Meeting 10 October
Club Speaker Ken Mullin
"The Internet"
file photo edited by Editor, Ross Jones
The open-ness was the key thing – any computer (including personal computers and later mobile phones) could easily join the network.
The later work on internetworking emphasized robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks in the event of nuclear attack.
TCP (transmission control protocol) played a major role in forming the basis of open-architecture networking, which would allow computers and networks all over the world to communicate with each other, regardless of what hardware or software the computers on each network used.
TCP was designed to have the following features:
Small sub-sections of the whole network would be able to talk to each other through a specialized computer that only forwarded packets.
No portion of the network would be the single point of failure, or would be able to control the whole network.
Each piece of information sent through the network would be given a sequence number, to ensure that they were dealt with in the right order at the destination computer, and to detect the loss of any of them.
A computer which sent information to another computer would know that it was successfully received when the destination computer sent back a special packet, called an acknowledgement (ACK), for that particular piece of information.
If information sent from one computer to another was lost, the information would be retransmitted, after the loss was detected by a timeout, which would recognize that the expected acknowledgement had not been received.
In 1973, a transatlantic satellite link connected the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) to the ARPANET, making Norway the first country outside the US to be connected to the network. At about the same time a terrestrial circuit added a London IMP.[48] This connectivity later evolved into the SATNET.
In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer
English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.
The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and then to the general public in August 1991.
By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
- URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
- HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.
As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.
He explains: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work.
Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications.
In the early 1980s, networked personal computers became increasingly popular in organisations.
They ran the organisation’s email - cc:Mail, LANtastic, WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Mail, Banyan VINES, Lotus Notes.
These systems could only talk to each other so long as organisations had the same product.
In 1971 Ray Tomlinson invented and developed electronic mail, as we know it today, by creating ARPANET’s networked email system.
World-wide email standards of SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), POP3 and IMAP.
By 1976 75% of all ARPANET traffic was electronic mail.
For many new internet users, electronic mail was the first practical application of this exciting new medium.
Now, over 2.6 billion active users and over 4.6 billion email accounts in operation, email is the most important and widely used communications medium on the internet.
Email has become an indispensable part of daily business activities in nearly all aspects of commerce. The massive breadth of populations using email regularly can be attributed, in large part, to it’s accessibility and general usefulness.
1991 Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser Nexus.
1993 NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) released Mosaic - the web browser that popularized the WWW and the Internet.
Primarily developed by Marc Andreessen.
Its intuitive interface, reliability, Microsoft Windows port and simple installation all contributed to its popularity.
Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window.
The first graphical web browser.
By October 1994, Mosaic was "well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface.“
Marc Andreessen left NCSA and co-founded the Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape – later Netscape.
There are two ages of the Internet—before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee's Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen's browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In 24 months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous.
By 1995, helped by the fact that Netscape was free for non-commercial use, the browser dominated the emerging World Wide Web.
In 1995, Netscape faced new competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0 released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus, but continued to dominate the market.
Internet Explorer 2.0 was released as a free download three months later.
Unlike Netscape, it was available to all Windows users free of charge, this also applying to commercial companies.
Netscape and competitor products were bundled with other applications to full Internet suites.
New versions of Internet Explorer and Netsccape were released at a rapid pace over the following few years.
Internet Explorer began to approach feature parity with Netscape with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementation.
Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was integrated into Microsoft Windows, which gave it a large installation base.
Microsoft had strong advantages in the browser wars – resources, the default desktop operating system Windows.
Jim Barksdale, President and CEO of Netscape Communications: "Very few times in warfare have smaller forces overtaken bigger forces..."
In 1995 Netscape, the company, was acquired by America Online for US$4.2 billion.
Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002.
The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers.
After Mosaic in 1993, there was explosive growth in use of the internet.
Between 1990 and 1997, households in the USA owning computers increased from 15% to 35% as computer ownership progressed from a luxury to a necessity.
A shift to the Information Age, an economy based on information technology, and many new companies were founded.
Netscape went public in 1995, and was extremely successful.
stock closed at $58.25, giving the company a value of $2.9 billion.
In 1996, Yahoo! made one of Nasdaq's most successful ever IPOs.
Along with a number of other successful IPOs, this generated high interest in investing in internet companies.
Then investors were eager to invest, at any valuation, in any dot-com company.
Investment banks, which profited significantly from initial public offerings (IPO), fueled speculation and encouraged investment in technology.
Many investors were willing to overlook traditional metrics, such as the price–earnings ratio, and base confidence on technological advancements, leading to a stock market bubble.
Between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose 400%, reaching a price–earnings ratio of 200.
In 1999, shares of Qualcomm rose in value by 2,619%, 12 other large-cap stocks each rose over 1,000% value, and seven additional large-cap stocks each rose over 900% in value.
Investors sold stocks in slower growing companies to invest in Internet stocks.
People quit their jobs to engage in full-time day trading.
Dot-com companies could raise a substantial amount of money even if they had never made a profit or realized any material revenue.
People who received employee stock options became instant paper millionaires when their companies executed IPOs.
Most dot-com companies incurred net operating losses as they spent heavily on advertising and promotions to harness network effects to build market share or mind share as fast as possible, using the mottos "get big fast" and "get large or get lost.“
These companies offered their services or products for free or at a discount with the expectation that they could build enough brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services in the future.
In January 2000, there were 16 dot-com commercials during Super Bowl XXXIV, each costing $2 million for a 30-second spot.
The "growth over profits" mentality and the aura of "new economy" invincibility led some companies to engage in lavish spending on elaborate business facilities and luxury vacations for employees.
Later in 2000 the Fed announced plans to aggressively raise interest rates, which led to significant stock market volatility as analysts disagreed as to whether or not technology companies would be affected by higher borrowing costs.
Also in 2000 Microsoft lost their case on monopolisation, leading to a one-day 15% decline in the value of their shares.
In April 2000, the Nasdaq fell 25% in a week.
By the end of 2000 most internet stocks had declined in value by 75% from their highs, wiping out $1.755 trillion in value.
By the end of 2002, stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak with the NASDAQ-100 down 78% from its peak.
Many of the companies who had IPOs went out of business.