ElCid wrote:I am a bit late to this discussion, but having been an electronics engineer from the early seventies, I was always under the impression that the World Wide Web (www) was the invention of Tim Berners-Lee an Englishman working at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border. It was Berners-Lee that advocated the use of the URL etc. In the beginning that resulted in various scientific networks (eg. Janet in the UK) where scientists exchanged their thoughts. The US Defence funded network, DARPA, became prevalent and many scientists exchanged their ideas over this network which became the first Internet. Tim Berners-Lee may still be alive but he must be one of the most unrecognised inventors around.
Yes, Tim Berners-Lee created the web and is still alive.
https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.
By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):
* HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
* URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
* HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.
Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.
As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.
He explains: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the web’s 25th birthday, almost two in five people around the world were using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-LeeThe UK's Joint Academic Network ( JANET ) grew out of a number of preceding networks which had been setup from the 1960s onwards. These networks were joined together and then standardized as an X.25 network using the Colour Book protocols with JANET going live in 1984. The JANET network then switched to using TCP/IP in the early 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANETJanet developed out of academic networks built in Britain since the late 1960s. Planning for the first regional network, South West Universities Computer Network (SWUCN), centred on Bristol began in 1967 and work started in 1969.[8][9] A number of national computer facilities serving the Science Research Council (SRC) community developed in the early 1970s, each with their own star network (ULCC London, UMRCC Manchester, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory).[8] Other regional networks followed in the mid-late 1970s around Edinburgh (RCOnet), London (METROnet), the Midlands (MIDnet), and Newcastle (NUMAC - the Northern Universities Multiple Access Computer[10]) among others such as Yorkshire and the South East.[8] These groups of institutions pooled resources to provide better computing facilities than could be afforded individually. The star networks developed into distributed computer networks but each was based on one manufacturer's standards and were mutually incompatible and overlapping.[8][11][12]
JANET
In the early 1980s a standardisation and interconnection effort started, hosted on an expansion of the SERCnet X.25 research network.[13][14][15] The JANET effort was based on the Coloured Book protocols developed by the British academic community, which provided the first complete X.25 standard,[16][17] and gave the UK "several years lead over other countries".[18] The naming scheme, JANET NRS, established "UK" as the top-level domain. When the Internet's Domain Name System adopted the ISO standard for country code top-level domains later in 1984, the UK had a pre-existing national standard which was retained as the .uk Internet country-code top level domain for the United Kingdom.[19][20][21]
JANET went live on 1 April 1984,[2] two years before the NSFNET initiated operations in the United States.[13] It hosted about 50 sites with line speeds of 9.6 kbit/s. In the mid-80s the backbone was upgraded to 2 Mbit/s, with 64 kbit/s access links. JANET connected to NSFNET in 1989.[22][23]
JIPS
Planning began in January 1991 for the JANET Internet Protocol Service (JIPS).[18] It was set up as a pilot project in March 1991 to host Internet Protocol (IP) traffic on the existing network.[24] Within eight months the IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic, and the IP support became official in November.[8]
JANET became, primarily, a high-speed IP network. A further upgrade in the early 1990s took the backbone to 8 Mbit/s and the access links to 2 Mbit/s, making Janet the fastest X.25 network in the world.[citation needed]
There had been some talk of moving Janet to OSI protocols in the 1990s, but changes in the networking world meant this never happened. The X.25 service was closed in August 1997.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocolsIn the mid-1970s, the British Post Office Telecommunications division (BPO-T) worked with the academic community in the United Kingdom and the computer industry to develop a set of standards to enable interoperability among different computer systems based on the X.25 protocol suite for packet-switched wide area network (WAN) communication. First defined in 1975,[1] the standards evolved through experience developing protocols for the NPL network in the late 1960s and the Experimental Packet Switched Service in the early 1970s.[2][3][4][5][6]
The Coloured Book protocols were used on SERCnet from 1980,[7] and SWUCN from 1982,[8] both of which became part of the JANET academic network from 1984.[9][10] The protocols were influential in the development of computer networks, particularly in the UK, gained some acceptance internationally as the first complete X.25 standard,[1][11] and gave the UK "several years lead over other countries".[12]
From late 1991, Internet protocols were adopted on the Janet network instead; they were operated simultaneously for a while, until X.25 support was phased out entirely in August 1997.[13][14]
Protocols
The standards were defined in several documents, each addressing different aspects of computer network communication. They were identified by the colour of the cover
That must have been late 80's.