Internet of the Past
(access limited to the few)
The Internet was designed in 1969 by the US Department of Defense to facilitate communications between the military sites scattered across the United States.
The early applications on the Internet were:
- 1981 - more than two hundred computers were linked to the Internet and access to the Internet was being considered by other countries.
- 1988 - the Internet was opened to commercial networks for the transmission of E-mail.
- 1989 - almost twelve million pieces of information were being sent across the Internet.
- 1991 - several groups decided that there was a need for tools to access the growing collection of information that was developing on the Internet.
- 1992/3 - imergence of the www using the graphical browser Mosaic
- 1993/4 - Netscape becomes the definitive browser
- 1992 - almost six billion pieces of information were being transferred
- 1994 - more than twenty billion pieces of information were being transferred.
- 1996 - saw the development of an Internet railroad around the world, moving data at 45 megabits/sec. [MCI upgraded their system to 155 Mbps]
- Gopher was initially designed by the University of Minnesota Computer Center so that the various campus departments could control and provide access to the data on their computers. Students and other university community members could then access this data by using a simple menu structure to find answers to their questions. Today there are thousands of gopher servers and millions of gopher users worldwide.
- Connecting to Gopher through the gopher server at the University of Minnesota, users can locate full-text novels like Alice through the Looking Glass, find their favorite recipes, find the latest weather report for any place in the world, and do research on just about any topic imaginable.
- Internet users at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, decided to use a different approach to obtaining information from the Internet. They developed a hypertext interface into the Internet which they called the World Wide Web or www for short. This allowed the user to focus on what information they wanted and not on how to get to the location where the information resides.
- Shortly after the development of the www, Mosaic was developed by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Mosaic provides a graphical interface into the hypertext world of the World Wide Web.
- Several of the developers of Mosaic left the NCSA to form their own company and created another graphical browser called Netscape. By 1996, Netscape was used by over 75% of the users of the Web.
