THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET: Through the holidays, Ive read one book and it is about the origins of the internet—John Naughton’s “A Brief History of the Future.” What amazes me is that the works that led to the internet started from way back in the 1930s during the cold war and only started to take off during the admin of US Pres Eisenhower in the 1950s--when Russia launched a ball into space called Sputnik. In response, the US military created the Advance Research Project Agency (ARPA) to devise a communications system that will withstand a nuclear attack. Thus ARPANET was born. . I also found out that the real geniuses that launched the net are hardly known today, because they were not concerned about making money from their inventions. These were not the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft or Steve Jobs of Apple or Marc Andreessen who created the Mosaic and Netscape or even Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web. . For example, one of the real pioneers was Vannevar Bush who in 1937 thought of a way of indexing and going through large files of data and films through a system using a rapid selector machine he called “memex.” But his studies were stymied by the Second World War. . In 1945, he wrote his studies in layman’s language and published it in Life magazine under the title, “As We May Think.” A radar technician assigned in the Philippines, named Douglas C. Engelbart was so inspired by the system proposed by Bush that for the next 20 years of his life, he devoted his genius to creating systems that would make the system thought of by Bush a workable reality. He later worked with ARPANET, NASA, and creative his team that as early as 1963 “not only envisioned but also created the future that we now take for granted—bit-mapped screens, graphics-based interfaces, multiple windows…chorded keyboards, and a host of other things.” . You may not have read about Engelbart but you will always remember him when you are surfing the net or your files and you use that ubiquitous pointing devise we now call a “mouse”—he invented it.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 02:08:56 +0000
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