Which networks appeared first. Who Invented the Internet? Where did the Internet and the global web WWW come from?

The phrase "founder of the Internet" is often used to refer to people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Let's think about it from a more global point of view. And what could be more global than the Web?

Therefore, today we will meet 10 people who helped the worldwide network spread across our planet and come to the state in which we see it now.

Reading this top, you will get acquainted with several of the most influential peoplewho have created and developed ideas and technologies that are today leading on the global web. And you will also find out, in fact, where the Internet was invented.

1. So who invented the internet? - Tim Berners-Lee

This man stood out because he became an Internet investor. A physicist by training, Berners-Lee and his team created the world's first internet browser "WorldWideWeb"as well as hypertext markup language - Html.

Berners-Lee founded and currently leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that develops and implements standards for the world wide web. Although 1969 can be considered the birth date of the Internet, it was Berners-Lee who became the first person to combine the concept of the Internet with hypertext, which became the foundational moment for today's world wide web.

Due to the fact that CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) did not close access to its development called the World Wide Web, and also never claimed its rights to it, the protocols of this development have found widespread use.

2. Marc Andreessen

Although Mosaic was not the first graphical web browser, it was the first browser to receive serious attention. It was also the first browser to display images within text.

After the creation of Mosaic, Andreessen co-founded Netscape Communications. The company's flagship product, the Netscape Navigator browser, provided a huge impact on the development of the worldwide network, allowing you to convey its benefits to ordinary users. In 1998, Netscape released the source code of Netscape Communicator under an open source license. This project, known as "Mozilla", became the basis for the development of the program we know as "Firefox".

3. Brian Behlendorf

What is the significance of this man: Brian Belendorf was lead developer of Apache web serverand also one of the founders of the Apache Group. While working as a webmaster on Wired Magazine's HotWired website, Belendorf noticed that he was making many changes and fixes to the HTTP server code originally developed by NSCA at the University of Illinois on the Urbana Champaign campus. After he discovered several more groups of people making such corrections, he organized a mailing list to coordinate work on the server.

By February 1995, the project was named Apache, and the original server code from NCSA was completely rewritten and re-optimized. Apart from being free and open source, Apache's real achievement was that it was an extensible solution. This meant that hosting providers could easily add their extensions or plugins for better server optimization, allowing hundreds of sites to be hosted on one computer. Apache is by far the most popular web server on the web.

4, 5, 6. Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski

Lerdorf, Gutmans and Sourasky Steel the parents of what we know as PHP, a scripting language that remains one of the most used languages \u200b\u200bin web development when creating dynamic web pages. Rasmus Lerdorf developed this language in 1995 and became the lead developer of the project in its first two versions.

In 1997, Gutmans and Sourasky decided to extend PHP by rewriting the parser and creating a third version. After that, they both started rewriting the core of the language from scratch, calling it Zend Engine, bringing it to the release of version number 4. Gutmans and Sourasky, after the release of this version, founded Zend Technologies, which continues to make a huge contribution to the development of PHP.

While Larry Wall's Perl was one of the first general-purpose scripting languages \u200b\u200bthat allowed the web to evolve, PHP's simplicity and ease of implementation became fundamental to its de facto "P" being included in the LAMP acronym. (a set of components for building web applications)

7. Brad Fitzpatrick

LiveJournal Creatorwhich is largely social network, author of the original memcached and openID authentication protocol.

Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal while he was in college so that he and his friends could share their lessons and experiences. Later, the project grew into a huge blogging community, and also gained many innovations, such as Friendlists, the ability to create polls, support for blog clients, the ability to send text messages to users, the ability to write posts from the phone, publish posts via E-mail, create custom blogs and many others, which later became the standard for the creation of networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, WordPress.com and Posterous.

As LiveJournal grew and consumed more and more resources, Fitzpatrick launched a project called memcached, aimed at speeding up dynamic web applications and reducing the load on databases. This is due to the clear and centralized allocation of the RAM of the web servers that host the application, which allows large projects to grow with ease. Memcached is used by Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Craigslist and many more.

This man became javaScript creator and is currently chief Engineer, Mozilla Corporation... Eich created JavaScript during his time at Netscape, calling it first Mocha, later renaming the project to LiveScript, and then to JavaScript. JavaScript's official launch date is December 1995.

JavaScript has become one of the most popular languages \u200b\u200bfor web development in a short span of time. With the passage of time and the development of libraries and frameworks, JavaScript, together with the power of Ajax, have made it an integral part of web standards.

