Origin of hypertext
History of the Internet
Development of the World Wide Web (1989)
Development of Mosaic (1993)
Creation of Netscape (1994)
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The Internet has its origins in the ARPANET (ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency). The Defense Department began ARPANET in the late 60's, early 70's as a network to allow communication between defense contractors and defense researchers.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) eventually created a backbone, called NSFNET, to which many other networks in the United States are connected:
Wilkes is connected to PREPNET, which is Pennsylvania's connection to the backbone. We have a telephone connection through Scranton to Philadelphia and from there to the world.
The first communication on these networks was electronic mail (or email). This was entirely text. Soon, they figured out ways to send pictures and sound encoded as text. Nowadays, pictures and sound can be sent as raw data on the net, but the majority of transmissions are still text.
In 1989, a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (also known as CERN for the initials of the french version of the name) in Switzerland proposed a new set of standards for Internet communciation. These protocols were for the distribution of information between various high energy physics research groups. The protocols were adopted by other groups and soon a consortium, known as the W3 Consortium, was formed.
Other World Wide Web (WWW) servers were created (the "web") and many organizations began encoding information in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for distribution over the Internet. In the early 1990's, the web reached "critical mass." This critical mass is similar to the "chicken and the egg" arguments relating to the development of CD-ROMs. There were enough servers with enough interesting information that an easier way to access them had to be devised.
An organization at the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) began writing a graphical, easy-to-use application that could access the web. This program was written for three types of computers and was released free for educational use on the Internet in 1993. The program was called Mosaic.
Mosaic spurred an explosion in the use of the web. This further intensified the development of WWW servers and so on. Stories of the Internet and the web soon began to flood the popular press.
Several of the programmers who wrote the original versions of Mosaic graduated in the spring of 1994. They were hired by a California entrepreneur who formed a new company called Netscape. They soon wrote and released a new application to access the web called Netscape. This program is the most popular method of accessing the web, used by 60% of the people on the Internet. The Netscape company recently went public and sold stock. The stock soared in value making those original programmers millionaires (at least in stock value!).
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