Slide 1
Hello again and welcome to COM 333 - and now our 3rd lecture.  Today we’re going to be talking about the brief history of the Internet, and particularly the development of the World Wide Web, and also introduce you to finding your way around the Internet.

Slide 2
Of course, we talked briefly about the Department of Defense and the development of the ARPANET in our 1st lecture.  As you may recall, in the 1960’s the Department of Defense recognized the need to link together those research institutions that were working on DOD projects.  And in particular they were interested in linking those across the country so that they could share blueprints and other data on satellite, submarine, etc. projects.  Well the Internet continued to grow in the 1970’s and was used largely by college and universities and some other research institutions - engineering companies, defense contractors, etc.. And in the 1980’s, the Internet began to pick up speed as more and more universities joined the net.  It continued to grow and it seemed to be growing rather rapidly, but little did we know how much faster the Internet in fact would grow.  Here at UIS (back then Sangamon State University) we used Bitnet, because at that time it was a part of the Internet, and used that for communication for email and also accessed the Internet for graphics and images.  Well, beginning at the end of 1990 and 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML - the hypertext markup language - and Marc Andreeson - some great distance away (of course, Berners-Lee in Geneva, Switzerland, and Andreeson in Urbana, Illinois), Andreeson developed Mosaic, which was a graphical web browser using HTML.  What was important was that by the development of HTML and the simultaneous development of a software tool that integrated HTML - one could see images real time off the Internet, rather than downloading them.  And so the Internet then became much more than it had been in the past, and in fact, even now we must realize the Internet is more than just the World Wide Web.  Email of course, which we talked about last week, is an important component of the Internet.  But now the World Wide Web is increasingly the largest part of our Internet experience.

Slide 3
Well, before the web, File Transfer Protocol was the mode of access and transfer of information across the World Wide Web and largely those computers that were linked by the routers of the time were unix-based systems, and they used certain protocols, and among them was File Transfer Protocol.  Stand-alone graphical viewers were used on individual machines, on mini-computers and microcomputers, as well.  So that one would transfer an image, let’s say a satellite image from a government site - the NOAA site or the national weather service to your home computer.  Then using a separate piece of software on your home computer you would be able to then bring up the image.  Now that process took several minutes - that’s much longer than it currently does.  Modems of the time were transferring data at 300 baud or 1200 baud.  Baud is roughly translated into bits per second.  Now, of course, many computers have 33,000 bit per second or 56,000 bit per second capability and with ISDN lines, 128,000 bit per second is not uncommon.  Now the cable modems transfer data at more than a million bits per second as does ADSL - the Asymmetrical Digital Service Line - sometimes abbreviated simply as DSL.  We’re going to be hearing a lot more about cable modems and DSL as we more through 1999.  Well, the web itself was the beginning of e-commerce - electronic commerce.  The potential was envisioned once the web was developed and Internet was no longer just the purview for colleges, universities and researchers.

Slide 4
Commercial entities understood the potential of the Internet and when they compared the Internet to newspapers, radio and television for advertising they found the Internet was far less expensive.  It provided far more detailed data collection on those who visited the site - and it allowed for built-in electronic ordering - it had so many features that newspaper, radio and TV had only promised.  Commerce now drives the Internet and it really is the force that moves the Internet and World Wide Web forward.  Government, education and research, which really were the founders of the Internet, now are moving to a new forum - NGI and Internet2.  NGI - Next Generation Internet, of course, is the project, which is promoted by the US federal government.  Internet2 is a project that is promoted by now about 150 colleges and universities.  And it is supported in a grant matching basis by the federal government.  But it’s important to note that these are two different initiatives - NGI for the federal Government and Internet2 for colleges and universities.  Ultimately, Internet2 is to expand to include and embrace k-12 schools, as well.

