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Introduction

“Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?”

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Lewis Caroll

Everything has to begin somewhere, so our journey will start with a focused history lesson. Below I am going to give you a brief overview of the creation of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the “web standards” that this entire series focuses upon. I think it is useful and interesting to understand how we got to where we are, but it will be short enough so you don’t get overwhelmed, and can get into the details nice and quickly. If any terms are unfamiliar to you, don’t worry; if they’re important for learning web development they’ll be defined in the later articles that go into more depth on each subject, and you can always Google them! If you are already familiar with the history of the Internet or the World Wide Web, feel free to skip to the section on web standards.

The article contents are as follows:

• The Internet’s origins
• The creation of the world wide web
• The browser wars
• The coming of web standards
• The formation of the W3C
• The web standards project
• The rise of web standards
• Summary

The Internet’s origins

On the fourth of October in 1957 an event occured that would change the world. The Soviet Union successfully launched the first satellite into Earth’s orbit. Called “Sputnik 1″, it shocked the world—especially the United States of America, who had their own programme of satellite launches underway, but had yet to launch.

This event lead directly to the creation of the US Department of Defence ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), due to a recognised need for an organisation that could research and develop advanced ideas and technology beyond the currently identified needs. Perhaps their most famous project (certainly the widest used) was the creation of the Internet.

In 1960, psychologist and computer scientist Joseph Licklider published a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, which articulated the idea of networked computers providing advanced information storage and retrieval. In 1962, whilst working for ARPA as the head of the information processing office, he formed a group to further computer research, but left the group before any actual work was done on the idea.

The plan for this computer network (to be called “ARPANET”) was presented in October 1967, and in December 1969 the first four-computer network was up and running. The core problem in creating a network was how to connect separate physical networks without tying up network resources for constant links. The technique that solved this problem is known as packet switching and it involves data requests being split into small chunks (”packets”,) which can be processed quickly without blocking communication from other parties—this principle is still used to run the Internet today.

This concept received wider adoption, with several other networks springing up using the same packet switching technique—for example, X.25 (developed by the International Telecommunication Union) formed the basis of the first UK university network JANET (allowing UK universities to send and receive files and emails) and the American public network CompuServe (a commercial enterprise allowing small companies and individuals access to time-shared computer resources, and then later Internet access.) These networks, despite having many connections, were more private networks than the Internet of today.

This proliferation of different networking protocols soon became a problem, when trying to get all the separate networks to communicate. There was a solution in sight however—Robert Kahn, whilst working on a satellite packet network project for ARPA, started defining some rules for a more open networking architecture to replace the current protocol used in ARPANET. Later joined by Vinton Cerf from Stanford University, the two created a system that masked the differences between networking protocols using a new standard. In the publication of the draft specification in December 1974, this was called the “Internet Transmission Control Program”.

This specification reduced the role of the network and moved the responsibility of maintaining transmission integrity to the host computer. The end result of this was that is became possible to easily join almost all networks together. ARPA funded development of the software, and in 1977 a successful demonstration of three different networks communicating was conducted. By 1981, the specification was finalised, published and adopted; and in 1982 the ARPANET connections outside of the US were converted to use the new “TCP/IP” protocol. The Internet as we know it had arrived.

The creation of World Wide Web

Gopher was an information retrieval system used in the early 1990s, providing a method of delivering menus of links to files, computer resources and other menus. These menus could cross the boundaries of the current computer and use the Internet to fetch menus from other systems. It was very popular with universities looking to provide campus-wide information and large organisations looking to centralise document storage and management.

Gopher was created by the University of Minnesota. In February, 1993, they announced that it was going to charge licensing fees for the use of their reference implementation of the Gopher server. As a consequence, many organisations started to look for alternatives to Gopher.

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Tags: internet, W3C, web development, Web standards, Web Standards Project, world wide web, www