John Resig - jQuery creator and lead developer, the most popular JavaScript library on the Internet. Although other JavaScript libraries predate jQuery, such as Sam Stevenson's Prototype, this library's achievement is its cross-browser compatibility that sets it apart from many.

Over the past two years, attention to jQuery has grown significantly, and is now used by 31 percent of the 10,000 most visited websites in the world. Its extensibility and jQuery UI have also made it possible to adapt the jQuery library for use in enterprise application development. Any JavaScript library that allows web developers to move into the enterprise application maker niche is a godsend.

JavaScript continues to dominate the standardized web, and jQuery plays an important role in this.

10. Jonathan Gay

He founded FutureWave Software and for over a decade has been a leading developer and mastermind behind a technology called Flash.

While not everyone likes Adobe Flash, it's worth remembering how influential and important this technology has been over the past 15 years. Guy created a vector drawing program called SmartSketch for the PenPoint operating system in 1993, and after leaving the operating system, SmartSketch technology was proposed for creating and playing animations for web pages.

This product, renamed FutureSplash Animator, was acquired by Macromedia in 1996 and named Flash. Following the takeover, Guy became Vice President of Macromedia Development and took over the management of Flash Development. Over the years, his team has incorporated new elements into Flash, one of which is ActionScript.

However, the pinnacle of Guy's accomplishments was the creation by the team he led of the technology we know as Flash Communication Server (now Flash Media Server), which allowed Flash Player to use the RTMP protocol for streaming audio and video over the web. In fact, this technology has allowed YouTube to become ... YouTube.

Hello dear readers of the blog site. Strange as it may seem, there is no single answer to this question. I can say that the Internet appeared in 1969 year (consider his birthday 29th of October), but I can say that it has been leading its active history only since 1991 or even 93. So when did he appear?

It just depends on what you are asking about. The fact is that in the history of the development of the Internet one can clearly see two eras, the watershed between which can be called the appearance of the first browser (well, and the work of Tom Bernes-Lee, of course, without which this very browser would not be needed by anyone).

You are most likely interested in the second era (pop), when the audience of this network began to grow at a monstrous pace, and not in the era when only people in uniform and dressing gowns knew about the Internet (then there was no such term), and its audience even in the years of maximum distribution, it did not exceed tens of thousands of people (compare with today, when more than three billion use the network).

In this case, the birthday of the Internet can be considered May 17, 1991when the so-called, i.e. what we call today briefly - the Internet, and where we can safely go using a browser. In general, this holiday is officially celebrated April, 4... Why? Read a couple of paragraphs below and find out (there must be at least some intrigue).

History of the Internet and Who Created It?

So, it all started in the distant sixties of the last century. At that time, the United States (the country of the forerunner of the Internet) was at the peak of its capabilities and a huge number of talented scientists worked and served there. It was they who, for military purposes, created the future prototype of today's Internet. It was called ARPANET and served as a link between various military facilities in the event of a nuclear war. Oh how!

As I mentioned just above, the date of birth of this network is considered. But there was nothing to do with what we now understand by the definition of the word Internet. However, there was a network and it developed. Over time, she began to serve not only the military, but also scientists, linking the leading universities of the country. In 71 it was developed (I wrote about a little earlier), and after a couple of years the network was able to step across the ocean.

But as before, it was the lot of only a select few scientists and a group of enthusiasts who used it for correspondence. About ten years later (in 1983), a rather significant event took place - all the now known TCP / IP protocol was standardized. And in 1988 such a tsimus thing as chat (correspondence in real time) appeared, which was implemented on the basis of the IRC protocol (in the Russian Internet, the chat client was called "irka", as I remember now, after all, I have been for many years).

So, America turns out that it gave an impulse for the emergence of the Internet (in our modern understanding), but the very idea of \u200b\u200bcreating the World Wide Web (WWW) was born already in Europe within the walls of the still well-known organization CERN (collider and other crap).

A Briton worked there Tim Berners-Lee, who may well be called the founding father of the Internet. Of course, he was not alone, but it was his two years of work creating the HTML markup language, the HTTP protocol and everything else that was the turning point. This is what made the hypertext-based global network possible.

It was at the end of the eighties of the last century. And already in 1991, the worldwide network became available to everyone (the very second birthday of the Internet -). But this was not enough for this very availability to grow into popularity. Why? Because there hasn't been a handy surfing tool yet.

And then finally in 1993 the first really popular appeared browserbecause he was graphic, i.e. could display not only text, lists and tables, but also pictures! His name was Mosaic. In fact, he became the ancestor of all modern observers (read about) and his popularity at that time was very high.

