Group P: Chapter 41 & 42

Chapter 41: Popularizing the Internet

The Global Picture

• ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
• developed by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War
• Designed for research and education
• NSF (National Science Foundation)
• United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering
• BITNET
• cooperative U.S. university network founded in 1981
• UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program)
• a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers
• Internet is American
• Many countries already had networks before adopting it
• Internet owned by US gov, so not many civilian networks (other countries) connected to it
• ARPA and NSF thought that taxpayers would be mad about giving US technology (funded by taxes) to other countries
• BITNET and UUCP spread overseas faster than the Internet (lower political profiles)
• “Before privatization, therefore, it was difficult to expand the Internet abroad by adding host sites to the US-run networks; connecting the Internet to networks in other countries was much more promising
• State-run networks (by mid 1970’s)
• Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Japan
• As well as multinational networks for European Union
• European Informatics Network, then Euronet
• Some were for research/education, some for commercial network services
• Minitel (France Telecom)
• First phone company to offer network service (content and comm.)
• Few people had computers, so FT gave Minitel users inexpensive terminals
• Allowed normal people access to network (including online porn)
• CERN (European laboratory for particle physics)
• A leading site in networking
• While at accelerator sites, scientists have to communicate with and send massive amounts of info back to home site, so CERN installed local-area networks and linked them to a lot of wide-area networks including EARN (European branch of BITNET), HEPNET (US- based network for high energy physics), Swiss public data network, etc.
• Connecting to the Internet
• When NSF created civilian network NSFNET foreign networks had ability to connect to it and gain access to Internet
• Canada and France connected in 1988 followed by Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (later 1988)
• 1989- Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, UK
• 1990- Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland
• January 1990- 250 non-US networks were attached to NSFNET (more than 20% of total number of networks)
• April 1995- NSF stopped operating NSFNET, simply the Internet
• 22 000 foreign networks (>40% of all networks)
• Other Industrial Countries
• US gov operated military and research networks, public network services provided on commercial basis
• Other countires- public networks run by gov.
• Network decisions involved politics and business(politics)
• Many people saw rise of Internet as US economic domination
• So people liked it (expansion worldwide and whatnot) it was still a political issue
• Internet Barriers
• Technical obstacles
• Incompatibilities among network systems
• Had to adopt official CCITT or ISO protocols
• Limited by global disparities in teclecommunications infrastructure (fewer phone lines in different countries)
• TCP/IP
• Mid 1980’s many private network builders began using TCP/IP (maybe impatient with slow connection)
• November 1989- RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) formed in Europe
• Similar to CIX- connected member networks to form pan-European Internet (each network agreeing to accept traffic from other members without charge)
• Had a forum
• 1996- RIPE had 400 organizations, connecting 4 million host computers
• Social obstacles
• Reducing US dominance over internet
• Countries wanted to have own top-level domains
• ISO prompted domain name system where each country has own top-level domain, indicated by two letter code (fr for France, us for US)
• This system made every nation equal
• Internet native language is English
• Unequal distribution of wealth

The World Wide Web

• 1980’s- Internet grows fast, email/file transfer most common activities
• Internet Obstacles
• Text only
• Boring in comparison to cool graphic interfaces on personal computers
• Difficult to finding online information
• No search engines (had to know exact names of files)
• The Gopher System
• 1990’s
• Developed at University of Minnesota
• Allowed providers to organize info in hierarchy of related topics
• Allowed users to select topics from menus (vs knowing file names)
• The Wide Area Information Server (WAIS)
• Thinking Machines Corporation
• Allowed users to search for documents based on specific words in texts
• Then titles displayed and users could pick one
• Other Obstacles Still
• No way to link info
• Various protocols were not compatible (after the changes)
• There wasn’t a program that could handle it all
• The WWW addressed all these issues
• People see internet not just for research/education, also for entertainment, shopping, getting your personae out there
• Building the Web
• Did not come from ARPA , came from CERN, NSF and the new Web
• Wanted to include more multimedia aspects
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Worked at CERN
• Realized new Web couldn’t work on TCP/I
• Designed new service to run over Internet protocols
• Not at all like ARPANET (military style)
• Based on Ted Nelson’s Hypertext
• Links possible
• Planned to use Hypertext system as well as multimedia
• Developed HTML (hypertext markup language)
• To allow web to handle different data formats, designers specified “format negotiation” between computers to ensure machines agreed on which formats to use when exchanging info
• Built new application on top of TCP/IP (because format negotiation could handle this)
• Built HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol)
• Used to guide exchange between Web browsers and Web servers
• Invented URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
• Way to identify info a user wants to access
• Specifies type of application and address of computer that has desired data
• Can refer to variety of protocols, not just HTTP
• Possible to use Web to access older Internet servers
• December 1990
• First version of Web software operating within CERN
• How the Internet (the Web) became popular
• The Web was awesome
• Widespread access to Internet (because of privatization)
• Personal computer (technical means to run Web)
• Could have worked without PC (minitel worked) but Web needed power on users end
• Also operating systems allowed users to know how the Web worked because they already knew how to use the OS (point and click seemed natural)

