Did you know that the Internet and the World Wide
Web are NOT the same thing? Is knowing how the Internet came to be,
and how it has evolved, of ANY importance to folks like you and me,
as Internet marketers?
Well, yeah…yeah, I think it IS. I think that
knowing exactly what the Internet IS can better prepare us to
really understand what it is NOT.
And knowing what the Internet is NOT, my
friends, is vitally important to our success as fellow Internet
marketers. You see, my goal is to make YOU into the Internet
version of a Formula One racecar driver! And for you to be in the
winner’s circle you need to know at least something about the
machine you are driving...
It all began in 1957...
In October of that year, the former Soviet Union
launched "Sputnik," the first artificial earth satellite.
To say that the United States panicked is putting it mildly!
You see, up until that time, we smug Americans just ASSUMED that the
United States was THE world leader in science and technology. In
fact, at the time, the Soviet Union was looked upon as a powerful,
but technologically backward country.
Now, for those of you who did not live through the
so-called "Cold-War" years, it’s difficult to imagine
what the launching of Sputnik did to the mentality of the United
States. Suddenly, we were a "second-rate" country, and
government leaders, as well as the man and woman on the street,
could only envision nuclear bombs raining down on us from
unreachable, untouchable Russian satellites! It’s hard to
believe, but a growth industry of the time was companies that built
bomb shelters in your back yard!
Something had to be done and done
FAST!
So… the following year, the United States
Department of Defense formed "A.R.P.A." (the
Advanced Research
Projects Agency) specifically to
re-establish the U.S. lead in science and technology, especially
in military matters.
In 1962 the RAND corporation, a government
"think tank," was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do
a study on how it could maintain command and control over it’s
missiles and bombers after an all-out nuclear war, when normal means
of communication would be wiped out. Sound a little paranoid?
Remember folks, this was during the Cold War. Both countries
maintained huge fleets of nuclear weapon laden bombers in the air 24
hours a day, in addition to THOUSANDS of nuclear ICBM’s in bunkers
and submarines. It was in 1962 that the Cuban Missile Crisis
occurred, during which we were actually expecting nuclear missiles
to be launched at us at any moment from the shores of Cuba.
The RAND Corporation study was finally made public
in 1964, and envisioned a decentralized network of powerful
computers that would link military command posts and relay
messages back and forth. Since it would be designed from the first
to have no "central" source, an enemy could not target one
specific area and knock out the whole system.
The first "node" (computer capable of
relaying information) was set up at the
University of California at
Los Angeles (UCLA) in September of 1969, and by December of that
year, three additional "nodes" were set up at SRI, the
University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of
Utah. This infant computer network of four interconnected computers
was named the "A.R.P.A.-NET," after it’s Defense
Department sponsor.
It's almost hard to imagine, isn't it,
that there was a time when what we now call the Internet, consisted
of just FOUR computers!?
The first message sent across the
network was supposed to be the word "login", but
reportedly, the link between the four nodes crashed on the letter
"g"; at the time 5 letters was just too much
information for the infant Internet to handle!
Three years later, in 1972, there were still only
23 computers on this "baby Internet," but something very
important happened.....
.....Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies created the very first
email program.
Now, understand, the federally subsidized ARPANET
was designed to be a scientific and military communication system
ONLY – a means of transferring scientific data between top-level
scientists working at Universities, as well as communiqués between
military command posts during time of all-out nuclear war.
But something VERY strange was happening!
The main traffic on ARPANET was NOT long-distance
computing and military communications – it was news and personal
messages! The researchers working on this project had turned
ARPANET into their very own, ultra high-speed "post
office!" Mailing lists ("safe-lists") were soon born, and the biggest was
named "SF-LOVERS" – it was a list for science fiction
fans.
By 1973, just one year after the first email
program was developed, 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email! (Talk
about the shape of things to come, eh!?)
Although the term "Internet" was first
used in a scientific paper by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn as early as
1974, it was not until 1982 that the Internet as we know it
was really born. That was the year that Vint and Bob perfected the
computer language known as "TCP/IP." By January of the
following year every machine connected to ARPANET was required
to use TCP/IP and, for the first time, the loose connection of
networks that made up the ARPANET could be coherently and reliably
connected into a TRUE "Inter"-net.
The ARPA-net was slowly giving birth
to the Inter-net!
In 1984 the science fiction author William Gibson
first coined the term "cyberspace" in his novel "Neuromancer."
That same year the number of Internet hosting computers exceeded
1,000 for the first time, and by 1987 the number jumped to over
28,000!
It was about this same period (the mid-80’s) that the
proliferation of relatively inexpensive personal computers gave REAL
impetus to the growth of the Internet. No longer was this exciting,
new communications medium the province of universities, the
military, and a few large companies – the average
Joe-on-the-street (that’s you and me!) was now able to "log
on."
ARPANET was officially decommissioned in
1990, and guess what!? Nobody noticed! By that time the INTERNET
had taken over virtually all of the duties of "old-man
ARPANET."
Understand, though, that up until this time,
there was STILL no such thing as the World Wide Web.
You see, although the terms Internet and Web are almost always used
to mean the same thing, they are actually completely distinct. The
Internet is the global community of computers that makes the
exchange of information possible. The World Wide Web, on the other
hand, is a PART of the Internet.
In other words, the Net exists independently of
the Web, but the Web can’t exist without the Net.
Then, in 1991, a physicist by the name of Dr. Timothy
Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in
Switzerland developed a new and unique technique for distributing
information on the Internet. This program allowed users to connect
from one document to another (in other words, from one website to another) by the use
of things called "hyperlinks." (Just think what the
Internet would be like today if we weren’t able to
"click-and-go!")
