History+of+the+Web

Highlight some of the key points in the history of the world wide web. When did it start or how? When was email first introduced? When did it expand into education?

Angie Sandy Susan

Who created the web?
Tim Berners-Lee, a British man born in 1955, is credited with having created the World Wide Web while he was a researcher at the European High-Energy Particle Physics lab, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an international group with the goal of bring the WWW to its full potential and keeping the stability as it changes and grows.

Why did he feel the need to create the web?
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal called //HyperText and CERN// and circulated his proposal for comments at CERN in 1989. The proposal was the solution to the technologies that would enable collaboration in the high energy physics community. The basic idea was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

When was the web was born?
At CERN, the world wide web was "born" in late 1989. Through 1991 and 1993, Berners-Lee gained feedback from Web users and continued working on the design of the world wide web.

Al Gore claims, "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

How was the server born?
All of the documents coded with HTML elements were stored on one main computer at CERN. This special type of computer was called a "web server" (by the physicists at CERN) because it "served-up" batches of cross-linked HTML documents. There was only one Web server located at CERN, but by the end of 1992 there were over 50 Web servers in the world.

Where is Tim now?
Tim Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C (www.w3.org). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

Why was email invented?
"Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea," according to RayTomlinson.

How has email changed?
1960's: Timesharing computers were developed in the early 60's. These computers could run more than one program at once, and research organizations developed ways to exchange messages. These first systems had a lot of limitations.

1970's: Ray Tomlinson developed TENEX operating system that included local email programs. He informed his colleagues about a better email program in 1971 by sending everyone an email with instructions on how to use it. He was the first to use the @ symbol to combine the user and host names. At this time, one had to send separate emails to each recipient.

1970's: Instant messaging begins to appear (but not on the internet)

1980's: SMTP was created. This allowed users to send a single message to more than one recipient. Eric Allman created the "sendmail" program, the most commonly used SMTP server.

1990's: America Online and Delphi connected their e-mail systems to the internet.

1990's: Instant Messaging gains in popularity

April 2008: Microsoft claims to have 256.2 million users, Yahoo 254.6 million, Google 91.6 million, AOL 48.9 million users.

July 2009: Yahoo! Mail has 106 million U.S. users, Windows Live Hotmail 47 million, Gmail 37 million, and AOL 36.4 million.

When did the WWW expand into education?
1992: Online information in schools through Gopher servers (named after University of Minnesota mascot), a predecessor of the world wide web.

1995: Internet and world wide web catching on in schools, and individuals can create their own web pages.

1996: Many schools are rewiring in order to gain access to the internet and world wide web. Some schools install web servers and encourage web pages for instructional purposes.

2001: Museums and historical sites sponsor online field trips.

What are educational implications of the world wide web?

 * access to wide array of up-to-date knowledge (real time data collection)
 * social development
 * a closely connected world which can empower students
 * capabilities to publish work
 * collaboration
 * accountability for students (students can access information in and out of school)


 * The following is a link to Ted Berners-Lee Speech on celebrating the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. He actually talks about why he created it and how he did it.**

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This is an even shorter video but sums up the beginning in a quick two minutes.

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Sources: http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.html http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/Web-en.html http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/email.htm http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/berners-lee.htm http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm http://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/histofcs.html [] [] [] []