Internet Educational Tips

1990
September: The Archie Search Engine
The Web’s first search engine was Archie. It was nothing like today’s Google or Yahoo or Live Search; it was an Archive that catalogued a list of FTP sites & requested for updates once every month! Launched on 10th September 1990, this system quickly expanded from being a local tool, to being available on a network, to being a popular service available all over the Web. The servers on which Archie was hosted could be accessed by the local client xarchie, to sending queries via e-mail, and later via Web interfaces, like we do today.
The name Archive was derived from the word archive, Clones of Archie- Jughead and Veronica – were, however, inspired by the comic book series.
Then talking about search engines, we should talk about Gopher, which was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Dan Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota. Gopher was designed to act as an anonymous FTP service while trying to incorporate new web features. It contained a file like hierarchical system that was familiar to users, an easy-to-use syntax, was free to use, and could be created easily.
The name Gopher was chosen because its users would program it to “go for” information.
The Gopher protocol ceased gaining popularity as soon as it was made famous. The primary reasons for this were the University of Minnesota’s announcement on charging licensing fees for the use of its Gopher server, Web browsers like Mosaic quickly duplicated Gopher’s functionality & finally, because its defined file format & structure was too rigid to use.
December: The Internet is Born
The Internet was originally envisioned by Tim Berners Lee, an independent contractor at CERN in 1980, when he created a database software to catalogue people and software models while working at CERN, In this database, each new page of information had to be linked to an already existing page, a term later known as hypertext. He called his software ENQUIRE.

The World
The first ISP on the planet to offer basic dial-up access was the World. Operated by Software Tool and Die, it is headquartered in Brookline, Massachusetts. It used to use the domain name http://world.std.com earlier, but now uses mainly http://www.TheWorld.com

By 1983, the ARPANET was complete & had a total of 213 Universities connected all over the US. Robert Cailliau joined him in 1990, and the duo tried CERN to adopt their technology.
By December of 1990, Berners Lee had built all the required software to run the first web browser, called the World Wide Web, the first web server, and first web pages that described the project. However, the browser ran only on his NeXT system, which was far superior to computers available to the general public at the time.
In 1991, tests were on to make a multi-line text base browser that would run on any computer irrespective of the hardware or OS used. To encourage its use within CERN, they put up the entire CERN telephone directory on the web. Earlier, users had to dial into the mainframe to get the required telephone number, which could take several minutes.
In May of 1991, Paul Kunz from the standard Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) visited CERN and was fascinated b the web. He took with him the NeXT software, which was later ported to run on the VM/CMS OS of an IBM mainframe computer. This mainframe contained a catalogue of all the online documents in SLAC. This became the first web server outside CERN & the first in North America. Then in August of 1991, Berners Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt. hypertext newsgroup. This was also the time when the Internet became a publicly available service.

By 1992, early users of the web were navigating through pages that had HTTP links or hypertext menus presented as a file system. Since the number of new pages was growing rapidly, users book marked popular directory pages such as http://info.cern.ch/, or NCSA’s “What’s New” page. The graphical browser gap was filled in April 1992 with the release of Erwise & Viola WWW in May. These browsers could view embedded graphics & animation and paraphrase scripting code. The release of the Mosaic browser in 1993 helped revolutionize the browsing experience.
The first International WWW conference was held at CERN in May 1994. It was agreed that the web protocol and code could be used by anyone for free. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in September 1994, with Tim Berners Lee as its founder.
The years 1996 to 2000 saw a dramatic rise of the Web where many companies were starting to offer commercial services till the 2001 “dot-com bubble” burst.

Labels: 1990, Archie, www