1. SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTERS INTERNET AND THE WEB
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2. The 40’s and 50’s : calculators
The great ancestors : Pascal, Babbage, Ada Lovelace
20th century ancestors : Hollerith, Atanasoff, Zuse
: 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
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3. The « pascaline » of Pascal
The first computing machine
(1641)
More on this here :
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4. The machine of Babbage http://home.clara.net/mycetes/babbage/

5. 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
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6. 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
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…
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7. The 70’s (2) : The birth of micro-computers
73-75 : first proto-micro-computers
In 1974, traineeship at IBM, suitcase micro-computer, 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
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8. The 80’s : Internet before the WEB
80-83 : The TCP/IP protocol is adopted
had been designed in the 70’s
Standardization of , 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”)
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9. The 90’s : the advent of the WEB
Adoption of the information storing system within HTML pages and adoption of the « » 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…
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10. 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 million images 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.)
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11. 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 :
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