Before Web 2.0, a little Web 101

Internet 101

Before we go all crazy about Web 2.0 in all of its glory and, quite frankly increasing diversity and complexity, how’s about a little Web 101?

The Internet as a network of computers attached to each other by a whole pile of wire has been around since the 1970s. It was created by the US Military to protect communication in the event of a nuclear strike taking out a city and therefore causing a break in the network. What they came up with was this,

• if you could break up a file into small pieces and….
• send the pieces individually over a variety of paths and….
• they could all arrive at the same place at the same time and…..
• rebuild themselves into the correct file when they get there…. 

Then it would follow that if a part of the network went down, say from an 80 megaton hydrogen intercontinental ballistic missile hit, the data would flow effortlessly around the “broken” part of the network and we’d be none the worse for the wear. Well the data would be anyway, Chicago…not so much.

That lasted until sometime in 1980 when an Oxford Grad, Tim Berners-Lee who was working at a Swiss lab got fed up with the fact that his address book was spread across multiple computers but there was no way for him to access his personal data across the network. So he created a program called “Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything” to be able to access his data wherever it was. He was happy. Then he left and didn’t come back until 1990.

When he got back he developed the concept of Hypertext, you see a text list of things you want, you click on the words or title of what you want and you get what you want. You know how you click on a link on the internet and then it takes you somewhere? Yes, that’s what we are talking about here.

The Tim Berners-Lee to-do list below is from “Web 101 for Dummies Or Everything You Wanted to Know About the Web But Were Afraid to Ask! By Mickey Bryant, Applications Systems Analyst Arizona State University”. 

Then in 1990, while working on a project to enable information sharing within internationally dispersed teams and the dissemination of information by support groups, he proposed a Web concept. 

The project was approved and development began. By November 1990, his development team began testing the following: 

• the first Web browser
• the first Web server 
• the protocol to communicate between the client and the server, HTTP 
• the language used to compose the Web documents, HTML 
• the means to locate the information, the URL 

Here's a link to an image of the original proposal Berners-Lee gave to his supervisor at CERN (the European Nuclear Lab in Switzerland). It is interesting to note that the supervisor who gave him the ok to proceed with his research, noted at the top that the proposal was "Vague yet exciting".


By 1992 the World Wide Web was implemented


In 1993 Marc Andreessen created Mosiac, the first web browser that allowed pictures in the window, and the graphical internet was born. Andreessen went on to develop Netscape which eventually became Mozilla and Firefox.


So that is all the history we will bore you with, now for….


Sort of How it works in Internet Fairy Tale Format (IFTF).


When you open a browser like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari or Firefox and type in an address like www.yahoo.com here’s what happens;

1. Grandma (your browser) who lives in Terra Haute says to Goldilocks (HTTP), “I need to see the different porridges that Mamma Bigby Bear has in her shop.”
2. Goldilocks is confused because she knows the Bigby’s name but not where they live. Anyhoo…being the good kid she is she goes skipping down the path from the house (your internet connection) to the street (the internet) where she runs into a rehabilitated Wolf named Karl who stands in a kiosk all day giving directions (he is what we’d call a Domain Name or DNS Server).
3. She asks Karl where the Mamma Bigby Bear lives (this is the www.name.com) and he gives her the address as 123.122.3.21 (an Internet Protocol or IP Address) which she somehow understands.
4. She goes trippingly up the street and in a matter of seconds is at Mamma Bigby Bear’s house which is actually located in Burkina Faso. The first thing she gets is a brochure which will tell grandma everything Goldilocks needs to get in order to show grandma what grandma wants to see (a HyperText Markup Language or HTML document). The brochure also tells her where everything Goldilocks needs is located in the shop but Goldilocks can’t read it, only Grandma can. So she takes it, breaks it up in a million little pieces, instantly clones herself enough that each clone can take one pieces, and the flood of Goldilockses begin making their way back from Burkina Faso to Terra Haute via different routes.
5. Once in Terra Haute, all of the Goldilockses reform into one Goldilocks and she gives the brochure to Grandma. Grandma reads it and tells Goldilocks where everything is located in Mamma Bigbys shop. This includes more text like recipes and pictures of porridges, including her famous curried cranberry, raisin and almond porridge but I digress.
6. Goldilocks doesn’t complain, told you she was a good kid, then returns to Bigby’s in Burkina Faso finds the stuff she needs, repeats the cloning and breaking up part for each thing she has to get, returns all of the part s to Grandmas where Grandma reassembles the bits and pieces in the format and layout specified by the brochure.
7. Grandma is very happy she sees all of the porridges exactly as Mamma Bigby wants her to.
8. Grandma then sees a link for meat porridges, she glances over at Goldilocks, who hasn’t even broken a sweat, and the kid is up and out the door….

Further reading if you want. Not required, there won't even be a test, but it's fun to read anyway;

From CERN marking the 20th anniversary of "the internet": http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/Web-en.html