educated heretics

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[WARNING: Off-topic history geekiness here]

> The actual *inventer* of the internet concept was some poor guy who had
> trouble remembering clients' names.

The Internet was a big gumment project.  It was the U.S. Department of
Defense ARPANET before it was the Internet, and it was developed in the
60's as a military network which could survive a nuclear attack
(supposedely).

By 1980, several commercial and educational networks had linked onto
ARPANET, and by then folks were calling it the Internet.  Ten years
ago, NSFNET was created with a 56Kbps backbone.  In 1990, ARPANET was
phased out.  CIX (Commercial Internet Exchange) was started to provide
commercial providers with access to the Internet.

> Bill Gates' role was to develop an explorer.  His
> invention is the same concept as AOL, Netscape, etc.

Bill Gates invented nothing; he is a remarketer.  and AOL is still the
largest Internet Provider in the world.

The hyptertext navigation aspect of the Internet was a project of CERN
(European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Switzerland, and was
designed to facilitate document sharing amongst researchers.  The invention
of the web is attributed to Tim Berners-Lee, who got ideas from using a
data-association program called "Enquire."

Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
at the University of Illinois here in Champaign released the first
graphical browser, Mosaic for X, in 1993.  Andreessen and his
colleagues leave the NCSA a year later to form Mosaic Communications
Corp (now Netscape).

At the same time, Spyglass Corp (which is also composed of people from
the NCSA) releases "Enhanced Mosaic."  Spyglass sells source code for
Enhanced Mosaic to Microsoft (among other companies).  Microsoft
releases Internet Explorer.

Apostolic Life UPC in Champaign-Urbana, incidentally, became one of the
first UPC churches to have a web site on the Internet in 1995.
Actually, I believe it was *the* first, though I'm unsure of when the
Schaumburg UPC church came online.  The precise date was May 3, 1995 at
17:27:32 CST.  Since then, our attendance as quadrupled (!) and we've
changed physical meeting locations three times.

References:

 http://www.w3.org/History.html
	 "A Little History of the World Wide Web"

 http://www.cern.ch/
	 "CERN Welcome" (CERN Homepage)

 http://wwwcn.cern.ch/pdp/ns/ben/TCPHIST.html
     "A Short History of Internet Protcols at CERN"

 http://www.spyglass.com/company/whatis.html
     "Spyglass Company Background"

 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
     "Frequently asked questions by the Press - Tim BL"

 http://www.LUCENT.COM/internet/wp1.html
	 "lucent technologies - internet communications"

 http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
	 "Hobbe's Internet Timeline"


Richard Masoner
Champaign Illinois USA