Chapter 42 – The Codex Page to the Homepage

Author – James J, O’Donnel

Over arching theme of the chapter: Information Processing Technology;

To make knowledge available in as many non-linear ways as possbile

Beginnings of Writing

- Writing began on stone but did not become useful until the invention

of the papyrus roll was perfected

- First “great” library in the Greek founded Egyptian city of

Alexandria

- Ancient papyrus was elegant to look at but cumbersome to use

- Myth that the size of books was determined by the size of pigeon

holes at Alexandria

Papyrus

-elegant but very cumbersome to use

- Long sheets of papyrus hard to look through for certain passages

Wax Tablets

-Hollow slab of wood filled with Wax. A dry stylist would be used to

carve the words into the wax. An individual would simply erase the

letter by using their thumb to smear the surrounding wax.

Codex

-Replaced the scroll

-bound collections of pages using either Papyrus and/or animal skins

with a hard front and back cover

- Codices created in the first few centuries of the common era

-became widely acceptable in the second century and in full use by the

fourth century

- Manuscripts of the Christian bible are predominately transmitted to

us in the codex form – possibly for reference purposes

- Greeks had large comprehensive volumes earlier, Latins waited very

late

- Scholars of the time knew that if you wanted your work to survive you

need to transfer to codex. Transference did not guarantee survival of

information, it was difficult to do as it was economically expensive.

- Augustine was important for his mediation of the written word.

- Used for pure ease of access of information

The codex had several advantages over the scroll

- Size only limited only by the strength of the use

- Can be taken apart, rearranged, put back together

- Non linear access to the material in the volume was possible –

quickly go through to find what they wanted

- Arrangements of material on the page made information more accessible

and facilitates cross-movements of various kinds.

- Page numbers made finding information in a non linear fashion easier

- Today many things we read are non-linear, travel guides, text books,

etc

Cassiodorus –

-associated with the most ambitious single project we know of from his

time –

-to create a Christian university at Rome, a Christian Library on his

estates near Squillace on the Ionian sea. Commissioned a portrait of

the Hebrew Scribe Ezra

Manuscript

-first use was to be no more than just a prompt for the spoken word

which references McLunhans that a new medium initial use is to

facilitate the old medium

-no formal punctuation or word separation. It was intended for the

technical reader who knew how to convert it to the spoken word.

Medieval Manuscript System

-included a readers help system

-running series of numbers intended for quick study and reference

-early development of non-linear access of information

Part 2: Modern Access to Information

-many of the reading we do today is non-linear

-examples: textbooks, dictionaries, phone books, cook books ect

Scholarly Journals

-binding together small items

-an article is a monograph that is too short to warrant its own book.

So it goes into a collective of like minded subjects.

-In the beginning it covered a wide variety of topics but over it time

it became very specified

-for once function did not relate to the technology

-Future of scholarly journals: it will survive like how the classics

survive today: as pieces of art in a bookcase that makes a statement

about the owner

-electronic storage

Electronic Transformation

-quality of our non-linear access of information will grow

exponentially

-library outsourced to software systems

-makes reference to artificial intelligence as a possibility

- theorized that journals will be stored electronically. This will

make it easy to give certain article or journals several topic choices.

-hyper links will become a more dominate line of travel from one item

to another.

-collective information: Data bases will grow in importance

Possible Conflicts: Forecast

-the freedom to speak one’s mind and the responsibility to produce

information that is credible.

-Computers will become more efficient with storing information.

- Citing is also an issue – When information is gathered collectively

over time, it will be difficult to define what is freedom of speech and

what needs to be censored for responsibilities