Da Interwebz Pt. I

late 1950s

Computers had to be stored in special cooled rooms. They only worked on one task at a time. Programming at that time meant a lot of manual work and the indirect connection to the computers led to a lot of bugs, wasting time, and a lot of frustration.

A remote connection had to be installed so the developers could work remotely on the computers. At the same time the idea of time-sharing came up. This is the first concept in computer technology to share the processing power of one computer with multiple users.

Scientists and researchers used it for years to communicate during the cold war. It was useful because if one computer went down the others wouldn’t follow.

1962

A scientist named JCR Licklider proposed the idea of a network of computers that could talk to one another.

1969

The first ever message was sent from one computer to another over the ARPANET the government’s computer network at the time. ARPANET stands for The Advanced Research Project Agency Network. One was located in a research lab in UCLA and the other at Stanford. All the message said was “Login” and it didn’t fail to crash the network. Stanford only received the first 2 letters “Lo” but hey you gotta start somewhere. By the end of the year only 4 computers were connected to this network.

1971

The university of Hawaii’s Aloha network was added followed by various networks in London and Norway two years later. Ray Tomlinson was also developing the first system to send of mail back and forth between users of ARPANET. This will eventually be called electronic mail or email for short the @ symbol was used to tell a person’s name and the host name apart.

1970s

Vinton Cerf invented a way to introduce computers across the globe to each other in a virtual space. This invention was called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which was followed by Internet Protocol (IP) in the 1980s scientists used Cerf’s Protocol to send data back and forth. But the 1990s is where it really all began.

1991

Computer programmer named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This wasn’t just a data sharing space for scientists anymore this was an entire network of information that was accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In 1992 Erwise was created it was an internet browser and the first to have a graphical interface a few browsers came before and after but in 1993 Mosaic was created and it would popularize surfing the web. Mosaic influenced many of the browsers to follow including Netscape Navigator in 1994. This became the most popular web browser at the time accounting for 90% of web usage in 1995. In the early 90s companies like AOL and Compuserve were starting to provide Dial-up.