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History HTML and the Internet (world wide web) have a history that is much longer and covers a lot more territory than you might imagine. Their roots started in World War II, moved into space, dropped to England, moved to Switzerland, and ended up in the United States before spreading to the world! You don't have to know where HTML came from to be able to use it but it's pretty exciting to learn more about it. It gives you a perspective on how and why decisions were made that are still shaping the Internet today.
InternetThe cold war between the US and Russia was bad for a lot of reasons, but it also contained the spark that ignited the developments leading up to the world wide web. The launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Russians spurred the US, and then later the entire world, into a long string of electronic and information technology inventions which have produced the Internet as we know it today.Even before that the World Wars played a role, where the need for computing machines to decode cryptographic messages or to analyze radar data drove the technology of computers to new heights. The cold war continued that push. By the time of Sputnik, computers were far enough along to support the next era of networking technologies that form the basis of the Internet. In 1973 the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded the initial research projects on networking that lead to the creation of ARPANet, the forerunner of the Internet. ARPANet was tremendously successful and saw rapid releases of improved protocols and user applications (such as email) over its lifetime. By 1989 ARPANet had grown beyond the basic needs of the government. That year ARPANet was dissolved and ownership of the Internet was turned over to commercial enterprises. By that time personal computers were relatively common and large companies had begun a wholesale adoption of the computer as a business tool. 3Com, Sun, Microsoft, Novell Cisco, Apple and IBM are all companies whose origins are steeped in supplying the technology of networking to the world business community. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at CERN in Switzerland, was working on the problem of distributing information between a variety of users and computers. His solution, which he called the World Wide Web, was put to use in the scientific community. But when the Mosaic browser was released in 1993, its graphical interface and simplicity of operation began to draw the interest of users everywhere. By then the home modem had arrived and anyone could easily, at low cost, gain access to the Internet. Prior to the entry of Microsoft into the browser wars, there were actually laws against making profits via the Internet (because of it's publicly funded origin). Once those laws were changed big businesses such as Microsoft began to use the Internet on a very wide scale. The use of web sites and email services exploded. Email was, and still is, the primary reason most folks use the Internet, but the number of bytes transferred over the Internet is overwhelming due to file transfers (data, music, and video). A few of the organizations at the core of the Internet include:
Recognizing the pressure for greater Internet performance the US government and various institutions started work in 1996 on the Next Generation Internet (NGI), sometimes called the Internet2. This effort includes the development of new IP protocols (IPv6). I also suggest that you read these Internet histories:
BrowsersThe creation of the Internet drove the demand for a good tool to use for communication across the web. The first browsers (Viola and Midas) were released in 1993 but only supported the X-Windows system on UNIX. Mosaic was close behind, also with a UNIX version and then released a PC/Windows version before years' end.The race was on. The next 10 years would see the demise of Mosaic, the rise and decline of Netscape, and the ascendency of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Mosaic was available for free but Netscape thought their product was good enough to warrant charging for their browser, although they did give it freely to target audiences (students and teachers). That went well and Netscape's market share grew quickly to about 70%l Netscape's success continued until Microsoft started offering Internet Explorer for free eventually forcing Netscape to follow suit. MS Internet Explorer gradually took the market share away from Netscape and remains the dominant browser today with over 90% of the market. Along the way a small browser called Opera came on the scene. It was a very small program - small enough to fit on a 1.4M floppy disk. It was very fast and offered some features that were missing from Netscape and MS Internet Explorer. It drew immediate interest and continues to have a loyal following today. Microsoft has appeared to have a strangle-hold on the market but recent security issues with MSIE have begun to erode some of Microsoft's dominance. Everyone expects Microsoft to resolve most of the security issues but the issues continue to open doors for competition to stay alive. Here are the release dates for various browser releases:
Future specifications for web page generation are not expected to continue as new versions of HTML. Instead, new technologies such as CSS and XML will be added as supplements to the HTML specifications. For example, the first style sheet specification was released in 1997 (Mar) and is separate from the HTML specifications. The second style sheet specification (CSS2) was released in May of 1998.
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