Notes on Week 2

We discuss some of the history and structure of the Internet, using historyoftheinternet.org as our guide.

  • History of the Internet
    • Telegraph
    • Vannevar Bush
    • Ted H. Nelson (1960)
      • Hypertext
      • interlinked media so complex it couldn't be written on paper
      • the medium itself is important
    • RAND Corp. (1964)
      • communications network
      • withstand a nuclear attack
      • no central authority
      • this is the essence of the Internet -- by design
    • ARPANet (1969)
      • 4 nodes
        • Stanford
        • Utah
        • UCLA
        • UCSB
      • crashed on the G in login
    • First use of Internet (1975)
      • Vint Cerf
    • Usenet (1979)
      • News groups
      • alt.gossip.celebrities
      • groups.google.com
    • TCP/IP (1983)
      • flexible
      • any service can be put up on the net
      • IP Addressing
        • everyone gets a number
        • numbers are like address in the real world
    • DNS (1984)
      • Handier than remembering the IP address
      • like a shorthand for IPs, they just point to it
    • Mosaic (1993)
      • First web browser with images in the page
      • First popular browser
    • "Weblog" (1997)
      • term coined in 1997
      • arguably in existence for a while before that
      • raises an interesting question--what makes a blog a blog?
      • Early example of the read-write web
    • Google (1998)
      • Not the first search engine
      • but makes use of hypertext in a novel way
      • the algorithm