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Perl CGl Programming: No experience required.
(Publisher: Sybex, Inc.)
Author(s): Erik Strom
ISBN: 0782121578
Publication Date: 11/01/97

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Table of Contents


Appendix B
A Brief History of the Internet

The Internet is the backbone of the World Wide Web—and of all communication that takes place over the various TCP/IP protocols such as FTP and Telnet. Without the Net, there literally would be no Web or e-mail or Gopher or Usenet—indeed, there would be no TCP/IP.

So, what is this Internet, and how did it come to be? It’s a fascinating story.

Creating a Worldwide Network

The Internet, that worldwide network of computers that allows us all to communicate with each other so easily, has been described in at least one text as “an amorphous blob” and in another as “monolithic.” The former is technically true, because there really is no structure to it except that it hooks everyone up together. There is no “Internet Central,” except for a company called InterNIC that keeps track of everyone’s domain names. The Internet is defined by the fact that everyone can get into it easily; all you need is a computer and the wherewithal to connect with someone who’s wired into the thing.


NOTE:  When you register a new domain name, such as rcich.com, you do it with InterNIC. It costs a nominal amount of money per year, considering all that the organization has to do to keep track of the thousands of domain names in existence. You can find out more at http://www.internic.net. You can also rely on your Internet service provider to take care of the registration for you. Be advised, however, that there may be a charge for the service.

We tend to forget that it has been so easy to plug into the Net for only a few years. There was a time when Internet connections were the sole province of universities and huge businesses, the only enterprises with the resources to pay for the connections. Of course, we’re going back to a time when a 300-baud modem was the ultimate in communications technology and cost hundreds of dollars.

The times and technology have changed. An argument could be made that the Internet has grown in direct inverse proportion to the cost of computers and the other equipment one needs to hook into it, for the sophisticated graphical interfaces available to anyone with a free Web browser would have been unthinkable, inconceivable, to anyone whose link to the world transmitted characters at 300 bits per second.

The Internet is no “amorphous blob”; that’s merely a cute and facile description. Monolithic? Well, what is the definition of an international standard?

How It All Began

Believe it or not, the United States government, in a rare and entirely unintentional fit of intelligence, is responsible for the creation of the Internet.

The Department of Defense decided in the early 1970s that it needed to link together its various branches via computer, and so the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) was born. A nationwide network of computers had to be established to make it work; at that time, the only nongovernment agencies who owned the computing power to pull this off were universities, so they were brought into the project by necessity.

This was the government’s first mistake. As anyone who’s ever taken a college computer class knows, university computer science departments are run largely by anarchic geniuses who haven’t the faintest regard for the concerns of bureaucrats. As far as they were concerned, the notion of a coast-to-coast computer network was far too tantalizing to be left entirely to the Department of Defense. Besides, the bureaucrats didn’t have the resources to work it out by themselves.

Thus was this project let loose on the world. The Defense Department had its network, but the backbone for it was created by people who had no intention whatsoever of limiting this incredibly useful resource to a single government agency. Besides, they had to do an awful lot of work. What computer networks had existed before then were exclusive to the machines that ran them; now many different computers in many different places had to be able to speak to one another.

Necessity definitely proved once again to be Invention’s mom. This was not a project that could be undertaken by one company that would dictate all of the rules and reap all of the profits. It had to be an almost utopian enterprise, with all of the participants cooperating and sharing open-handedly, or it wouldn’t work. The following are a couple of the things they came up with:

  TCP/IP grew out of this spirit, and its many contributors did such a good job that the Internet now runs on that protocol.
  A few very smart people found that it was tedious to have to rewrite their internal lists of Internet addresses every time someone was added to the Net, so they wrote the distributed database that has been in use throughout the world ever since: the Domain Name Service (DNS).

There are hundreds of other contributions these pioneers made that we still use every day. Their fiercely egalitarian beliefs led not just to a network of computers that spanned the United States, but to a worldwide network. And, most importantly, no one person or body or corporation owned it.

It was a marvelous piece of work.

The Explosion

Still, in those early days the Internet was accessible only to those people who had some very expensive equipment. That meant university computer science departments and Fortune 500 corporations, for the most part. Certainly, no one else could afford to purchase mainframe computers, which is what one needed to get into the Net.

Times change. Beginning in the mid-’80s, the kind of computing power that previously had been available only to mainframe jocks began to wend its way into the general public. By then, most of the people who were setting up personal computers for themselves at home had heard of the Internet; probably lots of them had used it at school or at work.

