A Brief History of the Internet. Chris Brooks Computing, Python, and Robots

Transcription

1 A Brief History of the Internet Chris Brooks Computing, Python, and Robots

2 Outline Prehistory Birth of the Internet The Web is Born The Dot-Com Gold Rush Web everything old is new again The future?

3 Back in the day... Ideas for calculating machines have been around for over two hundred years. Gradual developments in size, power. Each machine could only perform a very specific function, such as adding a list of numbers

4 WWII The military had a need for machines that could perform scientific computation Calculating artillery trajectories The first digital computers were developed at this point. Programs were stored on tape

5 Colossus One of the most famous WWII computers was Colossus Used to break the German Enigma cipher.

6 Innovations A key idea that came out of this work was the stored program computer. Rather than building a new machine for each job, build a general-purpose machine and create a program for each job. Needs: A way to create programs A way to store programs

7 Innovations Early computers were tremendously large. The ENIAC took up 1800 square feet, and could store about 18K of data. Used vacuum tubes

8 Innovations 1947: The transistor is developed A switch can now fit into a much smaller space. Modern CPUs hold billions of transistors. 1950s : Programming Languages developed. Programmers can more easily describe their ideas.

9 Birth of the Internet In the 1960s, scientists began developing packet-switching networks. These are different from the previouslyexisting circuit-switched networks

10 Packet switching in two minutes A message is broken into a set of packets, each of which is labeled with a destination Each packet is sent separately They make take different routes, or arrive out of order. Advantages: can deal with network crashes, uses all available bandwidth.

11 ARPANET : ARPANET proposed and constructed. 1969: SRI and UCLA connected at 50 Kb/s. 1970: UC-Santa Barbara and Utah added. 1970s: More universities added. (40 by 1973)

12 A Question... Why was ARPANET developed by the government rather than private industry?

13 A Question... Why was ARPANET developed by the government rather than private industry? The computer industry in the 60s focused on selling mainframes to large corporations. Saw computers primarily as a tool for doing arithmetic, rather than a tool for processing information. What are the consequences of having a computer network developed by academia and government, rather than private industry?

14 A Question... What are the consequences of having a computer network developed by academia and government, rather than private industry? Compare to the telephone Greater incubation time; no need for immediate return Emphasis on open standards and interoperability Less interest in developing end-user applications

15 Open Architecture A basic premise of the Internet is an ``open architecture''. The way in which an application or network is built is publicly available. Anyone who follows these instructions can make an application that works with other Internet applications. Contrast with DVDs, game consoles, cable boxes, etc.

16 I Love the 80s Computing development in the 80s took two parallel paths: Networking Universities and labs continued to join ARPANET and NSFNET TCP/IP developed Network still primarily an education and research tool

17 I Love the 80s Computing the IBM PC released The Apple Macintosh released Windows 1.0 released Online BBSes - Compuserve, Prodigy

18 I Love the 80s Computers changed from something that only scientists and academics knew about to something people had in their homes. Networking was still far off for most consumers. Not enough bandwidth to people s homes.

19 Hypertext The idea of hypertext has been around since the 40s. Documents linking to other documents. Apple s Hypercard was a successful tool in the 80s.

20 Hypertext and the network Online systems for accessing data were developed in the 80s Gopher WAIS No one really got it right until...

21 The WWW The WWW was developed at CERN in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee Provided a way to share information between research labs Insights: I shouldn t need permission to link to your data If one link fails, everything else should continue to work.

22 The WWW Berners-Lee also helped develop HTML, a language for marking up pages in a displayindependent way. This was huge: you didn't need to use a specific program, OS or display to use the Web. Early HTML was pretty primitive; text and images, not much layout control.

23 The rise of the Web A few things happened in the early 90s to promote the development of the Web. Internet backbone was privatized. ISPs began developing Easier for private individuals to get on the Web.

24 The rise of the Web 1993: Mosaic developed. 1994: CERN releases httpd (now Apache), an open-source web server 1995: Yahoo! founded Portals and search engines appear

25 : The Gold Rush The mid to late 90s were a period of huge growth for the Web banner ads appear on HotWired The beginning of the commercial web. Lots of ideas about how to make money. Some of them even worked. 1995: Internet Explorer released. Led to an antitrust lawsuit.

26 : The Gold Rush 1995: ebay founded 1995: Java released Makes it possible to create interactive web pages.

27 The dot-com boom the get rich quick years. Lots of money pumped into the IT sector as businesses and individuals went online. 1998: MP3 format released Music files small enough to be downloaded. 1998: Google founded. First search engine to get it right

28 The dot-com crash 2000: The bottom falls out of the dot-com market Many businesses fail; unable to turn a profit. People had come up with great ideas without developing a business model. Also, an extremely competitive environment. Also, slowdown in hardware sales.

29 File sharing 2000: Napster appears Makes it possible for people to share music In some ways, a return to the early days of the Web Participants as publishers, rather than just consumers Napster was sued out of existence, but the genie was out of the bottle Gnutella, KazAa, Limewire, Bearshare, BitTorrent and others followed suit.

30 Everything old is new again We are now in what some people call the ``second dot-com boom'' Fueled by the rise of ``Web 2.0'' technologies These are tools or sites that encourage user participation or interaction Blogs, youtube, myspace, facebook, flickr, Wikipedia, etc.

31 The future? So where are things headed? One way to answer this is to look at developing technologies

32 The future? Wireless Voice over IP (Skype) Video over the Web Integrated cell phones/pdas/game devices/ internet appliances Internet in non-traditional devices ``Ubiquitous computing'' Cars, vending machines, cameras, etc.

33 Summary In 60 years, we ve gone from room-sized computers that can compute 200 multiplications a second to pocket-sized computers that can hold 120 hours of video. Key ideas: Simple, open, failure-tolerant We live in interesting times...