It’s probably hard for Millennials to imagine the world without netbooks, smart phones, streaming content and instant communication; yet, just twenty years ago, the digital gadgets we use everyday could only be found in the pages of science fiction.
It’s important to remember that although the structure of the web has been around for decades, the internet was only opened to the public in 1993. Even then, it still took years before software, hardware and sufficient infrastructure were available and affordable enough for internet access to become a staple of the American home.
Consider that, according to the World Bank, as recently as 1999, just over a third of the U.S. population used the internet. Thirteen years later, that number had jumped to nearly 80%. Shockingly, it is now estimated that by 2016, Americans will own an average of nearly three networked devices each.
In our rapidly changing and increasingly online world, students must learn the history of the internet in order to understand it and anticipate what’s next.
How it Works
Simply put, the internet is a system of millions of connected computers. Each computer in the system has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Service is provided to each computer, typically, through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) (e.g. Time Warner). Each ISP is served by a larger, regional ISP, that in turn is served by an even larger Network Service Provider (NSP) that connects with its brothers on Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs) or Network Access Points (NAPs).
In order to transmit a request or information, the data has to be broken down into manageable data packets, otherwise, large strings of data would slowdown the network. Inside the computer sending data, the Network Operating System (NOS) chunks the data into smaller packets, adding a special code so that the receiving computer can then put it all back together. Each packet contains the addresses of the sender and receiver, the information to reassemble the data, error checking code and, of course, the data.
Documents, games, applications, videos and everything else you find on the internet is stored on computers known as servers – millions of different servers. To actually move the packets over the internet, the sending computer converts them into electronic signals. These are sent from the computer over telephone and digital subscriber lines across the system. Some messages are bounced up to satellites, while others traverse the world on undersea cables.
When approaching the recipient, the DSL or cable containing the data packets connects to a modem, which translates the information. It is typically passed along to the router, which connects to the Local Area Network (LAN); for example, in your home, your LAN may include several computers, a DVR and a Wii. The router directs the data packets to the machine whose ISP is identified, unless it is malware or unsolicited, in which case its firewall (computer network defense) will not let it pass.
The internet is a hierarchy, where smaller participants are repeatedly grouped in ever-larger networks. Your home LAN may be part of a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) if you live in a city, or it may skip straight to a Wide Area Network (WAN) that covers a huge geographic area. The Internet, which connects innumerable smaller networks, is said to be the largest WAN in the world.
The Web: An Origin Story
Contrary to popular belief, the World Wide Web is not the internet. As described above, the internet is the huge WAN comprised of cables, satellites, routers, modems, servers and computers. The World Wide Web is the interconnected content transmitted over that network – games, videos, spreadsheets, documents and information.
In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense arranged for the Advance Research Project Agency (ARPANET) to create a network of computers that could survive a nuclear attack. Early on, it linked a couple dozen computers at speeds only 1% of that enjoyed today by someone with broadband (.056 Mbps).
On October 29, 1969 two landmark events in internet history occurred almost simultaneously: (1) the first email was sent by ARPANET participants at UCLA to researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI); and (2) the full message couldn’t be completed because the SRI computer suffered the first crash to halt someone’s internet service.
From inauspicious beginnings, computers quickly improved in durability and size. By 1977, Commodore had released a no frills personal computer called the PET, and Apple had released the Apple II. The latter came with a game and paddles and could be connected to a television to display color graphics.
In 1989, Tim Berners Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) developed the networked hypertext system that would eventually become the World Wide Web to help high energy physicists share data and information. By 1991, some of the group was on the web, and with the advent of user-friendly browsers, like Mosaic in 1993, it became even more accessible.
When CERN released its source code to the public in 1993, the web had only 500 servers; by the end of 1994, it had 10,000. To manage the traffic of 10 million users and counting, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created in 1995.
While researchers and academics were determined to make the web available to everyone, commercial interests were attempting to limit competition. Beginning in 1995, Microsoft strong-armed PC manufacturers into agreeing to install Internet Explorer as their only internet browser or they would not receive licenses for Microsoft’s wildly popular Windows 95. Eventually, Internet Explorer captured about 95% of the market share.
On June 7, 2000, a U.S. District Court ordered Microsoft split into two companies. On appeal, the D.C. Circuit Court reversed the breakup portion of the decision, and the Department of Justice eventually settled.
With so much growth in the industry, Wall Street was eager to participate. However, by December 2000, the dot com bubble had burst. There was suddenly a vacuum following the wave of speculative exuberance which had led investors to pour money on net-based companies. Over the next seven years, Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the dot com boom, lost 85,000 high tech jobs.
A User Created Web
Amazingly, through this period of tech boom and bust, internet use and access continued its rapid rise. And with it, a new form of content became king: user-generated media.
2001 – Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by its users, launches.(Today, it contains over 22 million articles written in over 280 languages.)
2004 – Social Media giant, Facebook, is founded. Since then, it has allowed over one billion people worldwide to find, friend, like, update, link and post to stay as connected as if they lived right next door.
2004 – Google stocks close at over $100 a share had its Initial Public Offering (IPO) with shares closing at $100.34. In 2010, Google possessed 2/3 of the search engine market worldwide and logged about one trillion searches every year.
2005 – Founded on Valentine’s Day, YouTube, has helped billions of people avoid work by living vicariously through others.
2006 – Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, tweets for the first time. By 2011, 200 million global users are sending one billion 140-character messages every week.
2007 – Apple introduces the iPhone in January and revolutionizes the ways users find, share and create content online.
