Also, considering the Internet didn’t exist at the time BttF (Back to the Future) series was made
Technically an incorrect statement. The web didn't exist at that point. Internet definitely did.
Oh thanks. I went to Google and it mentioned the web not going live until 1991, and I incorrectly assumed the web=the internet
What we refer to as the Internet is a vast network of computers on a insanely intricate network of networks of networks connected by the TCP/IP protocol. This system went live in 1969 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network project, designed to support the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense. This network -by necessity- involved a large percentage of civilian universities in the United States, as most such universites were -and are- involved to some degree in military research. At the time, the primary reason for the system was making full use of the small number of supercomputers the country possessed - it was very common (as an example) for a machine in Virginia to be overworked processing cryptographic data, while the missile design computer in Texas was idle half the time because they spent much of their time theorizing and spitballing over the result of their latest calculations.
As far back as 1941, science fiction authors were playing with the notion of linked sets of data structures. In 1945, the article "as we may think" described the fictional "memex" system, which would involve large quantities of microfilm that could be accessed at need through immensely convoluted linking structures. In 1963, the Memex inspired Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart to create the concept of "hypertext", which is pages of text that can be linked to more pages of text that can be linked to more pages of text that can be linked to more pages of text that can be linked to more pages of text. This was well recieved, and inspired a large number of applications and (later) computer programs - including some games intended to be the Next Generation of the text adventures popular in the 1980s.
In 1981, the National Science Foundation created the Computer Science Network, tying together the rest of the nation's major universities in a parallel network (along with a initiative to install large computers at these institutions) that covered organizations that could not be connected to ARPANET for various reasons. As time passed, these networks were gradually merged into the National Science Foundation Network, leading to the decommissioning of ARPANET in 1990.
At about the same time, the first incarnation of the modern, non-serious Internet was forming. In 1979, people at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University used a UNIX protocol called Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) to create a "Poor Man's ARPANET" of their own, which they called the User's Network, or USENET. The primary form USENET took was the Bulletin Board System (BBS), which is a somewhat cruder form of a forum (Yahoo Groups and Google Groups are more recent incarnations of the concept, and Reddit is a pretty similar successor). In 1980, USENET had reached the University of Berkley, which also had an ARPANET connection, and the two were bridged. USENET went national, and rapidly international, through the university system. Virtually the entirety of modern Internet culture began on USENET - down to a lot of the terms (such as "Spam" for unwanted messages) in use today.
At the same time, smaller BBS systems were being developed for the various home computers on the market. The most famous of these was CompuServe, which went live in 1979 and became an also-ran ISP in the 90s. The far more important one was Quantum Link for the popular Commodre 64 and 128 home computers. Quantum Link was essentially CompuServe for these older, less powerful, and much cheaper computers, which made this the BBS of the masses. Their more important contribution would come a little later, after a short marriage to Apple, creating the fairly short-live AppleLink service.
In the early-to-mid 1980s, a researcher at the
Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire (CERN) by the name of Tim Berners Lee became fascinated by the potential of the extant networks, but increasingly frustrated and infuriated by how hard the system was to navigate, and how hard it could be to connect to the computer the data you needed was on. Over the course of several years, he developed the concept of hypertext into a set of protocols (HyperText Mark Up Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which are probably familiar) that allowed the first web brower (WorldWideWeb, which ran only on the NeXT Computer System OS), the second web browser (Line Mode Browser, which was much cruder but would run on anything), and the first web server. This was the nucleus of the World Wide Web as we know it, particularly since he deliberately designed WorldWideWeb to easily connect with the USEnet protocol.
Lee's reward from this project was to be censured by CERN for wasting resources, so he left the organization and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He continued his work on HTTP, and the growing web flourished in universities.
This is where we wrap around to our friends at Quantum Link. In 1989, they introduced their first client software (PC-Link) for the IBM PC and compatibles. A year later, the company was renamed to reflect their new, very ambitious, mission statement. In October of 1989, Quantum Link became America Online, and fairly quickly steamrolled the competition. Five years later, in September of 1994, America Online added HTTP access and became the first large-scale way for people to access the growing World Wide Web (and USENET!) without first gaining access through a university.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14549813 times)