Slide 5
Finding your way around the Internet - well no one person knows what all is on the Internet - it changes every hour, every minute, every second, and there’s no complete index.  You know years ago even in the 1980’s when I was teaching classes on new technologies and we talked about he Internet, we described it as going to the Library of Congress with all of the books on the floor and no card catalog.  The first attempt came with a process called gopher, which was developed at the home of the Golden Gophers -the University of Minnesota.  The gopher system was a non-graphical way of linking together locations on the Internet.  And then there were hotlists and hotlists proliferated.  In fact, a couple of grad students at Stanford developed one that finally outgrew Stanford and ended up on it’s own as Yahoo!.  Web crawlers ultimately came about, such as AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, and there are so many others.  These web crawlers operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and they search domains constantly, they use bot -  short for robot - electronic robots that search the Internet - going from domain to domain and then they collect information from millions, actually tens of millions, of sites, and yet each of these only cover a fraction of the Internet.

Slide 6
Well, how do these work?  The web crawlers - they search the text of web-pages, so they will look at the HTML code - virtually look at the code - of the pages that are out there and the domains in which they are searching and they use the “meta” descriptors that are included, normally embedded in the head of the HTML code, and they store the results in huge data banks.  They apply their own algorithms, their own formulas, to these data banks of information.  For example, on a given page - let’s say we were searching for the word baseball.  It would look at the pages and find those that included the word baseball.  Then, even among those pages, it would determine which of those pages had the term baseball more often and which ones had baseball in larger font and which ones had baseball at the top of the page and those kinds of considerations figure into the algorithms which are used by the various web crawlers.  It takes about six to eight weeks for the web crawlers to cover all of the domains that they cover on the Internet and then they continue, they start all over again.  Of course, individuals can submit pages for inclusion directly to most of the web crawlers.

Slide 7
Well, as you use those web crawlers, you use commonly searched terms.  And the way in which you use those terms differ somewhat with each and every web crawler or search engine.  Many of them use Boolean logic terms, you know, you may have studied these years ago - if, and, or, not in logical expressions.  But I had never heard of a logical term called near, but near is used, in fact by AltaVista, for example.  You might be looking for the word Bill near Clinton.  And that means that Bill has to appear in the text within 10 words of the word Clinton.  So near is a useful term and it is used by some of the search engines.  Most of the search engines use double quotation marks to designate a phrase - if you want those words in that specific order, and that helps you to narrow your search if you put a particular phrase in quotation marks.  Generally one avoids uppercase - not always, but generally that will limit one’s search.  Now some search engines will search other than just the World Wide Web.  Some search engines include Usenet - news groups which we’ll be talking about in a couple of weeks.  Others include even news wires and some of the latest news from Associated Press, United Press, Reuters.

Slide 8
Well, perhaps the most exciting recent development has been the development of the meta-search engines.  No single search engine can keep up with the growth of the Internet.  And so meta-search engines have become very, very important.  The meta-crawlers are the crawler of crawlers.  That is, it’s a search engine that will then search other search engines.  So if you submit a search term to one site, it re-submits that term to multiple other search engines and then comes back with the results.  Meta-crawlers speed up searches quite a bit.  They also provide more complete searches, and of course we are going to be talking more about that, as you see on your syllabus, in greater detail next week.

Slide 9
Well, now it’s important that you visit all those links and we have some especially good ones this week.  It’s time to go to California to UC Berkeley and look at their super tutorial that’s provided by the library at the University of California at Berkeley.  This is a great example of the way in which we use the Internet among universities.  UC Berkeley updates its tutorial every month and so even later this semester if you re-visit that site, you’ll find new or additional information.  And you can find (that tutorial, by the way, is highly-rated across the Internet) it may take you an hour or more to go through it, but you’ll emerge a much better searcher, and it will really help you as you prepare for your mid-term exercise and the final research project.  Also, check out that searching, sleuthing and sifting site at Sages College.  It is a wonderful site - I think you’re going to find nicely organized information on how to find information on the Internet.  The Internet valley link is the one on the history of the Internet.  I think you’re going to find that one particularly graphical.  It’s almost McCluenesque in it’s visualization.  And Hobbes timeline is not quite so visual, but is a great standard and was updated in January.  It’s a wonderful timeline of the development of the Internet - you can see how the Internet picks up speed year by year.  And then, of course, make sure that you respond to the question of the week.  And I’ll talk to you again next week.