Web 1.0 - The Internet
Look! It's the Internet!
"My daddy told me one time, you don't know where you're going until you know where you've been."
- Will Smith, Will 2K
To fully understand and appreciate Web 2.0, we first need to take a
look at how the Net works and what has characterized it since its
inception.
This module covers:
- origins of the Internet
- structure - hardware, software, infrastructure, and protocol
- traditional content and user experience
A Brief History
The first example of a computer network was created at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire by George Steblitz. It was a simple connection
which used a teletype machine to transmit data to Steblitz' Complex
Number Calculator in New York. As computers developed, so did the art
of networking them. Networking technology was advanced by both
government/military efforts and by the work of computer scientists at
various institutions of higher education. The earliest networks had
relatively few nodes and were logically inflexible. Efforts to make a
network robust enough to survive a nuclear attack on the infrastructure
led to the development of decentralized, packet switched network.
As you read these articles, pay attention to the types of organizations/institutions that were involved in the development of the technologies and protocols, the types of people inside and outside the organizations that made use of the technology, how they used it, and what tools or specific technologies (web browsers, email clients, chat clients, etc.) were involved.
Read this article on yourhtmlsource.com which discusses the early history of the Internet.
For an overview of the history of the Internet, read or skim Wikipedia's article.
Structure
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Any piece of information that needs to be transmitted from one
computer to another via the Internet must pass through the hands of
several entities. The OSI networking model refers to these as layers.
But to make it simple we'll describe it like this: a piece of
information is given to the network card (or modem) by the Operating
System. The card (or modem) chops up the data into smaller pieces and
sends these packets of information via one of several physical or
wireless connections such as CAT-5 networking cable, telephone line,
wi-fi, bluetooth, etc. The packets are relayed to an ISP, and from
thence across the main infrastructure of the Internet to the
recipient's ISP, to their computer's network card (or modem), which
hands it off to their Operating System.
Think of it as a fire brigade, where the OSs, the NICs, the routers,
the ISPs' hardware, and the Internet backbone's hardware are all people
standing in a line. The end users as well as the people who own or
maintain the ISPs and the Internet backbone all have hardware. The ISPs
and the backbone make up the communication infrastructure that is the
middle-man connecting end nodes or local networks.
The protocols used to transmit packets can be thought of as a set of
rules or expectations that any two nodes on a network conform to. In
our analogy, think of it as how any two adjacent people in the fire
brigade agree to hand buckets to one another. All of the networking
hardware from the NIC in your desktop machine to the routers at the
core of the backbone run software that abides by these protocols, which
allows the successful transmission of data.
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More History
But the creation and evolution of the Internet is only a piece of the picture. Let's take a look at how it fits in with the history of computer usage in general.
In the early days of computing, the personal computer gradually gained popularity in the home and was used for stand-alone applications, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and (of course) games. Modems became commonplace, as did rudimentary services that people could connect their computers to via phone lines. Along came the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and the World Wide Web. But before the web gained in popularity, something else was on the scene: client-server applications. An example is a program that my bank gives me on a CD. I install and run the application, authenticate with a username and password, and it connects using my modem to the bank's server, retrieving my financial information and allowing me to transfer money, view my account history, and make payments. The application is a "rich" client - it has all the functionality and user interface installed and running locally on my machine, with the server serving and receiving data only, not running the application.
Contrast this with the early days of the web. The client application was the web browser: specifically built to render HTML pages. Which brings us to the sticking point that is HTML. Before DHTML every time the user was supposed to see something new, they had to click a hyperlink (or submit a form) and the server would process the request and send back a new page. This made a user's web experience fairly linear and mundane. Even with the addition of server-side scripting, the page-request based model was still the same. Javascript livened things up a bit, but web applications were still nowhere close to the installed client-server applications. But as the web grew in popularity and became the latest idea to go through the skepticism-buzzword-bubble-refine-embrace cycle, the old client-server applications fell out of use. As an example, my first email account was through Juno and used an installed client. Now my banking is done online through a website that replicates all of the functionality an installed client would've provided years ago.
Slowly, the web developed and web applications caught up. With technologies like AJAX and the ubiquitous Flash player, developers are better equipped to create thin clients that use the shell of the web browser to do what the installed client-server applications of yesteryear had done. And with the Adobe Integrated Runtime environment we see the model come full circle. But the functionality and structure models are not the only things that have changed in a way that has given rise to the phrase "Web 2.0". We'll discuss other memes, or ideas later, such as look-and-feel, social behaviors, collaboration, remixing, and so on.
Traditional Content and User Experience
Think of the web without blogs, social networking sites (facebook,
myspace), flickr, wikipedia, podcasts, APIs and webservices, Google
maps, or del.icio.us. Like it was back in the day. Most of the web in
its early heyday consisted of people (individuals and companies)
hosting content that they hoped people would access. The Web 1.0
mindset is "the web provides me an avenue of delivering my content or
product to the wired masses." As we look into 2.0, we'll see that the
mindset shifts towards providing services and enabling user
participation, and we'll discuss how this change in approach works as a
business model.
Skim (please, do not read - unless you really want to) the following article.
Towards the end of the article the author mentions what is one of the
hallmark business moves of Web 1.0: the tight integration of Internet
Explorer into the Windows 98 operating system by Microsoft. From this
and the above articles you should have some understanding of the
browser war that began in the 90's. This action by Microsoft is
illustrative of the 1.0 mentality.
Sources
A Breif History of Computers and Networks