AND!... this new innovation also made possible for
the first time the transfer of not just words,
but pictures and sounds! Pictures and sounds!!!
Who would have thought?
We take this for granted now,
but at the time it was pretty exciting, cutting edge stuff!
The first webcam was also born in 1991. It was
deployed at a Cambridge University computer lab, and its sole
purpose was to monitor a particular coffee maker so that lab users
could avoid wasted trips to an empty coffee pot!
However, as innovative as Dr. Berners-Lee's new
"hyperlinks" concept was, even two years later the World Wide Web still only
accounted for a mere 1% of all Internet traffic. You see, there was
still a piece of the puzzle missing – there was as yet no
easy-to-use way to navigate your way around the now exploding
Internet.
In other words, what was needed was a
"browser."
Then, in 1993 Marc Andreesen and a group of student
programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
developed the first user-friendly browser for the World Wide Web
that they called "Mosaic." (One year later, by the way,
Marc left the NCSA to form his own company which he called Netscape
Communications. Ever hear of NetScape before!?) This was also
the year that the National Science Foundation set up InterNIC,
which, through Network Solutions, until recently was solely
responsible for assigning us our "dotcom" domain names.
This new browser was the real "icing on the
cupcake" for the World Wide Web, which began to grow at the
astounding rate of 381 THOUSAND percent a YEAR! Within
just two more years WWW traffic was the dominant traffic on the
Internet, and you could order a pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut over
the Internet.
The era of e-commerce had arrived!
1995 is often considered the first year the web
became commercialized. While there were commercial enterprises
online prior to ’95, there were a few key developments that
happened that year. First, SSL (Secure
Sockets Layer)
encryption was developed by Netscape, making it safer to conduct
financial transactions (like credit card payments) online.
In addition, two major online businesses got their
start the same year. The first sale on "Echo Bay" was made
that year. Echo Bay later became eBay. Amazon.com also started
in 1995, though it didn’t turn a profit for six years, until 2001.
(Oh, yeah…and the term "spam" comes
into being.)
By 1996, 45 million people worldwide were on the
Internet, with about 30 million of those (about 67%) in the United
States and Canada. By 1999 the number of world-wide "net-izens"
had increased to 150 million; it took only one more year for that
number to double to over 300 million. For the first time the number
of American homes with Internet access surpassed 50%, and by 2010
that number reached over 90%.!
The Next Step:
The Internet is based on a set of
"rules," or "protocols" for exchanging
information.
This collection of rules is known as "Hyper-Text
Transfer Protocol," or more
familiarly, "HTTP." We can go back and forth
between pages on the Net because Web browsers (like Marc
Andreesen’s "Netscape," or Microsoft’s "Chrome," or Mozilla's "FireFox") which actually
READ the pages, and Web servers (computers that STORE the
pages) both understand this rule or protocol.....
"Hyper-Text
Transfer Protocol"
Hmmm... Does "HTTP" ring any bells with
you?
Yep! It's always the first part of a website
address. For example, the website address that you used to
purchase the "Secrets of the Big Dogs" ebook is...
https://www.bigdogsecrets.com
A website address - the location of a particular
website - is referred to as a "U.R.L."
U.R.L.
stands for Uniform Resource
Locator, and now
you know what that "https" at the beginning of every URL
stands for - Hyper-Text-Transfer-Protocol! (The
"s" means that the site is "secure")
And I'll bet you can now guess what the "www" after
the double slashes stands for. That's right! It
signifies that portion of the Internet on which that website resides
- in this case, the World Wide
Web.
(Incidentally, you old "fogies" -
meaning someone who was on the Net back in the '90's - may remember
when we HAD to put the "www" at the front of every website
address, or it wouldn't work. Today, however, the
"www" portion is not necessary because the World Wide Web
is such an overwhelming part of the Internet.)
Now, then...
After the "www" in a URL
comes what is called the
"domain name." The domain name specifies
exactly what computer is "hosting" that website.
And, finally, the suffix ".com" indicates that this is a top-level
domain. ".Com" stands for
"commercial." Other top-level domain suffixes you
may have seen include ".edu" (education), ".mil"
(military), ".gov" (government), and ".org"
(organization).
In other words, when you initially clicked on that
link to go to the "Secrets of the Big Dogs" purchase page,
THIS is what you were telling that little box on your desk to do...
"Computer! Use the "secure"
version of Hyper-Text-Transfer-Protocol,
and take me to that portion of the Internet called the World-Wide-Web
where I can find the Domain bigdogsecrets, which is a commercial,
top-level domain."
Congratulations! Not only are you now an
expert on the history of the Internet, but you are one of the few
people who know the parts of a URL, and what they stand for.
You are bound to be the center of attention at the next cocktail
party you attend, and, boy, if you ever appear on Jeopardy!...
But seriously...
Within just 50 years the Internet has grown from a
Cold War idea for communicating among the remains of a society
devastated by all-out nuclear war, to the Information Superhighway
on which we work and play.
Today, most folks look with awe upon the Internet,
as this all-encompassing, all-knowing, smoothly running behemoth
that makes anything and everything possible. (And to a large extent,
that IS true.)
But all too many folks
think that the Internet is a sure-fire road to riches requiring no
investment of time, effort, or money.
IS this an accurate appraisal of the
situation? In other words…
…IS THE INTERNET ALL THAT
IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE.....!?
Forward
- To Chapter 2
Back - To Contents
