History of the Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Inventer of the World Wide Web

information taken from http://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
and Tim Berners-Lee. "Answers for Young People". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 25 May 2008.

 

Cern - 1989

• Cern is the birthplace of the World Wide Web
• In Geneva, Swizerland
• Largest particle physics labratory in the world
• Scientist here generate a lot of documents
• And want to look at documents created elsewhere
• Imagine the difficulty in pre-Web days
  • there was different information on different computers,
  • you had to log on to different computers to get at it
  • sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer to access the information.
  • often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…

The Beginning

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee was a computer scientist at Cern
• Many of the pieces of the Web already existed.
  • Hypertext
  • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
  • Domain Name System
  • Different fonts
• It just required the vision to put them together
• Berners-Lee said

  I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web ... Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult

Developing the technologies - 1990

• In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee developed
  • HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the Web.
  • URI: Uniform Resource Identifier - in effect the URL
  • HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web
• He also wrote
  • the first HTML editor/browser
    
  • the first Web server

The public opening - 1991

• First Web page served on the Internet in late 1990
• In 1991 people outside CERN were invited to participate

Early HTML Editors

• Berners-Lee wrote the first HTML editor
• But it only ran on the neXT computer
• Followed shortly by a Line Mode Editor
  • by Nicola Pellow
  • would run on the other machines

Early Browsers

• Berners-Lee wrote the first browser
• But it only ran on the neXT computer
• Other browsers followed
• At this point, the Web was totally text based. NO IMAGES

Next Gen Browsers

• In 1993, Marc Andreessen and his team developed Mosaic browser
• In 1994, a company was formed to develop the browser commercially
• Name changed to Netscape Navigator
• Became very popular due to support for graphics and other multimedia.
• IE developed in 1995

Browser wars

• Microsoft was late to the party with its browser
• There was intense competition betwen IE and Netcape
• Netscape had the largest market share until 1998 (about 64%) accoring to Wikipedia
• The tide began to shift to Microsoft when they bundled IE with Windows

Standards

• The big loser in the browser wars was ease of making Web pages
• IE especially implemented features in a non-standard way
  • greatly complicated the life of developers
• Today most browser makes follow most of the HTML standards most of the time.

Browser market share today

Source: Google Analytics data for Audience Technology: Browser Date range: February 1-28, 2015

Major HTML version

• HTML
• HTML 2.0
• HTML 3.2
• HTML 4.01
  
• HTML 5

HTML today

• HTML 4.01 developed in 1998, is still used more extensivly than
• HTML 5 under development for several years
• final version in October 2014.
• HTML 5 has many new features.
• Most browsers today support HTML 5.
  • began supporting some features in 2011
• But many Web developers are reluctant to use new features
• Still many old browsers in use that do not support the new standard

Silicon Valley

from Wikipedia

Silicon Valley

• Stanford University, its professors, affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of this Silicon Valley
• Probably first called "Silicon Valley" in a column in Electronic News in January 11, 1971
• But the seeds were sown in 1951 by Frederick Terman

The birth

• Frederick Terman is credited with being the father of Silicon Valley
• An enginnering professor at Stanford University
• Concerned by the lack of good employment opportunities in the area for Stanford engineering graduates
• It troubled him that his best graduates had to go to the East Coast to find employment
• Actively encouraged his students to start their own companies
  • Russell and Sigurd Varian, William Hewlett, and David Packard
• He spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park in 1951
  • University leased land to high tech companies
• Motivations
  • Stanford needed money to fund growth requirements resulting from soldiers returnin from WWII
  • To provide local employment opportunities for graduating students

Stanford Industrial Park

• Early occupants
  • Varian Associates
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • Eastman Kodak
  • General Electric
  • Lockheed Corporation
  • Shockley Transistor Laboratory
• Helped to create a hotbed of innovation in this area
• The world's first technology-focused office park
• The first university-owned industrial park

William Shockley

• Brilliant but erratic and hard to work with
• People under his supervision developed the transistor
  • He was angry that he was not included in the patent
  • Tried to take all the credit for others' work
  • And was co-winner of Nobel Prize for physics in 1956
• Moved to Silicon Valley in 1956 to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
• In late 1957, Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors
• Because of that and his abusive management style
  • Eight of the company's researchers resigned
  • He called them the "traitorous eight"
  • Formed Fairchild Semiconductor
• Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory did not do anything significant after that

The traitorous eight

• Over the course of 20 years, those eight former employees started 65 new enterprises
• Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore later left Fairchild and founded Intel.
• Shockley is also sometimes called the father of Silicon Valley
  • because of his role in bringing the 8 men out here

Today

• Semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy
• But it has been most famous for innovations in software and Internet services.
• Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.
• A 2006 The Wall Street Journal story found that 12 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California,
• 10 of those were in Silicon Valley
  • San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005
  • Sunnyvale was second at 1,881 utility patents
• Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area
  • 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers are in high- tech
• Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary
• The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita.
• Silicon Valley is a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation
  • accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States

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