The internet is 43 years old and was originally called ARPA - the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The original computers that comprised ARPA were housed at Stanford University, UCLA, UCSB and the University of Utah. It was revolutionary because it was decentralised. Even now the internet is not owned by anybody or corporation. It was originally designed for communication between universities, however nowadays commercial users make up most of the internet.
This site traces the route the internet takes when you access your browser. It's quite interesting to see how far it travels once a command has left your computer.
The internet also revolutionised the cost of global communication and made it cheaper to communicate with people overseas via Skype for example. Distance is now irrelevant.
Exercise 1: Internet Timeline and milestones
This photo shows the number of websites that have been created since 1990...
Five milestones of the Internet Timeline most relevant to the world wide web, screen design and multimedia design issues:
This photo shows the number of websites that have been created since 1990...
Image courtesy of: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
Five milestones of the Internet Timeline most relevant to the world wide web, screen design and multimedia design issues:
- 1990 - The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access; the first remotely operated machine is hooked up to the Internet
- 1993 - Businesses and media begin taking notice of the Internet
- 1994 - 1995 - Communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet; A number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack with the 3rd largest ever NASDAQ IPO share value
- 2002 - 2003 - blogs become popular; The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 individuals for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks
- 2006 - Emerging Technology of 'Cloud' computing
Exercise 2: Tim Berners-Lee FAQ
1) Tim Berners-Lee's role in the development of the internet: He invented the World Wide Web. The WWW is only one feature of the internet.
2) He talked about HTML, SVG, RDF and XML back in 2000.
3) The very first website was extremely basic with a white background, black text and blue links. There were no graphics or animations. I consider it a static website. It differs from websites of today because of it's bland appearance and lack of interaction with viewers. It has limited HTML code with basic tags consisting of <header>, <title>, <body> and a basic table.
4) The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium - the web police. They control coding regulations. They care about standards because it's important that all browsers are capable of reading common coding so webpages can display correctly.
5) As the // has become unnecessary in URL's the Curtin domain could be entered as http:students.curtin.edu.au/administration/admissions and the browser would assume the double slash is present.
6) The most popular browsers nowadays are Internet Explorer 9, Safari, FireFox, Google Chrome and Opera. I believe they are so because they have the fastest load times. Internet users are getting more impatient and want webpages to load as fast as we blink! These browsers open the fastest.
7) The 3 colours which were first used on webpages were blue for links which change to red when hovered over and purple when visited.
Interesting facts:
- In the 1960s, J.C.R. Licklider published his ideas about the future role of multi access interactive computing. He looked beyond the existing limitations of punched cards and paper tape to a time when computers would interact in real time with the human user. By performing numerous routine tasks on demand, computers could contribute to a person's ability to formulate new insights and decisions. He saw man-computer interaction as enhancing both the quality and efficiency of human problem solving. Information courtesy of http://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/ftp/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/abstracts/src-rr-061.html
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