They wanted it for themselves.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a bulletin board system (BBS) even if you’ve never actually used one. This was the only link to the world for most computer users throughout the 1980s, and the concept reached its apex with nationwide BBSs such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online. As hardware costs continued to plummet, these companies found that they could offer stripped-down Internet access to their subscribers at a price that didn’t frighten most of them away. There wasn’t a lot out there yet for the average home computer user except e-mail, but the popularity of that one attraction mushroomed far beyond the expectations of the big online services. Suddenly, the ability to send messages to people anywhere in the world—instantly—became almost a necessity for the subscribers.

The online services, in the grand tradition of American corporate greed, tried mightily to hog all of this action for themselves. Microsoft’s new Windows operating system was racking up record profits, so they developed their own graphical user interfaces and mass-mailed the software everywhere; they did handstands to make their services more appealing to users. But they still wouldn’t allow you, as a subscriber, to bypass all of their fancy internal gee-gaws and simply get out to the Net. At the time, it wasn’t really a big deal, unless your idea of a good time was to be able to play around with the nation’s UNIX systems.

Enter the Web

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee was working in the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He needed a way for the lab’s physicists to pass their research documents around, worldwide, without the impediments and delays that they encountered using e-mail or FTP, the ubiquitous UNIX File Transfer Protocol.


NOTE:  Purists will note that CERN doesn’t come anywhere near standing for European Laboratory for Particle Physics and they’re correct. The acronym actually comes from the French: Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

Berners-Lee, in one of those serendipitous flashes of inspiration that seem to be so numerous in Internet development, took a few of the common UNIX tools and lashed them into what he called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, which led very shortly to the development of a document language called the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. The concept of hypertext, or linking documents together with a system of embedded links, was not new in 1990. However, this was the first time anyone had tried it in a way that didn’t depend on a certain kind of computer to work.

Berners-Lee and his associates also developed a software package to make these concepts work. This first Web server, known today as the CERN server, was the beginning of the World Wide Web. CERN, in keeping with the usual behavior on the Internet, gave the package away, which certainly didn’t hurt its popularity. It was called httpd, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Daemon.

Meanwhile, the computer scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications were hard at work on their own httpd version. It was soon available for downloading—free, of course—and it wasn’t long before Web servers from CERN and NCSA were running on UNIX systems throughout the Internet.

Browsing the Web

To take advantage of HTTP, you needed software that could read HTML. These first applications, called browsers, were non-graphical, slow, and entirely clunky. Still, they allowed people to interact with sites on the World Wide Web, transferring documents and other information around with no regard at all for the machines they came from or the formats they were written in.

This still is the hallmark of the World Wide Web, despite the best efforts of some companies to make it conform to their standards alone. It doesn’t matter what you’re passing around or what format it’s in, if it follows the HTML and HTTP standards, it will be able to negotiate its way around the Web.

But those old browsers were not particularly spiffy. With no graphics and no recognition of a mouse, they were very difficult to navigate. Figures B.1 and B.2 illustrate the difference between the Silicon Graphics Web site in a text-based browser and a new graphical browser.


Figure B.1:  A Web page called up in the old Lynx browser


Figure B.2:  The same Web page in Netscape Navigator


NOTE:  If you have access to a UNIX system, you can get a taste of how things used to be by running Lynx, one of the early, text-based browsers.

Then, in 1993, a team of NCSA programmers led by a young man named Marc Andreesen wrote a graphical browser. They called it Mosaic and it quickly became popular among people who used the Web frequently. Andreesen then took the idea and realized every programmer’s dream —he formed his own company and became very rich and famous. Andreesen’s company is Netscape; it sells the Navigator browser, which is neck-and-neck with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the world.

The Web Takes Off

Arguably, it was Mosaic, then Netscape, then—though somewhat later—Internet Explorer that created a veritable explosion on the Internet. Before these browsers made it possible to interact with really good-looking Web sites, there was no incentive to create the sites and thus no incentive to go cruising around the Net unless, as we’ve pointed out, you had a desire to visit UNIX systems.

Suddenly, though, anyone could make Web pages with graphics and fancy pictures and links to other good places. All you needed was a Web server and a little HTML.

The result was a huge jump in the number of users on the Net, which led to a huge drop in the price of connecting to the Internet and the World Wide Web, which itself led to a gigantic jump in the number of users on the Net. Things have grown to the extent that luminaries such as Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, regularly predict that the Net will collapse under its own weight soon.

Well, that hasn’t happened yet. Things do get a little slow on the Net some nights, though, don’t they?


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