Freelance
News Service
Technology is Transforming the Internet
By William Cracraft
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The Internet of today, used to play games, research medical papers and talk to friends, started as a doomsday communication network.
"The early origins of the Internet started off as a project for the Department of Defense. They wanted a (communications) network that would survive a nuclear attack," said Edith Gong, product manager at Netscape Communications.
That was the Beginning of ARPANET, the acronym for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The system of interlocking networks was developed by researchers at various universities on the West Coast and in Utah, including Stanford University and the University of California Los Angeles.
As the cold war wound down in the mid-Seventies, universities started tapping into these networks, using them as mechanisms for sharing information with other universities and researchers across the world, Gong said.
"The Internet as we know it today started with a lot of (separate) applications that were used over the Internet: e-mail, news groups and IRCs (Internet Relay Chat), chat-based applications. Then people said we can use these other protocols like http (hyper text transfer protocol) to communicate graphical information," she said.
"What began to happen is that people began to use a portion of the Internet called the World Wide Web. A lot of people think of those two as being synonymous, but the Internet is probably the larger network for all these other applications that were being used," she added. Some of those early applications like Gopher and FTP, or file transfer protocol, "were outdated by improvements in the World Wide Web.
"FTP is still in use to download files, but commercial web browsers subsume that kind of functionality" to make various uses seamless to the user, said Dave Bottoms of Netscape. The next step was to bring graphics to the web. In the late Eighties work on a web browser with graphics capacity was taking place at the National Center for Super Computing Applications at the University of Illinois. Marc Andreason, one of Netscape's founders, was a critical part of that team.
The early Nineties saw rapid development of Internet use for commercial purposes but graphic display was limited. "They were creating a browser that would display not just tech-based, or bulletin board information, but display in the graphical way so you can have pictures and text and the whole idea of hyper linking," Gong said.
"He basically, with his team, wrote an early version of what became the Netscape Navigator. They wrote their own mosaic browser. That was in 1993. Just before the proto-Netscape browser came out, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee created the mechanism for hypertext, which is how the World Wide Web allows users to link from word to word," she added.
The browser created at the University of Illinois was put on the Internet through university computers and is still in use, but that technology later opened up the Internet to those outside of academia and government. "If you were on the Internet in the early Nineties you were probably using e-mail in university systems where you'd have the long weird e-mail addresses," Gong said.
The words 'user-friendly' were on everyone's lips back then, and the next step was to idiot-proof Internet access. The following jump in technology was the first commercially viable web browser developed by Marc Andreason with Netscape Communications co-founder Jim Clark. That jump began with the release of Netscape's browser allowing users to view graphics and use the protocol of linking to move easily from page to page of related information, said Gong.
Netscape Navigator was released in late 1994, other Internet browsers followed, notably Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the browser war was on.