It was he who attracted millions of new users to the Internet and it is this date that I would consider the point of the report, when the real Internet appeared in the world (accessible and understandable for everyone). On this fertile soil, millions of sites and people began to appear like mushrooms on the Internet. In general, life began.

Internet day

International Internet Day (despite all the above dates of his multiple births) is usually celebrated April, 4... Why? Well, probably because if you write the month (April) in numbers, you get 4.04 or the famous 404. These numbers, to some extent, have become business card the Internet, although they mean one of the many possible errors that the server issues when an abnormal situation occurs.

It's just that this one catches the eye of users very often (this means that the page at this link was not found - it was deleted, moved, or the link was written with an error).

Often, 404 error pages are very entertaining (one jaga-jag is worth a lot) and these numbers are firmly embedded in the minds of users, even if they do not always understand what is at stake.

It turns out very symbolically, in my opinion.

When did the Internet appear in Russia (runet)?

Runet is the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, i.e. there is an area where sites in Russian are located and any other services where this language is used for communication. Oddly enough, but in terms of popularity, the Russian language is in second place on the Internet (after English) and eats away quite a lot of 7 percent.

Moreover, Runet itself appeared somewhat earlier than this term became commonly used. The Russian-language network began to form at about the same time as the bourgeois (the rest of the Internet, with the exception of the Runet), namely somewhere since 1991-93... The term "runet" first came into use in 1997. They interpret its meaning in different ways (someone says that these are domains belonging to the ru zone, someone that this is a Russian runet), but they agree that this is a place on the network where the Russian language is used (mainly Russia and neighboring countries). abroad).

Well, and we, dear readers, are residents of this very Russian-speaking part of the Internet (new reality). With what I congratulate you!

Good luck to you! See you soon on the blog site pages

Birth of an idea

Like many other things in our world, the Internet owes its existence to the arms and technology race, in which Western countries, led by the United States, participated on the one hand, and on the other - Soviet Union... In 1957, the USSR won a landslide victory by launching the first space satellite into near-earth orbit.

This made the United States think not only about new space achievements, but also about its information security. The Americans feared that the Russians from space would be able to obtain intelligence information. The then President D. Eisenhower ordered the creation of an agency that would be engaged in advanced research, and bring together the best representatives of American science.

ARPANET creation

The agency was named ARPA, and its research was generously funded by the US government. Soon, agency staff L. Clayrock and J.K. Lickleader developed a project to create a universal information and communication network, which was approved by the Pentagon, and the work began to boil. Not everything worked out the first time, but in 1969, on October 29, the first attempt at a computer connection took place between the Stanford Research Center and the University of California.

At exactly 9 p.m., one of the researchers at Stanford typed the letters L and O on his keyboard, which immediately appeared on a computer display in California. The first attempt ended without completing. An hour and a half later, the communication session was repeated, and the scientists managed to fully transmit the word LOGIN typed on the keyboard.

The computer network created was named ARPANET after the ARPA agency. Two years later, the network had 23 users throughout the United States, and two years later, organizations from England and Norway joined it.

ARPANET becomes the Internet

The ARPANET was used primarily for the exchange of emails, with chat, newsletters, and bulletin boards a little later.

In the 70s, protocols (standards) for data transmission were actively developed for it - it was necessary to create a way of presenting information that would be quite simple and exclude or minimize the number of errors during transmission.

A huge role in this process was played by J. Postel, whom many call the creator of the modern Internet. By the way, in 1983, standard information transfer protocols were officially enshrined, and ARPANET was renamed the Internet.

Europe comes into play

Despite its obvious successes, the Internet was far from perfect in the early 1980s. It is not known how its development could have gone if it had not been for the involvement of the Geneva Research Center CERN in the person of T. Berners-Lee in the work on it.

It was he who developed the concept of the World Wide Web, or WWW, which made it possible to create the Internet in the form that we use now. Berners-Lee can rightfully be called another of those who invented the Internet.

Building a web browser

Although Berners-Lee's web protocol provided excellent communication, it was still difficult for the average person unfamiliar with programming to use the Internet. This continued until 1993, when programmer M. Andreessen proposed a new user interface - the Mosaic browser. The creation of the network was completed, the period of its development began.

From that moment on, the Internet from a tool for a few scientists and administrators turned into what it is today - into a powerful and accessible way of communication for everyone around the world. Over the next two years, the number of Internet users has grown thousands of times. He united disparate networks into different countries into a single whole and became truly the World Wide Web, which embraced our entire planet.

