1. The Internet &
World Wide Web
William J. Moner
September 12, 2012
RTF 319 – Intro to Digital Media

2. Agenda
• Lab notes & other administrivia
• The origins and evolution of the Internet
• The origins and evolution of “nerd culture”
• The emergence of the World Wide Web

3. Reading Due Today
• Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New
Media. pp. 115 – 160
• Kleinrock, L. (2010). An Early History of the
Internet.
RECOMMENDED
• Okin, JR. (2005). The Internet Revolution: The
Not-For-Dummies Guide to the
History, Technology, and Use of the Internet.
Chapter 3.
• Jordan, T. (1999). Cyberpower: The culture and
politics of cyberspace and the Internet. Chapter
2.

4. The Internet
A NETWORK OF NETWORKS
• Emerged from a peculiar combination of
government research, commercial
interest, and enthusiastic early adopters
who shaped the medium to include many
forms of communication

5. ARPANET
• Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency
• Basic premise:
• Decentralize information resources
• Provide failsafe message routing (if a
network connection fails or is breached for
any reason)
• Based on pioneering research at Xerox
PARC (JCR Licklider & Robert Taylor)

6. THE MYTH
• ARPANET exists to provide for information
resources to be available in the case of
nuclear attack…

7. THE REALITY
In case of nuclear attack … boom.
Bob Taylor, Xerox PARC (2009)
• Programmers really just wanted to be able
to see information from multiple resources
on one screen
• Many of the early experiments were
“bottom up” innovations
[Taylor is a UT grad. See Kleinrock (2010) for full
details on the early Internet!]

8. ARPANET’s Beginnings
• Started with four nodes on the West Coast
• UCLA // SRI (Menlo Park, CA)
• Expanded to University of Utah & UC
Santa Barbara

9. ARPANET PROPOSAL

10. Core concept: Packet Switching
• As opposed to circuit switching via analog
phone lines or telegraphs
• Circuit switching : direct line, point to point
• Packet switching
• Takes the contents of a data
message, breaks it into evenly-segmented
packets, and distributes it via the best
route possible
• Message is assembled at the receiving
end

11. TCP/IP
Pioneered by Vint Cerf (Stanford) and Bob Kahn (DARPA)

12. TCP/IP (1970s)
• Introduced as the official Internet transfer
protocol in 1983; developed throughout 70s
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
• Handles the “breaking apart” of messages
into packets for transport
• Handles routing through the best possible
route

13. TCP/IP
Internet Protocol (IP)
• Handles addressing
• 127.0.0.1 is an IP address
• Go to http://whatismyip.com to find out
your own IP address for your current
Internet session

14. TCP/IP
• Imagine a thousand UPS trucks taking a
thousand different packets through
hundreds of different routes
• Each time a packet hits a router, the router
determines the next best path for the data to
take
• The receiving computer re-assembles the
packets, in order, to form the complete
message

15. DNS (1983)
• Domain Name Servers
• Provide translation from numeric IP
addresses to “plain language” addresses
• e.g. 206.76.109.52 might translate to
nameserver.utexas.edu
• We use the name // the computer uses the
numbers

16. Email (early 1970s)
• Ray Tomlinson
• Introduced the @ symbol to common
vernacular
• First “killer app” for the Internet
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?s
toryId=120364591

17. FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
• Early file transfer mechanism for moving files
over a network from peer to peer or from
client to server

18. What about Bob?
• Bob Metcalfe (now a UT prof in engineering)
• Invented Ethernet (the world’s most
popular network topology)
• Founded 3COM, now Linksys

19. FIDONET & BBS (late 1970s)
BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS
• Dial-in to a private telephone number with a
modem attached
• Log-in with a username and password (if at all)
• Exchange files, messages, play online
games, tie up phone lines
• Later: mostly online via TELNET
FIDONET
• Mapped network replication of data onto peer to
peer dialup connections

