocks of web pages and creating their own pages. In 1994 there was actually a webpage that indexed all the ages available on the World Wide Web, today there are roughly1.98 billion websites on the web. There is no longer a single page index and we rely almost entirely on search engines such as Google to find the content we need.
With the World Wide Web in its infancy, there was very few rules as to how web content should be structured. This led to issues as different browsers read HTML and CSS in different ways, therefore content that worked perfectly on Internet Explorer may not work or certainly not be displayed the same as content on its major rival at the time Netscape. This mad life tough for developers and designers who would have to test their sites on different browsers and make adjustments to ensure it displayed correctly on each one.
People therefore started pushing for standardisation across browsers, so that the web content would work and display the same across all browsers. As one of the founding principles of the World Wide Web was its free access to all this was very important, and eventually standards were laid down for all browsers and websites to follow.
As designers it is essential that my designs follow these standards and luckily there is a book: Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman which is a go to resource to help me achieve this.