There are many opinions about who exactly invented the Internet. Even several people are called “parents” of the World Wide Web. The famous media activist Gordon Krovitz considered it necessary to present his version of birth

"Who Invented the Internet?" - asked the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal Gordon Crovitz (Gordon Crovitz). And he answered it from the pages of the same publication. One of the most common versions is that the Internet was created by order of the US government for military purposes, but this legend has little to do with the truth, wrote Krovitz.

The creation of the Internet by the US government is just one of the urban legends. "The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet because it was necessary to keep the connection even in the event of a nuclear strike," writes Krovitz.

According to the official version, in the 50s of the last century, during the Cold War, the US Department of Defense thought about the need to create a reliable, reliable information transmission system. As an option, the agency is advanced research projects USA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, now DARPA) proposed to develop a computer network. The project was entrusted to four organizations: the Universities of California, Santa Barbara, Utah and the Stanford Research Center. It was they who created the ARPAnet network. The work began in 1957, and only 12 years later - in 1969 - the network connected the computers of the listed universities.

However, the very idea of \u200b\u200bthe Internet originated earlier, Krovitz recalls. During World War II, Science Advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt, Vannevar Bush, was part of the Manhattan Project [codename for the US nuclear weapons program]. Later, in 1946, he wrote an article "How We Can Think", in which he proposed a prototype of a device capable of "expanding human memory" - Memex. This device was presented as a kind of "repository" for all human knowledge, amenable to formal description, and able to quickly find and issue the necessary information. Many tech enthusiasts see Memex as a prediction of the Internet.

Of course, at that time, many perceived it as a figment of a wild imagination. But already in the late sixties, engineers tried to combine several communication networks into one "global" network, that is, in fact, to create a prototype of the "world wide web". According to Gordon Krovitz, the federal government's involvement in this project was modest - through ARPA. But the goal of the project was not to maintain communication during a nuclear attack, and, in fact, ARPAnet was not a pro-Internet, if you understand the Internet as a connection of two or more computer networks, said in 2004 Robert Taylor, who led a project at ARPA in the 60s.

"But if the Internet was not invented by the government, then by whom?" - continues to ask Gordon Krovitz. Vinton Cerf created the TCP / IP protocol, the foundation of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee became the "father of the world wide web", embodying the idea of \u200b\u200bhyperlinks.

But the main merit belongs to the company where Robert Taylor moved after working in ARPA - Xerox. It was in the Xerox PARC laboratory located in Silicon Valley that in 1970 was developed ethernet technology, designed to transfer data between different computer networks. As is known today, the same laboratory developed the Xerox Alto personal computer and graphical user interface.

Michael Hiltzik's book Dealers of Lightning, which tells the story of Xerox PARC, also provides information on how Ethernet was built. At some point, the lab's leading researchers realized that the government was too preoccupied with other things to bother connecting various computer networks in united network... Therefore, they had to deal with this issue on their own. At the same time, Xerox PARC employees blamed ARPA, which, in receiving government funding, worked, in their opinion, too slowly.

Later, in one of his letters, Robert Taylor wrote: "I believe that the Internet was created at Xerox PARC, around 1975, when we connected Ethernet and ARPAnet through PUP (PARC Universal Protocol)."

So, the Internet was created at Xerox PARC. "But why didn't Xerox become the world's largest company then?" - the author of the article asks another question. The answer is simple and obvious: the company's management was too focused on the core business to notice innovative developments and calculate their potential.

Xerox executives, who were based at the company's headquarters in Rochester, New York, were too focused on selling copiers. From their point of view, Ethernet could only be used so that people in the same office could link multiple computers to share a copier.

Many people know the story as in 1979 the founder apple Steve Jobs came to Xerox PARC for ideas - he entered into an agreement with the management of Xerox, according to which he could get access to any innovative developments of the laboratory. “They just didn't know what they were,” Jobs later said, who made Apple a great company, thanks in part to developments taken out of Xerox.

However, the sale of copiers has been profitable for Xerox for decades. The company name has even become synonymous with the copier. But Xerox missed the moment, and in the era of the digital revolution, company managers can only console themselves with the thought that only a few succeed in successfully moving from one technological era to another.

In 1995, the development of the Internet completely came under the control of commercial companies. The part of the network, which was controlled by the supercomputers of the US National Science Foundation, remained only a narrow niche. Since this year, the commercial Internet has started to grow at an explosive rate, although before that almost 30 years "languished" under government control. In less than 10 years, companies have achieved a real technological revolution, which, according to Gordon Krovitz, once again proves that business is more important than government.

To build a successful technology business, it is necessary that both factors are present: both disruptive technology and special skills to bring it to market. The contrast between Apple and Xerox shows that few business leaders can succeed in the face of such a daunting task. It is to them, not the government, that the main merit belongs.

