Week 4- Using the WWW

Week 4-Blog 4 Friday 18th March 2008

Lecture:

Internet vs. Web

• Basically on the net you find computers
• on the web you find documents, sounds, videos... information
• On the net connections are cables between computers
• On the web connections are hypertext links

First it was the internet:

In 1965 a computer in Mass. was connected to one in California using a low speed dial-up telephone line. This was the first wide-area computer network ever built. Then in 1969, four University host computers were connected together into ARPANET.

The Web:

Was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (a researcher at CERN) in 1989, to facilitate sharing research information. The Web is a universe of accessible information stored on computers throughout the world. The information is available through a gigantic network called the Internet.

Protocols of the World Wide Web:

TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol; allows computers to communicate to one and other. TCP allows the conversion of data signals into telephone like signals. IP allows data to be routed from one network to another over the internet.

HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol; method of communication that allows the interpretation of data to determine how to display and/or exchange data between computers

DNS – Domain Name Server; www, .com, .org, .net, .au, .uk

URL – Uniform Resource Locator

Types of Web Browsers-Internet Explorer, Neoplanet, Firefox

Functions of the browser interface ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ buttons, ‘home’, ‘history’ newer more advanced IE’s have Tabs, and Bookmark settings, Tabs allows user to have multiple web pages open within the one browser window.



Workshop:

In the workshop the whole topic revolved around differentiating a websites authenticity.

Haggishunt:

• Entering the website an automatically picking out the advertisements is a sign of it being a bit fake
• The site ended up being a competition on finding a “haggis” to go into a draw to win prizes, which seemed a bit ridiculous, also if you spot the ”golden haggis” you win instantly
• The site appears to be that of a promotions company that has a competition currently running, this is an attempt to attract visitors
• The “haggis facts” at the top of the page, and the “haggisclopedia” page, are obviously made as a joke.




Molossia:

• When I entered the site it looked interesting but a bit dodgy
• There was a scrolling banner at the bottom of the page that seemed out of place and when you think about it, if it was a legitimate site and involved the government simple mistakes wouldn’t be allowed or accepted
• As I browsed the site I entered the teachers only link and it obviously explained how the site was fake which confirmed that I was correct



Martin Luther King site:

The site at first looked legitimate and I thought it would have relevant information about King and his work as well as life time achievements. But in fact upon examining the site you can tell that its run by a group of white supremacists, which thus contains large amounts of racist information towards Martin Luther King, and the African Americans. Basically aimed at shaming Martin Luther King and the good he did, their main purpose is to try and discredit any information published about or by Martin Luther King.





Readings summary:

1) A brief history of the internet-
Chapter 1: The Origins and Growth of The Internet and the World Wide Web
Began in the early 1830’s and progressed at a slow pace, world war 2 occurred an advances in technology sped up greatly with the development of many new navigational tables and tracking and aiming devices for anti aircraft guns. In June 1948 Manchester University developed Manchester Mark 1, 3 years later saw the integration of RAM, 1958-59 saw the development of the silicon chip, and it entered into commercial production in 1961.

Chapter 2: From ARPANET to World Wide Web
ARPA was created initially with its focus set on space, ballistic missiles, and nuclear test monitoring; in 1962 ARPA opened a computer research program. ARPANET was created from teams at MIT, National Physics Library, and the RAND Corporation, the final requirement was the design of a protocol to allow computers to send and receive messages and data. In 1971 ARPANET consisted of 23 host computers linked together.
1974 saw the development of the TCP/IP protocol to enable different networks to communicate with each other. Expansion of the internet gradually grew, the amount of people hosting servers and WebPages. In 1991 WWW was released to the public and no longer a military or higher education system.

Chapter 3: History of E-mail
ARPANET developers had considered such a process of electronic mail, at the time when computers where of ridiculous sizes and the everyday person could not afford one, this idea was not overly important. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson of ARPANET sent the World’s first email, he sent it to himself as a test then sent further emails to ARPANET users explaining how to address emails to other users.
1990 saw the democratisation of the internet, 1995 saw internet providers as CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy start business and deliver a connection to the world.

Chapter 4: Search Engines
The late 1980’s saw so much data on the internet that it was too difficult to rely on tips from other users. In 1992 there were 1,000,000 hosts. This saw the creation of search engines, servers that would catalogue available web pages an allow them to be easily accessed or found search engines included (Archie, The Gopher System, WAIS).
More recent search engines, Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista


2) History of the World Wibe Web- ARPANET was the original internet that transformed into the World Wide Web as we know it today.
Robert Kahn was behind the development of a new protocol which would support open architecture environments, thus the creation of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.
Kahn was successful with his creation of the TCP/IP protocol which worked well on large time sharing systems, people doubted that a PC could handle the complexity of TCP/IP, David Clark and research team from MIT proved it is possible to run TCP/IP on PC’s they reconfigured Khans version and made it suitable for a smaller less complex machine. 1980’s saw the widespread development and implementation of LANS, PC’s and WAN connections.

Because of commercialisation in the 80's private network services were being made available. The net controls alot of activities as most things are now accessible online.

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins

http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/ivh/frame_theorie.html