A brief history of the Internet

The Media World of 2014: http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/

Internet today

• 1990s—very few people used the Internet
• Today—about 180 million Americans are online (out of 292 million Americans alive in January 2004)
• 97 percent of them consider the Internet an important source of information
• For Americans 18 to 34, the Internet has overtaken all print media as a regular news source and is rapidly closing in on TV news
• In the two weeks after 9/11 attacks, the Internet was rated second only to TV as a news source

International aspects

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
          —Louis Armstrong

• Americans no longer comprise the majority of Web users (36% and falling, per Jupiter Research, 2001)
• 70% to 80% of Web content is in English
• Translation tools that are in development probably will not be functional for 20 years
• 2005—7 of 10 North American adults will be regular users
• 2005—1 in 10 worldwide will have access

How did the Internet get started?

• In 1969 the Department of Defense created the Internet to exchange data and text messages between mainframe computers
• This network of computers started with a link between UCLA and Stanford
• It began to grow to help academic and military researchers share data with one another through a protocol called TCP/IP
• TCP/IP is your connection software—what actually goes out and connects to the other computers in the world, gets Web pages, and feeds them to your browser

What was the original Internet like?

• It contained only text documents and was difficult to use
• This internetwork of computers would function even if major segments were knocked out by a nuclear attack or saboteurs
• If any distribution point was overloaded or disappeared, messages could be rerouted through other distribution points

What was the Internet like in the 1970s and 1980s?

• 1970s
      electronic mail (e-mail)
      first personal computer for non-techies (Xerox)
• 1980s
     PCs entered the consumer market
     Apple’s user-friendly desktop design made computers easy to use
     The military relinquished Internet development and funding to civilian organizations
   The Internet spread to major universities and research centers around the world

How did the Internet grow?

• 1989—Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer specialist working in Switzerland, was looking for a way to manage and share large amounts of information among colleagues
• Scientists at universities and institutes all over world wanted to be able to collaborate on high-energy physics projects
• Berners-Lee created a web of documents (which he called a mesh) connected to each other by a coded language called hypertext and hosted by computers called servers

Birth of the World Wide Web

• Berners-Lee named this mesh the World Wide Web
• He created HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a standard coding language that enabled people to send images (photos and graphics) as well as text on the Internet
• 1993—a browser called Mosaic made it possible to view graphics and multimedia on the Web
• Mosaic evolved into Netscape, and the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, other than e-mail

Magazines led many innovations

• Magazines enjoyed the first early success, mainly because of their experience with graphics (nationalgeoraphic.com)
• Little knowledge, lots of enthusiasm
• Money pit
• Cultural differences (plantation society vs. Wild West)
• Philosophical differences
• Competition (NGM vs. NGT)
• Lots of adrenalin (early mornings, late nights)
• The River Wild

First newspapers on the Web

• 1994—Palo Alto Weekly (shovelware)
• 1996—New York Times, Washington Post
• 1996—New York Times registration
     simple layout
     rudimentary navigation
     few graphics
     updated daily
     not much content
     no ads
     list of headlines on home page
     no personalization

What’s the difference between the Internet and the WWW?

• The Internet is a vast network of thousands of interconnected computers all over the world that store info and send it out
• No government or business owns the Internet
• No president, no CEO, no central headquarters
• The World Wide Web is the part of the Internet we’re most familiar with
• More than a billion pages on the Web

Who coined the word “cyberspace”?

• William Gibson in a science fiction novel called Neuromancer
• Neuromancer was published in 1984, a year made famous by George Orwell in his futuristic book of that name
• Gibson envisioned a future underworld where people would routinely “jack” into a global computer network to participate in unsavory businesses, commit crimes, and act out their fantasies

Is the Internet a much better vehicle for free speech and public debate than any other existing form of communication media, such as TV or newspaper?

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