2010 – Apple’s iPad is launched. It’s user-friendly design and ultra-mobile applications immediately extinguish concerns that there is no consumer base for tablets.
Cultural and Political Implications of the Web
Geopolitical Concerns
Perhaps the most obvious example of the web’s impact on geopolitics has been the Arab Spring. With dictatorial, corrupt governments falling to peaceful protests in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and others suppressing uprisings in places like Yemen and Syria, a chain reaction of revolutions burned through the region. Analysts and researchers have found that social media – carried into repressive states by services such as Twitter and YouTube – were catalysts in the spread of these democratic revolutions.
Similarly, the web’s reach is extending deep into the servers of national governments. Of chief concern is a cyber attack by either an extremist group or external government. Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of computer hackers, successfully accessed secret recordings from the FBI and Scotland Yard, and hacked the website of the CIA in February of 2012. It has been reported that the National Security Agency is worried that a group could attack America’s energy grid in the near future – and for good reason. In 2009 and 2010, the cyber weapon Stuxnet reportedly damaged Iran’s nuclear program, setting it back three years.
Consumer Privacy
Every time we tweet, click or like anything, this information is tracked and stored in an enormous database used to build predictive models to trace our preferences and buying behaviors. Privacy advocates have successfully enacted tough legislation in places like Europe, where people have the right to be forgotten. In the U.S., with our history of free markets, many advocates challenge the European model and argue that consumers benefit from the free flow of information; as Facebook’s Erin Egan said, “we don’t use that data for an advertising purpose – we use it to personalize the data on those pages.” As of March 2013, the only privacy protection enjoyed by U.S. consumers on the web was that voluntarily offered as part of a site’s terms of service.
Creative License and Copyright
Copyright provides legal protection to the creator of writing, images, musical score, recording, software and a myriad of other works. Traditionally, a copyright could be enforced because the initial infringer was easy to identify, and their means of spreading the work required physical copying, which took time.
In the digital age, it’s not so easy. A copyrighted image or song can be uploaded in less than a minute, and in about the same amount of time, illegally downloaded by thousands of others. To address this problem, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 to both protect copyright and provide a safe harbor for ISPs and others whose users posted copyrighted materials. A toothless lion, Congress again tried to address the issue with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012 by preventing tech companies from selling ads to suspected pirates; tech companies like Google, Twitter, Wikipedia and Reddit objected, and one industry insider said the law would “be devastating to the free and open web.” The bill never passed and the outlook of online copyright protection in the U.S. remains murky.
Digital Divide
The digital divide refers to the difference in internet access between different demographic groups. The 20% of American adults who did not use the internet include those in households earning less than $30,000 annually and those who did not graduate from high school. Luckily, the divide seems to be shrinking. According to PEW data, by August 2011, 94% of adults aged 18-29 and 87% aged 30-49 reported regular internet access.
Major Concepts and Trends
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is an application run through a service provider, like Apple or Google, where they store your stuff on their servers; conveniently, pictures, documents, books and data stored on the cloud can be accessed by a user with relative ease from a variety of devices.
Crowdsourcing
Essentially outsourcing a task or group of tasks that are traditionally done by a single entity to an undefined large group of people, crowd sourced products have ranged from advertising campaigns to beer. One variant whereby the crowd helps fund a project, crowdfunding, allows companies with an innovative product and little capital to raise up to $1 million each year.
Disruptive Tech
When a new device or process contains innovative features that quickly displace an existing technology, it is known as disruptive tech. Just like the digital camera made film nearly obsolete, the camera on the smartphone is displacing the digital camera.
E-commerce
Short for electronic commerce, e-commerce happens every time a sale is made over the internet. Pioneers in the field were Amazon and Ebay, but today traditional bricks and mortar operations are as likely to sell via their e-businesses as much as the web giants.
Fiber Optic Broadband
Offering 1 Gbps (about 10 times the speed of most other broadband services) fiber optic broadband is the wave of the future, although exactly when is unclear. Although Google Fiber is available in one American city, the best most of us can hope for is high speed broadband. Contrast this with Japan, which has 86% fiber optic broadband penetration and South Korea, which has 66% penetration.
Many technologists warn that if the U.S. fails to invest in updating broadband infrastructure nationwide, the American economy will play a shrinking role in fast-growing technology markets. Consider that the internet was originally an American invention, but that today’s U.S. broadband connections are among the slowest and most expensive in the developed world.
Download speeds are 3-5 times faster in the top nations. The U.S. also fell behind Poland, Italy and Slovakia who ranked 16th, 17th, and 18th, respectively.
RSS Feed
Really Simple Syndication, RSS, also known as an RSS feed, delivers content from the websites you choose directly into your email inbox. Although trending downward as of 2013, RSS sites are still by those who prefer it over Twitter as a means to access the news.
Web 2.0
Marking a transformation from the old internet experience where information travelled only in one direction from the site to the user, with Web 2.0, starting in the 2000s with sites like Facebook and YouTube, users generate content, as well. From blogs to videos, entries on Wikipedia and posts on social networking sites, user-generated content has come to dominate the internet. According to Alexa, Facebook and YouTube consistently rank in the top five for internet traffic.
Suggested Reading and Web Resources
“A Brief History of The Internet”; by the engineers that pioneered it: Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolff
How Does the Internet Work? by Rus Shuler of Pomeroy IT Solutions
How the Web Was Won: The Story of the World Wide Web by James Gillies and Robert Caillau
“Inside the Internet” an 11-week class found on Coursera
Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners Lee
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of The Internet by Katie Hafner
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