Lecture 6 - a brief history of the computer and internet

Notes -

• Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s - large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work
• 1965, Gordom Moore - Moore's law: the capacity of microchip's doubles every two years. This law has held true for over 40 years.
• Xerox PARC early 70s - mouse, graphical user interface (GUI)
• 1975 - first PC - Altair didn't have a language. Bill Gates started writing a language called BASIC for the Altair. In order to market his program he started a little company, the Microsoft.
• By 1980, IBM was determined to get into the PC market. Bill Lowe, promised IBM a product within one year: Open architecture - buying shelf products from a range of other companies and putting them together as a package.
• IBM needed a software - Bill Gates /Microsoft/ made PC DOS 1.0
• Apple - icon-based GUI (Graphical User Interface) - IBM and Microsoft came up with their own GUI - Windows

Internet

• The internet, is a network of networks.
• The idea came from Rand corporation in the 1960s - they developed a scheme for a network that could survive a nuclear war.
• A group of researchers from across the U.S. were already working on a system that they had called Packet Switching which is essentially breaking down messages into small chunks and transmitting them from one computer to another.
• ARPANET developed - downloading academic data - BBS - Bulletin Board Servers and MUDs - Multiple User Domains

World Wide Web

• The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world.
• 'browsers' - Mosaic and Netscape became generally available in the early 1990s.
• Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) is the name of the language in which web pages are written.
• Internet is not the same thing as the web.

Cyberspace

• 1972 Karl Popper wrote about the nature of reality as being divided into three worlds.
• The concept of cyberspace owes much to the work of William Gibson. He took the idea of cybernetics which is the study of particular types of systems of control and communication common to living organisms and machines.
• A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.

Early Internet Applications

• Electronic mail (Email)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc.