Barberio's Web Page

    WWW, “the Net”, .com, “Cybertalk” and Web terminology get more air-time in the media every day. Even the Detroit Newsline is not immune.  For the technology illiterate and the information weary (sigh), there is no escape.  Sooner or later we either demand to know or wax philosophical and ask the BIG questions: “Who made the Net?  And how did it end up on my desktop?”
    For those of you who desire the big picture this instant, here is a very brief but fascinating time-line history of the Web, which spans roughly four decades:

• 1950’s—Department of Defense worries about an atomic war and the nation’s existing communications systems being knocked out
• 1962—Paul Baran (at government think tank) proposes nationwide system of decentralized networked computers (so if one failed, others could reroute themselves)
• 1969—First packet-switching (before transmission, data breaks into pieces which are reassembled upon arrival) to network is funded by Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
• 1971—ARPAnet links 15 nodes (locations included UCLA, SRI, University of California at Santa Barbara and University of Utah)
• 1972—Forty nodes exist in ARPAnet; InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) created to establish common protocols
• Computer administrators add machines to network with phone line, hardware and free Network Control Protocol software creating connections of over a hundred mainframes in the U.S. and abroad
• Ray Tomlinson establishes e-mail system which is used primarily by scientists and educators
• Sending mail to multiple recipients produces mailing lists which creates Usenet newsgroups, an interactive conference
• 1974—Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn detail a protocol for packet network Internetworking that solves a computer language barrier problem; the protocol later becomes known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in 1982
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is how TCP/IP implements computer-to-computer data transmission; the hundreds of FTP sites on the Net and millions of files stored at those sites are accessed by using the Archie program
• 1976—Usenet becomes on-line conferencing system of choice on the Net with over 10,000 active newsgroups
• 1982—Internet becomes common term for referring to worldwide network of research, military and university computers
• 1983—ARPAnet is divided into ARPAnet and MILNET
• 1986—Network News Transfer Protocol is created to improve Usenet performance over TCP/IP networks
• 1990—ARPAnet retires; the European High-Energy Particle Physics Lab (CERN) is the largest Internet site in Europe
• 1991—Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill at University of Minnesota create Gopher, an intuitive indexed file organizer and pre-cursor to the Web; it lacks hypertext links and graphics (the Veronica program  helps to find files on Gopher sites)
• 1992—Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web, which incorporates graphics and hypertext links, to help promote the concept of computing via the Internet; WWW uses three new technologies: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used to write Web pages; HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), used by a Web server computer to transmit those Web pages; and a Web browser client program (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) to receive, interpret and display data
• 1993—InterNIC is created to provide directory, database and registration for the Internet community; it assigns Internet addresses;
• Marc Andreessen designs Mosaic, a free browser, which, after a year, is used by two million
• 1996—In January, there are almost 100,000 Web sites in the world; by June it is estimated that there are 230,000
• 1997—In January, it is estimated that there are 650,000  web sites
• 1998—In January, host systems (which can contain multiple web sites) are estimated at 29 million