Originally published in KASTN 95-19 (No. 19), October 4, 1995
Exploding all around us are the words and speaks so new that even the latest spell checkers can't keep up with - cyberspace, cybernauts, information highway, online, webspeaks, webheads, webspinners, URLs, HTTPs and HTMLs, Homepage, Mosaic, Netscape, Browsers and so on. Translate them into Korean? Forget it; they haven't even made into English dictionaries yet. How did we get here? Who, what, when and how? We will outline a brief chronology of the cyberspace to provide a temporal perspective for this fast-accelerating phase of modern human development. It all began when a small device first named the 'transfer resistor' was invented by three physicists back in 1947. The name 'transfer resistor' didn't last long;it was shortened to 'transistor.'
The first transistor was invented by three physicists at the AT & T Bell Laboratories, William Shockley (England, USA, 1910-1989), Walter Brittain (China, USA, 1902-1987) and John Bardeen (USA, 1908-1991). The trio were awarded the 1956 Nobel Physics Prize.
The first integrated circuit, the ICs, the forerunner of the LSIs (large scale ICs) and VLSIs (very-large-scale-ICs), was invented by two engineers, independently of each other, Jack St. Claire Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyes (1927-1990), one of the cofounders of Intel (Another shortened name, from Integrated Electronics). As the micro-fabricated system of interconnected transistors on a single piece of silicon, the ICs, more popularly called chips, would usher in the information age of today.
The first microprocessor chip, Intel 4004, contained 2,250 transistors, a dinosaur by today's standard. A 4-megabit chip of today contains about 8 million components. This was 8 years after an event all of us remember as if yesterday: the first news in 1963 of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Three mass-production personal computers emerged this year: Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET.
IBM PC in 1981, IBM PC-XT in 1983, and Apple Macintoshes in 1984. Bill Gates-DOS phenomenon has its genesis somewhere during this period.
What is now known as the Internet began as a US Defense Department research project in the 1970s. It was originally called the ARPAnet, an experimental network designed to support military research - to establish a network of networks of regionally clustered computers that could withstand partial outages (under thermonuclear attacks, for example) and still be able to function (like firing all ICBMs). In the early 1980s, Ethernet local area networks and faster workstations came on the scene. Most of these workstations came with the UNIX operating systems. In 1986, the National Science Foundation took over the matter and established the so-called NSFNET, initially supporting its five national supercomputing centers. Soon it rapidly evolved into an academic and research support tool; users on one network could communicate with those on another, and, presto, what we now call Internet was born.
Out of the idea of combining hypertext to the Internet, first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics, the acronym coming from its original name in French, Centre de European Researches Nuclaire), Switzerland, the World Wide Web was born. In the beginning, its accessibility was still limited to particle physicists speaking fluent UNIXtalk.
When the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA, released the Web browser called Mosaic in 1993, things really began to take off. It was Mosaic or bust, more memory chips, faster microprocessors, brighter color monitors and so on, in pursuit of life, happiness and Web!
Mosaic was destined for a short half-life, about a year. Since 1994, the Web is controlled by the juggernaut called Netscape browser; version 1.0 in 1994 and 1.1 in 1995. And that's where it's at, Netscape uber alles! As recent as last June and July, the Web is a hot, new topic to report; BusinessWeek (June 19, 1995) and US News (July 10, 1995), for example.
In March 1995, CERN has formally handed over the World Wide Web and its future developments to the WWW Consortium, run by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, INRIA, and the Laboratory for Computer Science of MIT.