SHORT HISTORYOF COMPUTERS

INTERNETAND THE WEB

Numbers and representations : seven

…….

7

111

VII

seven

Numbers and representations : ten

……….

Ten

1010

X

Dix en français

The 40’s and 50’s : calculators

• The great ancestors : Pascal, Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Hollerith

• 20th century ancestors : Atanasoff, Zuse• 1943-1946 : the Eniac (by Eckert, Mauchly and

Neumann - who also did many other things in mathematics, physics and economics)

• Some seminal ideas came from Turing• Computers were only « calculators »

– Military, scientific, demographic and economic applications

• Central processing unit + memory

The two ways to produce cloth

• Weaving

• Knitting

Enigma

• During WWII the German forces used an encryption system to send secret messages called Enigma

• The British, lead by Turing, actually cracked Enigma• Yet they let some of their cities be bombed so that the

Germans would not know• To this day the British have not said how they cracked

Enigma• At the beginning of 2004 the British authorities

declassified millions of military photographs taken during WWII

The « pascaline » of Pascal

The first computing machine(1641)

http://www.sdnp.org.gy/geap/ncerd/ithistory/pascal.html

More on this here :

The machine of Babbage

http://home.clara.net/mycetes/babbage/

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/gessler/topics/jacquard-roy-orr.htm

Jacquard cards

The 60’s : the birth of Arpanet

• The importance of the « memory » function

• The advantages of connecting « computers » together

• 1965 : first telephone connection between a computer located on the East-Coast and a computer located on the West-Coast of the U.S.

• Standard telephone connection

• 1966 : Introduction of the « packet switching » principle (Paul Baran)

• 1969 : ARPANET– At first, connection between : UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah State University

• Further references

Packet switching through a network

• A good example of an idea that is totally counterintuitive, and yet turns out to be very powerful :

• This technique makes communications very robust

• It’s as preposterous as sending oil through a network of pipelines with teaspoonful quantities, to go from A to B.

The 70’s (1) : from Arpanet to Internet • 70-71 : Development of Arpanet

– Connection of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.

• 72-73 : New functions– Invention of E-mail

– Invention of the Telnet protocol

– Invention of the FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

• 79 : Creation of the Usenet forums

• In those remote times, we were still very far from the present “user friendliness” of computers– Main frame to main frame connection

– Refrigerated rooms, machines operated by specialists, clad in white, and as susceptible as cooks…

The 70’s (2) : The birth of micro-computers • 73-75 : first proto-micro-computers

– In 1974, traineeship at IBM, suitcase micro-computer, 100 000 FF…

• 1977 : The Apple II– Fantastical development thanks to the invention of Visicalc (by Bricklin

and Frankston)

– First word processors

– Development of a large number of softwares (tools, like Basic, as well as end-user applications)

• 1979 : IBM decides to enter the field– Internal discussions, William C. Lowe, special division, Boca Raton

– Unsuccessful contact with Gary Kildall (see also bio)

– Development of DOS attributed to Microsoft

– Microsoft purchases DOS from Tim Paterson

– First IBM PC in 1981

The 80’s : Internet before the WEB • 80-83 : The TCP/IP protocol is adopted

– had been designed in the 70’s

• Standardization of E-mail, FTP, Telnet, Usenet

• Several major breakthroughs are yet to come in order to reach the WEB

• Forerunning inventions :– Archie (McGill University) : first index of all the data available in the FTP sites

– WAIS : first « full text » index of all the documents in the FTP sites

– Beginnings of the Client / Server architecture

– Gopher : first software running on a client PC to search the Internet (later on, refined into Veronica : “Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives”)

The 90’s : the advent of the WEB • Adoption of the information storing system within HTML

pages and adoption of the « http://www… » protocol

– Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and his team (from the CERN) in 1989 – Inspired principle of storing information within simple text pages, with « hyper-links »

linking them to other pages of the same type ; founded upon the observation that 90% of the information useful to users can be stored that way.

• 1993 : Invention of Mosaic (by Marc Andreessen)– Second Internet “surfing” software running on a PC

– Much more user friendly than Gopher, because it has a « GUI » (Graphic user interface)

• Soon transformed into Netscape

• Then Microsoft Internet Explorer entered the ring as well…

The years 2000 : rocket takeoff • 4 to 5 billions of html pages (at the end of 2001) + all the invisible Web

(FTP servers and others …)– it is sometimes said that it is 20 times larger than the “visible Web” !

• In December 2003, the Google search engine listed 3 billion html pages + 425 million images + 700 million Usenet messages

– services, like for instance tracerlock.com, offer to permanently scout the Net and monitor pages to warn you whenever a subject of interest to you shows up

• Advent of dynamic pages– Javascript (since the end of the 90’s) : active pages on the client PC and the server

– And html pages created on demand by the server computer : PHP, ASP, PERL language, etc. + data extracted from a server based database (pages always up-to-date…)

• Takeoff of e-Commerce...

• …and of Intranets housing Information Systems (I.S.)

Internet tomorrow

• Still very fast growth and evolution of Internet

• Huge quantities of information created every day

• Still much publicly available information

• Problem of intelligent tracking of relevant information for a given question

• Present and future challenge to the searching and monitoring tools

• Further learning :– http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/comp_hd.html