SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTERS INTERNET AND THE WEB © AC 2002

The 40’s and 50’s : calculators The great ancestors : Pascal, Babbage, Ada Lovelace 20th century ancestors : Hollerith, Atanasoff, Zuse 1943-1946 : the Eniac (by Eckert, Mauchly and Neumann - who also did many other things in mathematics, physics and economics) Some seminal ideas came from Turing Computers were only « calculators » Military, scientific, demographic and economic applications Central processing unit + memory © AC 2002

The « pascaline » of Pascal The first computing machine (1641) More on this here : http://www.sdnp.org.gy/geap/ncerd/ithistory/pascal.html © AC 2002

The machine of Babbage http://home.clara.net/mycetes/babbage/

The 60’s : the birth of Arpanet The importance of the « memory » function The advantages of connecting « computers » together 1965 : first telephone connection between a computer located on the East-Coast and a computer located on the West-Coast of the U.S. Standard telephone connection 1966 : Introduction of the « packet switching » principle (Paul Baran) 1969 : ARPANET At first, connection between : UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah State University Further references © AC 2002

The 70’s (1) : from Arpanet to Internet 70-71 : Development of Arpanet Connection of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. 72-73 : New functions Invention of E-mail Invention of the Telnet protocol Invention of the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) 79 : Creation of the Usenet forums In those remote times, we were still very far from the present “user friendliness” of computers Main frame to main frame connection Refrigerated rooms, machines operated by specialists, clad in white, and as susceptible as cooks… © AC 2002

The 70’s (2) : The birth of micro-computers 73-75 : first proto-micro-computers In 1974, traineeship at IBM, suitcase micro-computer, 100 000 FF… 1978 : The Apple II Fantastical development thanks to the invention of Visicalc (by Bricklin and Frankston) First word processors Development of a large number of softwares (tools, like Basic, as well as end-user applications) 1979 : IBM decides to enter the field Internal discussions, William C. Lowe, special division, Boca Raton Unsuccessful contact with Gary Kildall (see also bio) Development of DOS attributed to Microsoft Microsoft purchases DOS from Tim Paterson First IBM PC in 1981 © AC 2002

The 80’s : Internet before the WEB 80-83 : The TCP/IP protocol is adopted had been designed in the 70’s Standardization of E-mail, FTP, Telnet, Usenet Several major breakthroughs are yet to come in order to reach the WEB Forerunning inventions : Archie (McGill University) : first index of all the data available in the FTP sites WAIS : first « full text » index of all the documents in the FTP sites Beginnings of the Client / Server architecture Gopher : first software running on a client PC to search the Internet (later on, refined into Veronica : “Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives”) © AC 2002

The 90’s : the advent of the WEB Adoption of the information storing system within HTML pages and adoption of the « http://www… » protocol Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and his team (from the CERN) in 1989 Inspired principle of storing information within simple text pages, with « hyper-links » linking them to other pages of the same type ; founded upon the observation that 90% of the information useful to users can be stored that way. 1993 : Invention of Mosaic (by Marc Andreessen) Second Internet “surfing” software running on a PC Much more user friendly than Gopher, because it has a « GUI » (Graphic user interface) Soon transformed into Netscape Then Microsoft Internet Explorer entered the ring as well… © AC 2002

The years 2000 : rocket takeoff 4 to 5 billions of html pages (at the end of 2001) + all the invisible Web (FTP servers and others …) it is sometimes said that it is 20 times larger than the “visible Web” ! In December 2001, the Google search engine listed 2 billion html pages + 300 million images + 700 million Usenet messages services, like for instance tracerlock.com, offer to permanently scout the Net and monitor pages to warn you whenever a subject of interest to you shows up Advent of dynamic pages Javascript (since the end of the 90’s) : active pages on the client PC and the server And html pages created on demand by the server computer : PHP, ASP, PERL language, etc. + data extracted from a server based database (pages always up-to-date…) Takeoff of e-Commerce... …and of Intranets housing Information Systems (I.S.) © AC 2002

Internet tomorrow Still very fast growth and evolution of Internet Huge quantities of information created every day Still much publicly available information Problem of intelligent tracking of relevant information for a given question Present and future challenge to the searching and monitoring tools Further learning : http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/comp_hd.html © AC 2002