The Internet has become a part of our life today. But the name Tim Berners Lee is not familiar to anyone. Meanwhile, this is exactly the person who created the Internet - the World Wide Web, without which many cannot even imagine their life.

Timothy's biography is quite simple: he was born in 1955, in the month of June, on the 8th. His homeland is London. Tim's parents were the mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee (father) and Mary Lee Woods (mother). Both parents worked at the same university (Manchester) on the creation of an electronic computer with rAM - "Manchester Mark I".

It goes without saying that little Tim, seeing the adults' activities, played by constructing small models of computers from empty boxes. And Tim drew mainly on computer punched cards - a kind of cardboard with holes, the first media.

Years of study

Tim Berners studied at the prestigious Emanuel School, where his passion for design and mathematics, success in study, surprised everyone. His biography has the following entry: "Years of schooling - 1969-1973"

However, after graduating from high school in 1973, when he entered King's College at Oxford University, Tim Berners decided to become a physicist.

And here again Tim Berners-Lee's childhood craving for computers woke up - in the biography of the future discoverer of the Internet appears interesting fact... Taking a Motorola M6800 processor and a regular TV, Tim managed to solder his first computer from them.

Like the biography of any mischievous boy, Timothy John Berners-Lee's biography has fascinating pages that reveal the personality from the not-so-pretty side. Actually, it was rash to condemn the young man for hacking the database of the university computer - it was just a fact of curiosity and a test of his strength. But as a result, Tim received a stern warning from the rector and a ban on using computers at the university.

Job

In 1976, Timothy Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University with honors and received a bachelor's degree in physics. After moving to Dorset, the future Internet creator gets a job at the Plessey Corporation. Here Tim Berners is engaged in programming information transfer systems, transaction distribution and creating barcode technology.

In 1978, Timothy John Berners-Lee changes jobs. At D.G Nash Ltd, his responsibilities are also changing: now Tim Berners creates software for printers and multitasking systems.

Tim Berners-Lee was invited to Switzerland in 1980, where the future creator of the Internet works as a software consultant at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is in Switzerland that Tim Berners starts working on the Enquire program after work, the foundation of the World Wide Web.

In 1981, Tim Berners-Lee joined Image Computer Systems Ltd, where he successfully engaged in graphic and communication software and real-time systems architecture. Later, in 1984, the future creator of the Internet begins to develop a real-time system, which is designed to serve to collect scientific information. In parallel, Tim Berners-Lee is developing applications computer technologyaccelerating particles; and other scientific equipment.

When asked what year the World Wide Web - Internet was created, one can answer that in 1989. It was then that Tim Berners-Lee introduced his leadership to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe World Wide Web, based on the concept of Enquire. This was the beginning of the invention of the Internet. The name "World Wide Web" invented itself, relying on the linking of various hypertext web pages using hyperlinks, data transfer protocol. Previously, these protocols were used in the US military network ARPANET. He, as well as the NSFNET university network protocol, became the forerunners of the World Wide Web, thanks to them the Internet appeared.

And now the speech of the one who created the Internet in the video (in English, but with subtitles):

The birth of the World Wide Web

In the remarkable year of 1989, the protocol received a new sphere of activity: they began to use it for the exchange of mail and communication in real time, for commercial purposes and for reading news groups. The idea, which Tim Berners-Lee came up with, was adopted by CEO Mike Sandell. But Tim Berners did not receive large funds for the work, only an offer to conduct experiments on one of the personal computers of NeXT.

Despite the difficulties, Tim Berners successfully copes with the task before himself: he develops the first-ever web server and the first web browser. His talent as a developer owes its appearance to the WorldWideWeb page editor, a standardized way of writing a website address on the Internet, HTML and an application layer protocol.

IN next year Tim Berners-Lee got an assistant - the Belgian Robert Kayo. Thanks to him, the Internet project received funding. Also, Robert took over all organizational issues. Despite active participation in the development and promotion of the project, the main creator of the Internet - Tim Berners-Lee - whose name is revered by all programmers of the world, went down in history. Robert Caillaux did not reserve the right to charge a fee for the use of the invention and was undeservedly forgotten.

Later, in 1993, Tim Berners-Lee created several browsers for different operating systems, which increased the share of the World Wide Web (WWW) in total Internet traffic.

An interesting fact is that earlier the University of Minnesota developed the Gopher protocol, which could well become an alternative modern internet... But Tim Berners-Lee disputes this fact, putting forward the opinion that the protocol would not withstand competition with the World Wide Web (WWW) due to the fact that the creators of this project demanded a fee for its implementation.