Brief History of the Internet and WWW
Networks, TCP/IP
Enabling computers to talk to each other is NOT simple, nor easy,
took many years of intensive research and developement
since the early 1970s. Almost all of it was funded by federal agencies,
mainly DARPA, NSF, DOE.
Need to speak same language, a common Protocol, which now is TCP/IP.
Also need programs, running at both ends, to interpred the msgs.
First came EMAIL, then FTP, then TELNET, ..., now there are many.
Timeline
29 Oct 1969:
first successful remote connection
(Leonard Kleinrock, from UCLA to Stanford)
after a decade of research on how to make computers,
running different operating systems, communicate,
Fathers: Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn
First domains: ARPAnet/milnet (became .mil),
then CSnet (for universities, became .edu),
bitnet, NSFnet, ...
First protocols for communication:
Anonymous FTP existed for a while but
now disallowed for security
Now dead, replaced by SSH for security
DNS was designed and proved to be robust, but not
efficient (many servers may need to be contacted for a connection),
nor necessarily secure...
Revolution! first universal GUI (on unix only),
enables remote display via client-server service:
"server" provides content to "client" who displays it,
separated content from display!
Crucial ingredient for WWW!
New ingredients: HTTP =HyperTextTransferProtocol ,
HTML =HyperTextMarkupLanguage to create docs ,
browser: GUI to display HTML documents
designed by Mark Andreessen, and made freely available.
-InterNIC (Internet Network Information Service) by NSF
to provide info, registration, assign domain names to IP
Top level domains created: .com .edu .gov .mil .net .org
-Microsoft launches Windows95 OS, graphics-based, like MacOS.
-Amazon online bookstore launched.
due to explosion in devices (each needs at least one address)
and methods of allocation by region and by Class A,B,C
Gradual transition to IPv6 128-bit addresses, 10^38 possible,
plenty for forseeable future!
There are several top-level domains today,
registered on 13 core DNS servers around the world.
Early growth of the web
Top five domains in Jan.1998:
.com : 8.2 M , .edu : 5.3 M , .net : 3.9 M , .jp : 1.2 M , .mil : 1.1 M
Other top-level domains were created soon after: .gov , .org , etc.
Clearly .com has conquered all...