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The European Organization for Nuclear Research
The European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN is an organization that helped research various aspects of the internet (like displaying photographs) as well as other nuclear research. -
Sputnik is Launched
The first artificial satellite is launched into orbit by the Soviet Union. This indicted the Soviet Union's ability of developing weapons that may travel through space; it caused a great level of alarm in the United States. -
Advanced Research Projects Agency
The U.S. department of defense created the Adcanvced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to compete with and defend against the new found Soviet Union technology. This organization purused knowledge (in missle technology as well as other defense related feilds) that would eventually become the Internet. -
Galactic Newtork
Joseph Licklider, an experimental psychologist, wrote a research paper for a "Galactic Network" that was a global network of computers that were able to send and share data easily. This proposal formed the basis of the Internet. -
Packet Switching
The Information Processing Technologies Office (an ARPA department) devolped a network able to transmit information using telephone lines using Packet Switching. Files are dismantled, transported through binary code, and reassembled on the other end. -
Binary Code
Binary Code is the language computers use to transmit data. This was a sequence of 1's and 0's represented by on and off electric charges. -
E-mail
ARPA began adding computers to its network and became known as ARPANet. A total of 23 computers at 15 different instituions were added. The scientists began adding special features to communicate more quickly- electronic mail or e-mail. -
Internet
Researchers at BBN and Stanford designed a network that linked all other networks together called the internetwork or internet. They developed a communications software that enabled communication between various networks called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. -
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee was a British computer programer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research that invented the system allowing the internet to display pictures, videos, and sounds-the World Wide Web. He also invented HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) which controlled how documents appeared and behaved, and linked documents to other documents. With his system a computer was also able to type in a uniform resource locator (URL) to reach another document. -
Gopher
The program Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota that organized information by related topics and enbled the public to search for files by their title names. -
Wide Area Information Servers
This program allowed users to comb through files based on their actual content rather than title. The user would use a keyword or phrase, and the WAIS sprogram would display files that contained that information; This became the foundation for popular search engines today. -
Mosaic
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed a much easier to use browsing program that allowed images to be displayed directly on a web page, and hyperlinks so one could jump from one page to another without having to type in a URL. By the time it was made free in 1993, tens of thousands of people had downloaded it. -
Microsoft vs. Netscape
Mosiac Communications Corporation introduced a commercial website programer called Mosaic Netscpae, and later changed the name to Netscape Navigator. Microsoft Corporation then engaged them in a battle to build the most popular browser by releasing Internet Explorer. -
Gaining Popularity
WIth the help of Netscpae Navigator and Internet Explorer, the World WIde Web became the fastest growing communications network in history. The Web began ti expand, including 36 million sites with thousands added every day. -
Extensible Markup Language
This new "computer language" made it possible to view web pages easily on cellular devices and handheld computers. This enabled people to get to the Web anywhere on Earth. The world entered the new age of wireless technology.