20. Two Basic Forms of Network
Communications
Client/Server Technology
• Requires centralized server and attached
nodes
Peer to Peer Technology (P2P)
• Every computer is both client and server;
nodes are “equal”

21. USENET (early 1980s)
Unix Users Group
• Hierarchal system for conversation and file
sharing
• Still is part of the Internet (albeit rarely
utilized)
• Google Groups is one organizing structure

22. USENET Hierarchy
comp.* – computer-related discussions
humanities.* – fine arts, literature, and philosophy
misc.* – miscellaneous topics
news.* – discussions and announcements about
news
rec.* – recreation and entertainment
(rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
sci.* – science related discussions
(sci.psychology, sci.research)
soc.* – social discussions
talk.* – talk about various controversial topics
(talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)

23. alt.binaries
• The USENET “alt” hierarchy existed outside
of strict regulation
• Became an early form of Internet-based file
sharing
• Messages would need to be broken apart
into smaller file sizes and reassembled due
to file size limitations
IN COMPUTING:
A WORKAROUND ALWAYS EXISTS

24. MUDs/MUSHs/MOOs
Accessed via TELNET
MUD: Multi-User Dungeons (for D&D-style role
playing games)
MUSH: Multi-User Shared Hallucinations
• expanded MUD structure with user-
customizable rooms and areas through a
shared scripting language
MOO: Multi-user Object Oriented (expanded
MUSH structure with more robust features)

25. IRC (late 1980s)
• Chat-based system organized into
#channels
• Peer to peer file sharing capabilities
• Organized chat, use of bots and other
automated tools to provide for basic games

26. Internet Service Providers
emerge
• When the Internet passed through various
steps towards commercialization (due to
federal policy changes), the ISP could now
connect services to a public backbone
• Several hundred ISPs emerged in the early
1990s

27. World Wide Web
HYPERTEXT
• Everything on the World Wide Web is rooted
in a webpage that describes how content is
to appear
• Hyperlinks allow for pages to link to each
other on both the same server and remote
servers & allows for links to content within a
given page

28. World Wide Web
• Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee
• Based on theory by Vannevar Bush, “As We
May Think” and the work of Ted Nelson
(coined the term hypertext in 1965) and
Doug Englebart (worked at SRI, admired by
early Internet pioneers for work on the
mouse and an early hypertext system)

29. World Wide Web
The original proposal:
• http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
• Pioneering work on HTTP protocol
• HYPER TEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL
• Uses a client/server based mechanism for
sending and receiving documents
• Browser = client; “website” = server
• Pages can be assembled from many different
information sources or servers

30. The Web Browser
• Innovated first at CERN, then opened up to
other research institutions
• Marc Andreessen, at UIUC, worked on a
research team to develop a web browser
called NCSA Mosaic
• First web browser to include images

31. The Web Browser (pre-2000)
• Allows for display of text with markup
• Allows robust linking between documents
• Allows inclusion of images, some audio
formats
• Allows for third-party plugins to play
video, animations, interactive games, and
applets
• Includes scripting capabilities via
Javascript

32. The Web Browser (post-2000)
• Includes the markup language (HTML)
• Hypertext markup language
• Includes a style language (CSS)
• Allows flexible description of
colors, fonts, layout grids, multiple
backgrounds, multiple layers
• Most recent version (CSS 3) includes
support for basic
animation, transitions, and other visual
elements

33. Browser Wars
http://www.evolutionoftheweb.com/

34. Due Monday…
READING
• Burgess, J., and Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online Video and
Participatory Culture. Chs. 1 – 2
• O’Reilly, T. (2005). “Web 2.0.”
LABS & BLOG DUE BY MONDAY @ NOON
RECOMMENDED
BBS Textfiles: http://www.textfiles.com/ (explore at your own risk;
vetted info here: http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/
Internet pioneers:http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/index.html
For fun: Open Terminal, type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl and
watch…