INTERNET SPECIAL WHO INVENTED THE INTERNET? PART II
Bonus Internet Facts:
§ The first domain ever registered was
Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. It was registered by the Symbolics
Computer Corp.
§ The “//” forward slashes in any web
address serve no real purpose according to Berners-Lee. He only put them
in because, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He wanted a way to
separate the part the web server needed to know about, for instance “www.todayifoundout.com”,
from the other stuff which is more service oriented. Basically, he didn’t
want to have to worry about knowing what service the particular website was
using at a particular link when creating a link in a web page. “//” seemed natural,
as it would to anyone who’s used Unix based systems. In retrospect
though, this was not at all necessary, so the “//” are essentially pointless.
§ Berners-Lee chose the “#” for
separating the main part of a document’s url with the portion that tells what part
of the page to go to, because in the United States and some other countries, if
you want to specify an address of an individual apartment or suite in a
building, you classically precede the suite or apartment number with a
“#”. So the structure is “street name and number #suite number”; thus
“page url #location in page”.
§ Berners-Lee chose the name “World Wide
Web” because he wanted to emphasize that, in this global hypertext system,
anything could link to anything else. Alternative names he considered
were: “Mine of Information” (Moi); “The Information Mine” (Tim); and
“Information Mesh” (which was discarded as it looked too much like “Information
Mess”).
§ Pronouncing “www” as individual letters
“double-u double-u double-u” takes three times as many syllables as simply
saying “World Wide Web.”
§ Most web addresses begin with “www”
because of the traditional practice of naming a server according to the service
it provides. So outside of this practice, there is no real reason for any
website URL to put a “www” before the domain name; the administrators of
whatever website can set it to put anything they want preceding the domain or
nothing at all. This is why, as time goes on, more and more websites have
adopted allowing only putting the domain name itself and assuming the user
wants to access the web service instead of some other service the machine
itself may provide. Thus, the web has more or less become the “default”
service (generally on port 80) on most service hosting machines on the
internet.
§ The earliest documented commercial spam
message on an internet is often incorrectly cited as the 1994 “Green Card Spam”
incident. However, the actual first documented commercial spam message
was for a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers and was sent on
ARPANET to 393 recipients by Gary Thuerk in 1978.
§ The famed Green Card Spam incident was
sent April 12, 1994 by a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurance Canter and
Martha Siegal. They bulk posted, on Usenet newsgroups,
advertisements for immigration law services. The two defended their
actions citing freedom of speech rights. They also later wrote a book
titled “How
to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway“, which encouraged and demonstrated to
people how to quickly and freely reach over 30 million users on the Internet by
spamming.
§ Though not called spam, back then,
telegraphic spam messages were extremely common in the 19th century in the
United States particularly. Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on
its network to be sent to multiple destinations. Thus, wealthy American
residents tended to get numerous spam messages through telegrams presenting
unsolicited investment offers and the like. This wasn’t nearly as much of
a problem in Europe due to the fact that telegraphy was regulated by post
offices in Europe.
§ The word “internet” was used as early
as 1883 as a verb and adjective to refer to interconnected motions, but almost
a century later, in 1982, the term would, of course, be used to describe a
worldwide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks.
§ In 1988, the very first massive
computer virus in history called “The
Internet Worm” was responsible
for more than 10 percent of the world’s Internet servers shutting down
temporarily.
§ The term “virus,” as referring to
self-replicating computer programs, was coined by Frederick Cohen who was a
student at California’s School of Engineering. He wrote such a program for a
class. This “virus” was a parasitic application that would seize control of the
computer and replicate itself on the machine. He then specifically described
his “computer virus” as: “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by
modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.” Cohen went on to
be one of the first people to outline proper virus defense techniques. He also
demonstrated in 1987 that no algorithm could ever detect all possible viruses.
§ Though it wasn’t called such at the
time, one of the first ever computer viruses was called “Creeper” and was
written by Bob Thomas in 1971. He wrote this virus to demonstrate the potential
of such “mobile” computer programs. The virus itself wasn’t destructive and
simply printed the message “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Creeper
spread about on ARPANET. It worked by finding open connections and transferring
itself to other machines. It would also attempt to remove itself from the
machine that it was just on, if it could, to further be non-intrusive. The
Creeper was ultimately “caught” by a program called “the reaper” which was
designed to find and remove any instances of the creeper out there.
§ While terms like “Computer Worm” and
“Computer Virus” are fairly commonly known, one less commonly heard term is
“Computer Wabbit.” This is a program that is self-replicating, like a computer
virus, but does not infect any host programs or files. The wabbits simply
multiply themselves continually until eventually causing the system to crash
from lack of resources. The term “wabbit” itself references how rabbits breed
incredibly quickly and can take over an area until the environment can no
longer sustain them. Pronouncing it “wabbit” is thought to be in homage to
Elmer Fudd’s pronunciation of “rabbit.”
§ Computer viruses/worms don’t inherently
have to be bad for your system. Some viruses are designed to improve your
system as they infect it. For instance, as noted previously, the Reeper, which
was designed to go out and destroy all instances of the Creeper it found.
Another virus designed by Cohen would spread itself on a system to all
executable files. Rather than harm them though, it would simply safely compress
them, freeing up storage space.
§ Al Gore was one of the so called “Atari
Democrats.” These were a group of Democrats that had a “passion for
technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the
environmental impact of the greenhouse effect.” They basically argued that
supporting development of various new technologies would stimulate the economy
and create a lot of new jobs. Their primary obstacle in political circles,
which are primarily made up of a lot of “old fogies,” was simply trying
to explain a lot of the various new technologies, in terms of why they were
important, to try to get support from fellow politicians for these things.
§ Gore was also largely responsible for
the “Information Superhighway” term becoming popular in the 1990s. The first
time he used the term publicly was way back in 1978 at a meeting of computer
industry workers. Originally, this term didn’t mean the World Wide Web. Rather,
it meant a system like the Internet. However, with the popularity of the World
Wide Web, the three terms became synonymous with one another. In that speech,
Gore used the term “Information Superhighway” to be analogous with Interstate
Highways, referencing how they stimulated the economy after the passing of the
National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. That bill was introduced
by Al Gore’s father. It created a boom in the housing market; an increase in
how mobile citizens were; and a subsequent boom in new businesses and the like
along the highways. Gore felt that an “information superhighway” would have a
similar positive economic effect.
Theodoros
II
FOUND OUT
No comments:
Post a Comment