TRACING WORLD WIDE WEB ORIGINS (or "How the Web was Woven") Along with e-mail, the World Wide Web has recently become one of the best-known Internet features, disseminating information through structured menus, extensive hyperlinks, and sometimes spectacular graphical interfaces. Receiving or downloading information via Internet is nothing new; people have been doing it for years via FTP or Gopher menu. What makes the Web unique is that most of these functions occur transparently. While in the past, a user had to have some knowledge of how Internet functions actually worked and often had to input long arcane character strings to find desired information, the Web offers a point-and-click interface that demands almost no previous knowledge of Internet (or computer) workings. Comprised of thousands of computers linked worldwide by the Internet, the Web receives its name from its function. Instead of harboring linear connections (similar to a long string of individual Christmas light sockets), all sockets on the Web are interconnected, allowing a user the potential to jump from one site to any other site with only a click of the mouse. The Internet has interconnected the same computers for years, but now users can actually see these sites in all their graphical glory -- as if the previous empty light sockets have now had bulbs placed within them. In essence, the Web has simply illuminated, visually, much of what has been in place for two decades. Origin of the Internet What those unfamiliar with the Internet often do not realize is that the Internet itself originated with the government under the jurisdiction of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which in 1973 became DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). It was created to do three things: * Connect military, university, and defense contractors * Promote rapid information exchange via computer * Support communications in case of nuclear attack Initially, two main problems had to be solved. Telephone switching nodes had to be constructed that would work well enough to facilitate information sharing among the networked computers. Also, protocols had to be designed and implemented that would allow each of the connected computers -- no matter its architecture -- to exist in the subnetwork and share its resources. In late 1967, ARPA contracted with Stanford Research Institute to develop specifications for the communication system itself. Although the final SRI report wasn't released until December 1968, enough essential work had been done by the summer for the ARPANET procurement to officially begin. The original schedule documented a five-year process to procure, construct, and operate the network, and then transfer it from ARPA to some common carrier. One should note the original premise defined by ARPA: "The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium between people dwarfs into relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine." (ARPA draft, III-24) Even in the Internet's earliest stages, the potential for quick world-wide communication was obvious. ARPA developed a program plan, which developed into a set of specifications, and these specifications were connected to a competitive Request for Quotation, in order to find an organization that would design and build the subnetwork between the IMPs. From an initial pool of 140 potential bidders, twelve submitted actual proposals, and the ARPANET contract was finally won in 1969 by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, located in Cambridge, MA. The initial system would be delivered on Honeywell computers. Now the protocol that would allow the hosts to communicate with each other over the subnetwork had to be developed. Based on system differences, ARPA decided that the four original sites -- UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and UTAH -- would design their own protocols, since the gurus there already knew their system intimately. In addition to protocol, hardware and software had to be developed to allow each host to interact with the others. In this way, the government and academic groups worked together to form ARPANET, with the underlying assumption that the academic world could advise the government on extraneous possible uses for the ARPANET. In September 1969, the computers arrived and were soon sending packets to each other: Success! This original system was strong enough that computers could find the quickest route between sites to send information, as well as discern and circumvent "crashes" or blocks along the route without losing data. Later on, during the development of satellite and radio packet networks, a new protocol named TCP/IP was created that allowed computers of different types of networks to share resources. The development of TCP/IP marked the beginnings of the Internet as we know it today, as various networks could now be connected via gateways. Internet Protocol could be encapsulated within lower-level network packets. The Birth of the Web The idea of graphical interfaces on the Internet -- the World Wide Web -- was conceived in the late 1980's at the European Particle Physics Lab in Switzerland (CERN), and the HTML "language" (actually a tagging system) was created as a means to access and display documents stored on servers anywhere on the Internet. Initially, through 1993, there was some struggle with the concept, not due to any flaw in the idea but to the lack of hardware that could adequately support such an ambitious medium: at that time, Internet connections and modems were too slow to adequately handle large graphics, and the Web was only feasible on large systems directly connected to each other. In addition, the hyperlinks that make the "magic" of the Web work -- the strands connecting every nexus on the spider web together -- had yet to be created. The arduous process of inserting sufficient links was sometimes made worse by page name and location changes, caused by internal site reshuffling and the Web's rapid growth. Still, faster modems and phone lines coupled with graphics compression techniques have enabled what was a virtual pipedream to become reality. The Web has quickly become a buzzword among computer novices and technicians alike. In light of its willingness to explore new communication frontiers when computers were merely considered number-crunchers, the government should also be front and foremost when it comes to finding useful implementations of Web technology. ----------------------------------------------------- (c) 1997 by David M. McCandless. All rights reserved. Material to be used solely in regards to examining my credentials for employment.