THE INTERNET/WORLD WIDE WEB (1962-1995) CERF & KAHN, BERNERS LEE et al

Here’s an interesting thought, just imagine yourself going about the course of a normal day. Now estimate just how much of that waking time you spend on the internet. This means a cumulative total of every online game, every social media post, every Amazon buy, every Candy Crush invite and all the hours of mindlessly swiping and scrolling to oblivion. According to Ofcom (UK communications regulator) the answer for the average citizen should be roughly 8-9 hours a DAY. So it’s pretty well established that we as a civilisation ‘like’ the internet, which is strange considering that if it could take on a human form it would only just be allowed to legally drink in the US. How crazy is that? That an invention only decades old is now used almost perpetually by around 3 billion people and has become integral to pretty much every facet of our lives. Baffling, but not all that crazy when we think just what it offers us as a service. We have almost unrestricted access to all the info we could possibly want, providing answers to all of humanity’s most burning questions such as ‘what was the name of that guy in that film?’ and ‘why aren’t there dinosaur ghosts?’ (I’m not even kidding, someone genuinely asked that). We also have instant communication, access to new ideas and the ability to buy and sell remotely from almost any location with a Wi-Fi signal. So how exactly did this technology revolution happen so quickly? Truth is the internet as an idea is now roughly 50 years old, initially proposed by J.C.R Licklider in the early 60’s (the era of peace, love and primordial computer networks). This idea was later advanced by a number of independent parties including MIT, RAND (a military affiliated research and development organisation) and British based NPL (the National Physical Laboratory) who each detailed their own version of the same thing – sharing ‘packets’ of information between many computers of a network. This would later be expanded by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf (1975), who designed a ‘network of networks’ that could be shared by any machine within it. This was an awesome development for the academic world, but positively world changing when it went commercial in 1995 (or sold out and went mainstream for the hipsters among you). This was all due to the emergence of the glorious World Wide Web, a protocol which ‘piggy backs’ on the Internet to host linked web pages – child’s play really.